Ella Purnell interview: ‘Fallout’ star on her new thriller ‘Sweetpea’ and bidding goodbye to ‘Arcane’

Ella Purnell, the British star, talks about playing a serial killer in her latest series, the obsessive detailing she pays each of her characters, and not understanding the fuss over her eyes

After her breakout role as the doomed queen bee Jackie Taylor in the survival thriller Yellowjackets, it seemed like only a matter of time that Ella Purnell and her eyes would take over the world.

The Londoner, who made her film debut in 2010 with Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, playing young Ruth (Keira Knightley essayed the adult version), had been on the edges of stardom for years, making an impression in titles like the NYC-set restaurant drama Sweetbitter and Zack Snyder’s zombie heist adventure Army of the Dead. But then, after the success of Yellowjackets and voice-starring alongside Hailee Steinfeld in the steampunk action series Arcane, Purnell’s life went into overdrive when she was cast in Fallout.

Amazon’s adaptation of the post-apocalyptic video game franchise was one of the most acclaimed shows of 2024 – even garnering an impressive 16 Emmy nominations – and at the centre of it all was Purnell, playing the lead protagonist Lucy MacLean. 

But even as fans eagerly await Lucy’s jolly jaunts in the second season, Purnell had another surprise up her sleeve as she decided to star in (and produce) Sweetpea, an adaptation of CJ Skuse’s 2017 novel about a socially-inept introvert who suddenly snaps one day and goes on a serial-killing spree.

The 28-year-old is certainly an unusual choice to play a wronged murderer, but perhaps that’s exactly what attracted Purnell to the project. Talking to us over Zoom, she seems to have delighted in the process of developing the dark comedy and the transformative arc of her character, the wallflower Rhiannon Lewis.

Excerpts from an interview...

It’s funny you ask if people have been talking to me about it my whole life, because they really hadn’t! In fact, the whole eye thing wasn’t even on my radar until I made Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. I was young and dumb, and made the mistake of Googling the film’s reviews. Never, ever do that! I should have known better, but I kept reading them and someone had said that I had the eye-to-face ratio of a giant squid. You can imagine what that would do to an 18-year-old’s self confidence (sighs). But no, no one really talks to me about it. It’s funny, we never really see ourselves the way other people see us.