Samantha

A quiet thread in the tangled web of survivors, memory, and the stories we carry out of the wilderness.

via Wikipedia: Sammi Hanratty · see source

Samantha Lynn Hanratty (born September 20, 1995) is an American actress. Since 2021, she has played teenage Misty Quigley in the Showtime drama series Yellowjackets. Hanratty was part of the ensemble cast of Showtime's thriller series, portraying a teen version of Christina Ricci's character Misty Quigley. Her first lead was in 2009, portraying Chrissa Maxwell in An American Girl: Chrissa Stands Strong. In 2011, she played the role Whitney Brown in the film The Greening of Whitney Brown. Hanratty is considered a Celebrity Friend for the Starlight Children's Foundation. She was born in Scottsdale, Arizona to Ellen (née Sugrue) and Brian Hanratty.

Quick Facts

Universe: Yellowjackets (TV series)
Role: Supporting character

Lore & Background

Every character, even those on the periphery, is filtered through that dual lens. Samantha exists within that ecosystem—part of the social and emotional landscape that the show constructs around the core group of survivors. The show's mythology is deeply concerned with how trauma reshapes identity, how small choices in the wilderness echo for decades, and how the people around the survivors—friends, family, acquaintances—become part of the story whether they were on the plane or not. Samantha's presence, even in a limited capacity, feeds into that web of connection and consequence. She represents the wider world that the crash disrupted, the ordinary lives interrupted by an extraordinary event. In the broader thematic architecture of the series, characters like Samantha underscore a recurring idea: the wilderness doesn't just change the people who are in it. It changes everyone who orbits them, who has to make sense of what they did, what they saw, and what they chose to remember or forget.

Reader's Guide

Her role is defined less by dramatic survival set-pieces and more by the emotional and social texture of the group's experience—how they spoke to each other, what they shared, what they kept silent. She is part of the ensemble that makes the wilderness feel like a real, lived-in place rather than a backdrop for the principal cast's arcs. In the present-day timeline, her function shifts to that of a living thread connecting the past to the now. She is someone the survivors (or the audience) encounter in the ordinary world—work, family, community—and her presence reminds viewers that the crash didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened to people with histories, with people around them who were changed or left behind. Key relationships orbit the core survivors: Tai, Van, Shauna, Lottie, Misty, Sawyer, and the others. Samantha's interactions with them, however brief, are charged with the subtext of shared history and unspoken grief. What she knows—and what she withholds—matters as much as what she says. In the show's structure, even a single line of dialogue from a supporting character can carry the weight of a season's worth of silence. Her arc, while smaller in scope than the leads, mirrors the series' central question: can you be the same person after the world has ended and restarted? For the core survivors, that question is answered in extremes. For someone like Samantha, it's answered in the quiet—over coffee, in a parking lot, in the way she looks at an old photograph and doesn't quite finish the sentence she started.

Did You Know?

She married Christian DeAnda in California in November 2023.
Hanratty gave birth on December 31, 2024, and had previously announced their son would be born with a cleft lip.