Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey has been cast as convicted Australian triple murderer Erin Patterson in a new true crime drama for Paramount+.
The New Zealand actress, will lead and executive produce Mushroom Murders, a six-episode limited series based on the infamous Leongatha mushroom poisonings that gripped Australia and the world.
Paramount+ announced the casting at the Australian television upfronts on Wednesday.
Mushroom Murders is created by Anya Beyersdorf (Apple Cider Vinegar, Fires), Daina Reid (The Handmaid’s Tale, Shining Girls) and Deb Balderstone (Dustfall), and produced by Soapbox Pictures.
Reid will direct all six episodes.
Lynskey said she was “very excited” to be playing Patterson, according to Paramount+.
Paramount Australia’s Beverley McGarvey said the series would bring the story to screen with “the scale, quality and creative vision audiences expect from Paramount+”.
For anyone who hasn’t followed the case: in July 2023, Patterson served individual beef wellingtons to her estranged in-laws and their relatives at a lunch in Leongatha, in Victoria’s Gippsland region.
Unbeknown to her guests, the meal was allegedly laced with death cap mushrooms.
Three guests died: Patterson’s former in-laws Don and Gail Patterson, and Gail’s sister, Heather Wilkinson. A fourth guest survived.
Patterson was found guilty in July 2025 of three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years. She is appealing her convictions.
It is hard to overstate how big this case became.
The sentencing hearing was broadcast live, a first for a Victorian court, and the trial has already spawned Stan’s documentary series Revealed: Death Cap Murders, CNN’s Death Cap: The Mushroom Murders and an ABC scripted drama, Toxic, still in development.
Mushroom Murders will be among the first scripted dramatisations of the case to reach screens, telling the story through the 97 days between the lunch and Patterson’s arrest that November.
As for Lynskey herself: I’m a big fan.
She’s been a scene-stealer since her days playing Rose, Charlie Harper’s devoted on-again-off-again stalker turned friend, on Two and a Half Men, and she’s been unmissable as Shauna Sadecki, the morally grey heart of Yellowjackets, since the show premiered in 2021, earning her two Emmy nominations along the way.
Lynskey made her screen debut as teenage killer Pauline Parker in Peter Jackson’s 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, and has since built an eclectic resume that includes The Last of Us and the Netflix film Don’t Say Good Luck.
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Fun fact for the superfans: Lynskey almost had a very different career turn nearly three decades ago.
She told Evan Ross Katz’s Shut Up Evan that she had actually auditioned to play Willow in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with creator Joss Whedon reportedly having her in mind for the role before the process dragged on.
“I didn’t get it! Alyson Hannigan got it, who was absolutely wonderful,” Lynskey said.
Mushroom Murders is scheduled to premiere on Paramount+ in 2027.