Ella Purnell on becoming apocalyptically famous: “There isn’t really a filter anymore”

“I think what people want right now is to see young women lose it,” says Ella Purnell. She should know. Playing characters who have simply had enough has rocketed Purnell’s career in the last few years. She’s made a speciality of women who refuse to go on behaving as they’re expected to, unleashing their inner furies with often deadly consequences. “I am aware,” she says, “that there seems to be a common denominator of blood.” And she’s not about to staunch the flow any time soon.

The high quotient of gore and death on Purnell’s CV has sometimes seen her labeled a ‘scream queen’, but that doesn’t seem entirely accurate. Her work is sometimes horrifying, but it’s not really horror. Any screaming she’s doing is generally rage, not fear. In her 2021 breakout role in the supernatural thriller Yellowjackets, Purnell is one of a group of schoolgirls stranded in the middle of nowhere after a plane crash. Scared, starving, and desperate, they go full Lady Of The Flies and turn cannibalistic. Purnell’s school queen bee is the first meal. In this year’s post-apocalyptic mega-hit Fallout, Purnell is a wholesome daddy’s girl who lives in the relative safety of an underground community, in a world where everything above ground has been ravaged by nuclear war. When she discovers all is not quite as she’s been told, she’s soon murdering her new husband (he absolutely had it coming) and biting bits off undead ghouls. If those were young women losing it, her latest is someone who has completely lost it and may never get it back.

In Sweetpea, Purnell plays Rhiannon, a small town Englishwoman – yes, despite the perfect American accent she often uses on-screen, Purnell was raised in Bethnal Green, London – who has been dealt a duff hand since childhood. She was bullied so much at school that she pulled out most of her hair through stress and retreated into herself. She never found her way back out and in adulthood she’s withdrawn and fearful, living at home with her dad and working in a local paper where nobody even seems to know her name. When her dad dies, leaving Rhiannon completely alone, something in her snaps. She starts exacting vigilante ‘justice’ on those she considers bullies, by murdering them.

What’s interesting about Sweetpea is that it’s not just about someone getting what she sees as revenge. It’s about a sort of addiction of victimhood. Rhiannon has so defined herself as the underdog that she considers all her actions justified. She doesn’t notice herself becoming the tormentor, even as she wipes another victim’s blood from her knife. It’s that, not the killing, that interests Purnell. “I like the grey area,” she says. “I like a character where I can’t make up my mind, or who’s divisive… maybe it’s a tiny rebellion, that I get to play people who aren’t necessarily likeable, or who maybe aren’t too concerned about being likeable.” There were times she worried Rhiannon was going “too far” for the audience to possibly go with her, but then says that’s part of the attraction. “I love that shit. I love confusing an audience.”

Purnell couldn’t be less like the awkward, anxious Rhiannon. She walks into a room with ease. Not cocky, but absolutely confident in her right to be there, chatting to everyone she encounters, rearranging her space so she’s as comfortable as possible. Before we sit down to speak, she strides around the hotel room adjusting the layers of her outfit to try to match the mix of hot lights and hotel air-conditioning. Without a table in easy reach, she upturns an empty wastepaper bin and uses it as somewhere to park her iced coffee. She just seems very at ease with herself, like she’s been doing this forever. Which she almost has. Purnell may have only become familiar to many people in the past couple of years, but though she’s only 28 she’s been at this for two decades. She’s put in the work to get here.

“After Fallout… I sort of am just a bit of public property”

School for Purnell was not the darkly formative time it was for Rhiannon, but it was still vastly different to most people’s experience. Her acting career technically began when she was eight years old, with “an advert for sweeties in Germany”, but she’s been working regularly since she was about 13, when she played a young Keira Knightley in Never Let Me Go. Acting wasn’t necessarily something she felt a huge passion for initially. She was good at it and enjoyed it enough to keep doing it. None of her classmates were particularly impressed by her occasionally nipping off to set. “I went to a very posh, fancy girls’ school,” she says. “Lots of people had scholarships or were very gifted at things… [Acting] just sort of felt like an extracurricular activity, if that makes sense?”

