Thanks to TV hits 'Yellowjackets' and 'Fallout', the British star reached new levels of notoriety. Her new show, 'Sweetpea', will be even bigger “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 .
