• Faith: Spirituality
• Career: Actress
• Birthday:  May 16, 1977

Melanie Lynskey is the eldest of five children. She was born in New Plymouth, New Zealand, to a real estate agent (her mother, Kay) and an orthopedic surgeon (her father, Tim). As a child, she helped her parents raise her siblings and prepared them for Baptist church services wherever they ended up.

In a 2003 Glamour magazine interview, she said, "My dad was a medical student when I was born, so he was studying and going to different universities. And then he was doing his residency, so I was always the new kid in school." That led to her shyness in school, which is why she was drawn to the drama classes: "It was so freeing, having someone give me the words to say and not being myself for a minute. It just felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders."

Many casual movie fans may not know the name Fran Walsh, an accomplished screenwriter of several Oscar-winning films. She has been married to Peter Jackson, of "Lord of the Rings" fame, since 1987. She discovered Lynskey in the lunchroom of New Plymouth Girls' High School. She and her husband were there talking to the drama school casting for a movie, "Heavenly Creatures," in which she ended up co-starring with a young Kate Winslet.

From there, her career skyrocketed in TV and film with projects like Ever After: "A Cinderella Story" (1998), in which she played supporting roles, and "But I'm a Cheerleader" with Drew Barrymore (1999). She ultimately landed a long-time supporting role on CBS' "Two and a Half Men" from 2003 to 2015. During that time, she also starred in critically acclaimed roles in "The Informant" (2009), "Touchback" (2011), and "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" (2012).

Her talent was resoundingly praised in the Netflix crime thriller "I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore." In a Roger Ebert review from Matt Zoller Seitz, she was called "one of those actresses I'm never not glad to see, and it's a treat to see her front-and-center here, carrying an entire movie mainly with her eyes, face and shoulders."

Currently, Lynskey is riding a career wave of acclaim and recognition on the Showtime series "Yellowjackets" and has been married to Jason Ritter, son of the beloved TV actor John Ritter, since 2020.

Melanie Lynskey's Religious Beliefs

While raised under Baptist teachings, Lynskey has said that dedication to the Lord didn't follow her throughout her adult life. In a 2017 Time magazine article, she discussed a film that resonates with her: "This World is Not My Home." The title was inspired by a 1965 gospel song by Jim Reeves.

With gripping lyrics about a glimpse of heaven, the article says, "Lynskey says she's not the churchgoing kind. But she offers a form of spiritual release for believers and nonbelievers alike. By reflecting our own mistakes and humiliations back to us, she does what performers do at their best. She makes us feel a little more at home in this world."

In a 2022 magazine article, she admits that a psychic told her "Yellowjackets" would be the hit TV series it is today. "This sounds so crazy," she told InStyle, "but I talked to a psychic, who I love, and she told me this was gonna happen."

She continued, "It had been months and months since we shot the [Yellowjackets] pilot, and she said, 'That show's gonna get picked up, and it's gonna be really big, and you're gonna enter into a time in your career that you thought, if this didn't happen when you were 25, it was never going to happen. It's about to happen.'"