FEATURE:
No Doubt About It
PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe McConnell for NME
Why I Can Envisage the Great Ella Purnell Stepping Into a Compelling Series with Music at Its Heart
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THIS is quite a self-indulgent feature…
PHOTO CREDIT: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian
but one that opens to a larger point. One of our greatest actors is London-born Ella Purnell. You might have seen her in shows like Fallout, Yellowjackets or Sweetpea. There are some fascinating recent interviews like this and this that I would advise people to read. There is also this great one with Elle. Almost too much to bring in. The twenty-eight-year-old from Whitechapel is seeing her career explode. Though she knows the acting industry is capricious and unpredictable, the fact she is making every role her own and choosing some really great parts suggests someone who have serious legs and chops. Someone who can adapt to and adopt any role and has that stamina and wisdom. A very smart and grounded person, she is not letting Hollywood stardom get to her. I think she will get a string of huge acting roles. I can see producers and actors like Margot Robbie snapping her up to appear in one of her films. Greta Gerwig too. You can feel some incredible women will look her way. Huge directors like Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese. It is still early days, though you know Ella Purnell is going to be a screen icon and one of the most lauded and acclaimed actors of her generation. I want to bring in some extracts from a couple of recent interviews before I move on and come to an observation relating to music. First, I want to come to an interview from The Guardian. Speaking about her role in Sweetpea, it is always fascinating reading and hearing interviews with Purnell. She is so grounded and relatable but there is this obvious and extraordinary talent at work. Someone who I envisage having this decades-long career:
“All Ella Purnell ever wanted to do was write children’s books about magical trees and talking ducks and happy bunny rabbits, and instead here she is chainsawing a man’s head off in a radioactive wasteland. Or freezing to death in the wilderness and being eaten by her closest friends. Or being so traumatised by school bullies that she takes up serial killing, slaughtering victims with her dead dad’s treasured pocketknife.
It might not be exactly what Purnell had in mind for her 20s, but spending the past few years committing, and being subject to, acts of stomach-churning violence has certainly had its upsides: the Londoner is now on the brink of TV superstardom. Purnell has been on a steep trajectory since 2021, when she appeared in hit US drama Yellowjackets as the prom queen captain of a New Jersey high school football team left stranded in a Canadian forest after a plane crash (think Mean Girls meets Lord of the Flies). In April, she starred in Amazon’s sensationally successful video game adaptation Fallout as Lucy MacLean, a vault dweller in a post-nuclear apocalypse United States who surfaces to search for her kidnapped father (the series attracted 65 million viewers in its first 16 days of release, and helped Purnell accumulate 1.4 million Instagram followers). Now, the 28-year-old is returning to the UK for more viscerally disturbing action. In new Sky Atlantic thriller Sweetpea, she plays Rhiannon Lewis, a receptionist whose mounting fury at being walked all over eventually erupts into a murderous spree.
Purnell isn’t sure why she’s ended up specialising in such troubling material. “People think I must be really messed up, but I swear I’m a happy, well-adjusted human!” Seated on a sofa in the corner of a blindingly white photography studio – the dramatic purple eye makeup from her shoot still intact – Purnell certainly seems psychologically sound; relaxed and genial, with a kind of preternatural confidence (even by American standards: a recent New York Magazine profile described her as “strikingly self-assured”). Yet the actor also joins me in identifying as a total wuss: “I can’t do horror films. I don’t really love watching too much gore, or any supernatural things. I’m not even really a big sci-fi person. And I’m not a gamer. So I don’t know how any of this has happened!”
In truth, there is a logic behind Purnell’s CV – and it can be traced back to the ambivalence with which she has approached her profession. Purnell “never really planned on becoming an actor. I feel a lot of guilt and impostor syndrome attached to that statement, because I know a lot of people have wanted to be an actor ever since they were kids. And that just wasn’t me.”