Basically, it was something she did, not who she was. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to do it as an adult. “I fell in and out of love with it a million times over,” she says. “But teenage girls go through a thousand changes of heart every single day… Sometimes I’d compare myself to others and want to be a normal kid.” Somewhere between the ages of 16 and 18 – she’s not sure exactly – she decided to take a year off acting and look into other possible careers: “A writer or a teacher, possibly both”. She traveled, “but couldn’t stay away [from acting]. I just kept coming back to it”. Then she won a role in Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, for one of her heroes, Tim Burton, followed by her first American role, in Sweetbitter, and that was the decision made. “That’s when I was like, yeah, I’m sticking with this.”

Career decided, she had to figure out who she wanted to be as an actor. “I made lists,” she says. “I make lists of everything: things to google; food I want to make; actors I like.” Top of that list was Helena Bonham Carter, but also Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie, among others. “Women who don’t fit in a box,” she says. “Character actors. You don’t see a lot of character actors, especially women.” She says channeling those women, especially Bonham Carter, helped her “learn to find my voice and come up with my own ideas, instead of just doing everything I was told to do.”

You can see that character actor element in her big roles. She’s playing the popular girl in Yellowjackets or Fallout, but they’re weirdo versions of the popular girl, clawing through the cliché. And as she says, the sort of woman she wants to play turns out to be what a lot of people want to see. “Yellowjackets, nobody had any idea that was going to blow up in the way it did,” she says. “It showed that clearly – pardon the pun – there’s an appetite for that.” And if Yellowjackets was big, Fallout was even bigger. According to Amazon, it had 65million viewers in its first 16 days of release.

Those two consecutive hits have been great for Purnell’s career, but the sudden notoriety has been odd for her. She’s gaining a leading lady profile, not a character actor’s. “When Fallout came out, I was filming in Wales,” she says. “I was aware of a change, people recognised me more and I could see my Instagram followers rising (she now has over 1.5million), but I just put my head in the sand.” It’s becoming harder to ignore. “It can be really strange forgetting that you’re being perceived. If you go out and you’re having a good time with your friends, then someone comes and approaches you, my first thoughts are, ‘How long have you been watching me? Have I been doing something stupid? Have I got food on my face?’… You forget people see you.”

That early start in acting has given her a bit of welcome armour when it comes to fame. “I’ve grown up in this industry,” she says. “I’ve grown up, obviously on a quite low scale, somewhat in the spotlight.” But even with a gradual introduction to fame, when it’s suddenly accelerated and you’re bumped up from ‘vaguely recognisable’ to ‘genuinely famous’ within a couple of years, it’s a big adjustment. “There isn’t really a filter anymore,” she says. “I sort of am just a bit of public property.”

There are many ways an actor can react when their fame steps up a level. They can cash in and do the big money roles. They can freak out and retreat from acting entirely. Or they can double-down and commit even more to the path that brought them success. Purnell has gone for a version of option three. When Yellowjackets was already a hit, and with Fallout seeming likely to do the same, she looked at all her available options and thought: squirrels.

That film she was shooting in Wales when Fallout premiered was The Scurry, directed by Craig Roberts (the Submarine star turned indie filmmaker). This is only her second lead in an actual horror movie – and even the first, Army Of The Dead, was more a zombie heist – and of course it’s a bizarre one. She’ll play a park attendant being terrorised by killer squirrels. “Well, I was like: ‘That’s weird’,” she says, matter-of-factly, when asked why that particular choice. “And squirrels are quite creepy, have you ever noticed?” Can’t say we have. “Even before the film I thought that. Have another look at squirrels and let me know. Squirrels are not ok.”

Given current trajectory, it seems likely Purnell’s stock will continue to climb. She’ll soon start work on the second season of Fallout, which will come with even more hype than the first. Sweetpea certainly leaves things open for a second season. And you can imagine she’ll be sought for bigger and bigger film roles. No matter how famous she becomes, her decisions so far suggest she’ll always be looking at the parts that are the most surprising, not the most glamorous. She’s got this far by making bloody good choices.

‘Sweetpea’ is available on Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW

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