Ella Purnell Puts Bloody Fallout Experience to Good Use in Sweetpea

At first glance, Starz and Sky Atlantic’s Sweetpea seems worlds away from blood-soaked sagas like Arcane, Yellowjackets, and Fallout that have made actress Ella Purnell a genre star.

The six-episode series follows a disaffected young British woman named Rhiannon (Purnell) who deals with mounting frustrations in her personal and professional life by keeping a mental list of people she’d like to kill. The list includes everyone from “manspreaders” to “Donna in the mini market who is never happy to help” to her childhood bully who waged “a relentless campaign of psychological abuse, eroding my self worth and general context in the world.” But hey, that’s just a list. And Rhiannon is the titular “sweetpea.” It’s not like she’d act on those impuls…oh wait, I’m hearing now there’s a trailer for the show? And it features Ella Purnell covered in blood? Ah yes, understood. Here it is.

So maybe Sweetpea isn’t actually too far from Purnell’s other roles as plucky post-apocalyptic hero Lucy (Fallout), steampunk baddie Jinx (Arcane), or dinner (Yellowjackets). When speaking to Den of Geek prior to the dark comedy’s Oct. 10 premiere, Purnell revealed that she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Oh my God, I’m going to get a reputation,” Purnell says. “I just like to be challenged. I want to do things that scare me, and I want to grow as an actor and as a person, and do things that I would never usually get to do. I suppose that all the survival drama and the blood and the killing—that comes with the territory of ‘things that scare me.'”

Part of the presumption of Rhiannon’s innocence lies with Purnell’s unique physicality. Armed with prominent, expressive eyes, Purnell has a tool in her acting toolbox that few others possess. Though that’s not something she fully realized herself until recently.

“I actually was not aware that I had larger-than-normal eyes until I, stupidly at 18 years old, read the reviews for Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children. We all know you should never Google yourself but most people in that situation would probably do the same thing. It came as a surprise that a lot of the articles had mentioned that. I try not to be aware of what my face is doing when I’m acting.”

Instead, Purnell opts to craft her characters from the inside-out—more specifically through articulation.

“I connect a lot with my voice and where sound comes from,” she says. “With Lucy, I feel like it comes from the solar plexus—like this inner light, wherever your soul might be. With Rhiannon, it’s sort of in her chest, and it’s quite quiet. If your shoulders are forward and you’re making sound out your chest, it’s going to come back into your body. When your shoulders are back and you have more confidence and you speak with your chest, it’s booming and it’s loud. It can’t be ignored.”

With work on Sweetpea completed (for now at least, there is no early word on a second season) Purnell will soon get back in touch with Lucy’s voice to embody the irrepressible former Vault-dweller for the second season of Prime Video’s Fallout. She notes, however, that she has yet to receive season 2 scripts or a start date for filming.

“I know nothing. I haven’t got a script. I don’t know when we start filming. At this point, I’m wondering if I’m even still in the show! No, I’m just kidding,” she says. “I hope [we get started] soon so we don’t have to keep everyone waiting. But I don’t want to rush them. I’m excited to read whatever they have, whenever they’re ready to send it to me.”

Sweetpea premieres Thursday, October 10 on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV in the U.K. and Starz in the U.S.