Confusingly though, Purnell actually was an actor when she was a kid. Growing up in east London, she took singing and dancing lessons at the storied Sylvia Young Theatre School, which led to her performing in Oliver! in the West End when she was 10. She appeared in her first film when she was 14 – playing Keira Knightley’s character Ruth as a child in Never Let Me Go. But as her career picked up further in her teens, she “freaked out” about the path that had been laid out for her (not by parents or agents, she clarifies, but a road she had unknowingly carved out herself). At 18, she decided to put the brakes on her acting career. “I wanted to go to university and be a writer – I wanted to write children’s books.”
Purnell won a place at university (she can’t remember exactly where or what she was going to study, but it was related to creative writing), but ended up deferring after landing a part in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – working with Tim Burton was her childhood dream and she couldn’t bring herself to turn it down. She thought it would be a one-off, but more irresistible jobs cropped up, such as the lead role in a US TV show. In 2017, Purnell moved to New York to star in Sweetbitter – a series about a young woman who comes of age working in the city’s buzzy restaurant scene – and relinquished her university place. “I realised I didn’t need to go to university to be a writer – I could just write!”.
Prior to moving on, there is another interview I am keen to feature. When speaking with NME last month, Purnell said how there is no filter anymore regarding her growing fame. Quite a big and scary moment of transition, this growing notoriety is a mixed blessing. It will mean security and so many interesting roles. The subject of privacy and remaining grounded. It is harder to maintain:
“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.
PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe McConnell for NME
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”.
I know Ella Purnell is a big music fan. Not to suggest she could have a music career of her own, though I have been thinking how she could play the lead in a music biopic. I definitely can see music playing a part in future roles. Whether it is a film that is set in the 1960s or 1970s where Purnell is playing one of the leads, set to a soundtrack of classic tracks of the time. She is an actor who can pretty much cover any ground or genre. Easily adopting American accents for roles, I do envisage music playing a big part. An actor I really love and have a huge amount of respect for, I do wonder whether Purnell has ever considered taking on the role of a major artist. In fact, when I was thinking about artists she resembled, Gwen Stefani came to mind. Perhaps there would not be scope for a biopic about her band, No Doubt, though I often felt Stefani is someone who could have had a long and successful acting career. I would love to see Ella Purnell take on Gwen Stefani in a film. Maybe playing a young version of her as part of a larger story. Maybe it is a random thought. Purnell has said in an interview how she loved Lenny Kravitz and Girls Aloud. I am not sure how much she has considered a role that would either be a known artist or a film revolving around music. There have not been a huge number of films like this the past few years. Of course, various music biopics made me think about Gwen Stefani and No Doubt. It would be wonderful seeing her in a film where music comes to the forefront.
I have been thinking how the T.V. series Vinyl didn’t last long but should have. A series set in the 1970s. It would be great to see a similar series set in the 1990s. Purnell playing someone in the music industry. I also think of The Beatles and the 1960s. How it would be cool and iconic with Purnell in the mix. This is me spit-balling and throwing out ideas! I have been really getting back into the directing of Michel Gondry and his visual style. How it took that and applied it to films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Few modern directors who have that sort of eye and intelligence. In reality, what would be great is Ella Purnell playing a fictional character. A series set in the 1970s. Around the styles and sounds clashing through the middle to the end of the decade. Perhaps this love story at the heart. Purnell playing someone in the industry who starts out as this overlooked person who is struggling to find her feet who then becomes this huge inspiring and important figure. Having that sort of remarkable mix of visual styles that Gondry brought to his video. Maybe having him direct. Writing by some incredible women. An empowering, fascinating, compelling and at times edgy and controversial series. This powerful performance by Purnell. The wonderful soundtrack and this evocative soundtrack. Whether it is something she has considered or not, I do hope that Purnell connects more with music in future roles. At least a series that explores music or weaves it directly into the story arc. The fantastic Ella Purnell is one of the best and most humble young actors in the world. I can see such a long career for her. Whether she is as massive a music fan of music as I think she is or not, I do love her adaptability and incredible versatility. Seeing Purnell in a music biopic or series about music would be…
WONDERFUL to imagine.