Yellowjackets’ Sophie Nélisse in Bathing Suit Says “Let’s Go”

Yellowjackets star Sophie Nélisse is on vacation, and it’s somewhere way, way warmer than the Canadian wilderness (where her hit show is set). Nélisse—who plays young Shauna on the Showtime smash—shared a photo of her in a blue bathing suit, walking between two rows of what looks like a tropical hotel. We’re guessing it’s from Holbox, Quintana Roo, Mexico, from which she’s been sharing photos all week. “Vamos,” she captioned it, adding a pineapple emoji; in English, that’s “let’s go.” How does the 21-year-old approach her life and character? Read on to see 5 ways Sophie Nélisse stays in shape and the photos that prove they work—and to get beach-ready yourself, don't miss these essential 30 Best-Ever Celebrity Bathing Suit Photos!

1. She Was a Gymnast

“[Gymnastics] taught me about discipline,” she told Teen Vogue. “You have to repeat a routine a hundred times to get it right, and when you do gymnastics you have to block out everything around you." “Gymnasts require stamina and good cardiovascular health,” sports medicine specialist Marie Schaefer, MD tells the Cleveland Clinic “Exercises that get your heart pumping are beneficial both during and between competition seasons.”

2. She Was Intrigued by the Psychology of the Series

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Yellowjackets captured her right on the page. The show "touches many different genres but I do love that it taps into horror a little bit but also psychological thriller because I love to see the progression of these girls as they're stuck in the wilderness—like, how it affects your mental health and the extremes that they end up going through because they've been stuck there for so long and how some friendships with the girls that were together before the plane crash, how it will affect is friendships and they'll fall apart and how other relationships will come together and some girls will grow together,” she told Sky Atlantic. “But even though it's very dark and it's very intense, there is also some lightness to it and some funny moments specially with like the older cast. You can tell they have trauma that has all of them throughout the years but there's also some funny moments and there's some loving moments also in there.”

3. She Has an “Inner Strength,” Says Her Co-Star

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Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey—who plays the adult Shauna—looked for commonalities in their performance. “Sophie has more directness in her manner. I feel like I’m quite apologetic. I mean, I’m from New Zealand and we’re all basically apologizing for our existence with every word we speak. We’re like, ‘Aw, sorry but here’s what I think.’ My own sort of energy is not quite as direct and confident as Sophie’s, and it was something that I really loved about her and I thought, ‘This is an interesting thing to try to have Shauna be a little bit more good with eye contact, a little bit stronger, not so sort of [hunched] with her body, but a bit more confident with her body,’ because there was something in Sophie that’s like an inherent strength, which I think is really nice for the character,” she told Collider.

4. Her Character Has an “Underlying Power” Also

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We were “finding things that Melanie and I had in common with Shauna,” Nélisse told the Washington Post. “Which mostly is this underlying power that she doesn’t have [at first] that really progresses.” The character Shauna is “in this constant struggle [to] accept her darker side, the darkness I think she doesn’t want to admit that she has, that kind of scares her almost, at times. … I think there’s this constant conflict [between] being herself and being who people want her to be.”

5. As for the Show, She Doesn’t Know How it Ends

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“We know very little about the end, even how they got rescued and how many people died. Are they the only four other than Travis? Are there more? Maybe there are other people that we’re not aware of. We know so little. There’s so much to uncover,” she told Hollywood Life.