Photography by Robb Klassen

Fact incoming: “Nobody wants to watch straight people talk anymore!” This extremely correct statement hails from Jasmin Savoy Brown, one of pop culture’s most compelling new stars thanks to roles in Showtime’s survival drama Yellowjackets and Wes Craven’s lauded slasher series Scream. For her performance as Mindy Meeks in the latter’s fifth film, Brown made history as the first openly queer character to try and escape the terror of Ghostface. 

As a “proud” Black woman of the LGBTQ+ experience, Brown tells GAY TIMES that her “favourite part” of being a performer is being able to “represent and interact with” her respective communities. “It means everything to me,” she says. “To be one of the lucky few that gets to debut something and be the beginning of the wave is really exciting.”

Brown reprises her role as Mindy in the forthcoming sixth film, which follows the predecessor’s surviving players as they relocate from Woodsboro to New York City, where they encounter one of the most brutal iterations of Ghostface to date. Also starring Courteney Cox, Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Hayden Panettiere, Mason Gooding, Dermot Mulroney and Samara Weaving, Scream 6 will ‘devastate and anger’ viewers, says Brown, while also continuing to explore her character’s resilience and queerness. 

With the long-awaited sophomore season of Yellowjackets also scheduled to premiere in March, we met with Brown to discuss both projects, horror’s recent queer makeover and why LGBTQ+ people are – second and final fact incoming – “smarter, hotter and funnier”. 

Jasmin, congratulations on all of your success over the past year with Yellowjackets and Scream. How does it feel to be involved with two major series that have developed such passionate followings, especially amongst the LGBTQ+ community?

That part. That’s my favourite part. I love to represent and interact with my communities. I’m really proud to be a queer woman, I’m really proud to be a Black woman and I’m very proud to be a queer Black woman. The fact that queer people love the projects that I’m involved with makes me so happy. It’s fun. We’re fun. Gays are fun, you know? It’s been a whirlwind. It’s pretty crazy and funny how life works because I’ve been doing this for 10 years now, and out of nowhere, it just clicked.

Gays being fun: that part. It’s madness that the industry is only just waking up in regards to LGBTQ+ representation because straights are painfully boring.

So boring. Nobody wants to watch straight people talk anymore! We’re getting there. We have a way to go but we are on the way, at least, and that’s exciting.

It’s the dream for any actor to be involved with a project that stands the test of time. Scream already has and Yellowjackets is one of the most acclaimed series of the decade…

Oh man, it’s such a gift and honour. You never know what’s going to hit. It’s really nice to be part of things that are of the moment, but also, you could watch in any decade and feel connected and be entertained and, hopefully, feel represented.