There’s a common thread among Ella Purnell’s roles: survival. As Jackie, high school queen bee, on Yellowjackets, she is tested after crash-landing in the wilderness. As Kate Ward in Army of the Dead, she must brave a zombie-infested Las Vegas. And as Tess in Sweetbitter, she learns to weather New York’s brutal restaurant industry. “I really like thinking about the end of the human rope—the extremities you can push yourself to,” the 27-year-old English actress tells me from her childhood bedroom in her mom’s house in London. “Also, I love taking characters and either completely destroying them, breaking them down, or building them up.”
The latest in Purnell’s growing collection of characters is Lucy MacLean of Fallout, Amazon’s ambitious video game series adaptation. Born and raised in a subterranean vault generations after a nuclear apocalypse, Lucy is sheltered and unwaveringly positive. She’s “Ned Flanders mixed with Leslie Knope,” Purnell says, “but she could also kill you.” When Lucy’s father is kidnapped, she goes on a solo mission to find him in the outside world, the wasteland, for the first time. The atrocities that await her are many: mutated monsters, people selling body parts, and an undead bounty hunter. “For some people, like Jackie in Yellowjackets, that could break them, but it doesn’t break Lucy,” she says.
Purnell isn’t a gamer, but she worked with series writers and executive producers Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, as well as Fallout series director Jonathan Nolan, to build Lucy. (Players create their own characters, which is why the series features an original storyline set in the world of Fallout rather than re-creating the game.) Together, they explored the question of morality through Lucy. Can a do-gooder survive in a lawless desert expanse while staying true to her values? Purnell won’t spoil too much: “She doesn’t surrender; shall we just say, she becomes a survivor,” she teases.
She was challenged by the physically demanding action scenes and hired a personal trainer, who helped her not only to master the stunts and constant running sequences, but to get through the eight-month shoot, with long hours each day. Before the show was officially renewed, Purnell shares she “would love to do another [season]. I feel like I’ve had enough rest now,” she says, laughing. “I’m ready.”
With the rise of video game-to-screen adaptations, Purnell is aware of the inevitable comparisons between Fallout and HBO’s The Last of Us, which she loves. (“I cried my eyes out. And I think both Bella [Ramsey] and Pedro [Pascal] are fantastic,” she adds.) But the two shows are “chalk and cheese—they’re just completely different,” she says. While also set in a dystopian future, Fallout is tonally snarky and tongue-in-cheek, with a colorful, retro-futuristic aesthetic. “It’s funny, and it’s loud and smart and political.”
She says the widespread praise for Yellowjackets proves that audiences crave more complex stories about women, whether they’re coming of age in high school, grappling with trauma in their forties, or battling supernatural demons. “We shouldn’t shy away from showing women in a survivalist drama or showing women in something quite violent,” Purnell says. “We should tell these stories, because they do exist. Women obviously have the same emotional capacity that men do.”
Purnell doesn’t know if Jackie will return in any flashbacks or hallucinations for season 3, though she hopes so. It would mark a grand return after her teammates grilled and consumed her frozen remains to survive the winter. Although Purnell wasn’t on set when the infamous scene was filmed, her co-stars kept her updated. “I was in New York filming Fallout, exhausted…being dunked in the water, and I would get these selfies with them and my half-eaten, scorched corpse, and I’d just be like, ‘What’s happening over there?’” Purnell wasn’t fazed by the visual, she says, but “it probably would affect my mom.”
She has a theory about why she’s drawn to survival roles: Maybe they’re a subconscious response to growing up in the industry and reading far too many scripts featuring women with the same stereotypical traits. “And I can almost predict the line she’s going to say, and what’s going to happen,” she says. Purnell has nothing against those roles; sometimes they turn out to be amazing or catapult an actor’s career. “But at this point in my life, I really just want to get down and dirty,” she says, her face scrunching up with feeling. “I want to play gritty roles, I want to get violent and ugly and desperate.…I want to see what’s inside, not just surface level.”
Hair by Anton Alexander for Kérastase; makeup by Grace Ahn at Day One; manicure by Merrick Fisher and Naoko Saita at Opus Beauty; produced by Production Partners; photographed on location at The Hollywood Roosevelt.
A version of this article appears in the June/July 2024 issue of ELLE.
