With her killer new series Sweetpea hitting Neon on October 10, the TV queen talks to Emma Gleason about playing women on the brink.
Women pushed to the edge, tried and tested by extreme circumstances, their beliefs shattered; Ella Purnell has carved out something of a niche with this flavour of character.
There’s Jackie, the queen bee of Yellowjackets titular girls’ football side, who find themselves stranded in the wilderness. A complex character, Purnell brings confidence and bravado to the role, married with the insecurity of adolescence and rightful paranoia as the hierarchies of girlhood and society are upended by their situation.
A shattered worldview is explored again in Fallout. Like Yellowjackets it’s nightmarish, set in a post-apocalyptic America. Purnell’s Lucy goes from the idealism and social conformity of vault-dweller life to the harsh reality – and revenge – of the surface.
Compared to the Canadian wilderness and nuclear-ravaged US, the dreary old London of Purnell’s new show Sweetpea seems relatively pedestrian. Or does it?
The grind of normality is the catalyst for the show.
Protagonist Rhiannon’s situation will be recognisable to many; frustrated with work, where she’s ignored for promotions, and commitment issues in her life, she’s also grappling with an ill father. Something of a wallflower, she feels invisible.
So far, so familiar.
People under pressure snap, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t broken down at some point in their lives.
“I think that in order to feel empathy for her and not just judge her too harshly too quickly, you need to have a certain level of relatability,” Purnell tells the Herald. “You need to see a little bit of yourself in that character.”
The concept of a cataclysmic breaking point – and what can trigger it – is something that looms over anyone with an understanding of how far people can go when pushed.
For Rhiannon it comes in episode one; killing a stranger who antagonised her, then realising she quite likes it.
This newfound power, and the homicides that beget it, are our premise for the show.
“I don’t think there’s any one moment that contributes to Rhiannon’s snap at the end of episode one, her first kill, I think it’s an accumulation of lots of different things,” explains Purnell. “Years of being mistreated, being invisible, not heard and just pushed aside and underestimated.”
Those frustrations, and that concept of a cumulative build-up, are terrifyingly commonplace.
“The key to her is her vulnerability,” she says. “Not how terrifying I make her.”
Are angry, vengeful women a taboo? “I think that it’s probably more terrifying to see female rage, because we don’t see it very often.”
Women are socialised to be careful about how they express emotion, Purnell explains, acknowledging it’s a generalisation. “We have to be very diplomatic in how we make our points and ask for what we want.” So, when women do snap – and she’s not just talking about murder here, but things as mundane as having a freakout or sobbing into a pillow – it can be jarring. “It is shocking, because we don’t see it,” she says. “It is unpredictable and it is terrifying.”
In her role as Rhiannon, getting to act that was cathartic. “It’s therapy, being able to completely let that go and be this wild uninhibited animal.”
It was challenging. “I’m an overthinker as it is, and I was really getting twisted around in circles,” she explains, before remembering that her job is to find – and focus – on the truth of the character.
“I knew it was going to be difficult to bring the audience on this journey where they relate to this character and they relate to their motivations, but not necessarily their actions,” she explains. “I wanted to cause the audience to feel morally conflicted and confused.”
Purnell was attracted to the challenge of playing a character so different from herself. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Preparing for the role, she started with female serial killers and psychopaths and sociopaths (stressing the difference between them) before shifting to the impacts of childhood trauma and early abandonment. “That really unlocked a lot of things for me,” she explains. “That led me to trichotillomania, the pulling of the hair, which then led me into her physicality.”
“I went through the script and I mapped out at every single moment what her hands were doing,” she says. “Whether she’s gripping her bag, or biting or chewing at her nails or her skin – or she’s squeezing because she has anxiety.”
These actions – tense and twitching, with visible stress – then led Purnell to Rhiannon finding power in a knife, and the actor understanding the trajectory to the killing. “The whole time she’s trying not to pull [her hair], then she finds this release in the knife.”
Women who kill is territory that’s been trodden before, some fictional, like Pearl’s titular murderer and Killing Eve’s professional assassin Villanelle. Others, like Monster’s depiction of Aileen Wuornos, are based on true events.
The idea of female revenge was explored in less homicidal fashion in Emerald Fennell’s 2020 film Promising Young Woman.
Is Rhiannon a psychopath? Purnell thinks she’s more likely a sociopath, due to her capacity for empathy. “I was trying to put her in a box,” she says. “The biggest thing that scared me was ‘how can someone do that?’”
Serial killers are often painted as criminal masterminds or murderous savants, but the horror in Sweetpea is her relatability. However, at some point, Purnell stresses, it’s important you stop relating to Rhiannon.
Purnell knew a story humanising a female serial killer would be hard to pull off. “I didn’t know if I could do it, therefore I really wanted to do it.”
The six-month shoot was challenging, with a lot of nights. The subject matter is challenging too, all that rage and killing.
It’s tempered by the tone of the show; it’s a dark comedy. Purnell believes humour gives you licence to go to dark places, providing levity to the heavy stuff – of which there’s plenty as the series unfolds.
Her catalogue of work has a shared theme of survivalism, but what loops them all together, she says, is a touch of comedy.
Sweetpea’s based on the book by C.J. Skuse (the first in a series about Rhiannon), which Purnell loved. “The show is very different from the books … Chapter one of the books she’s fully fledged Sweetpea; she’s a serial killer and she doesn’t care what anybody thinks. She’s funny and she’s confident.”
That would have made for a very different show. “It would have been definitely very funny but not pulling on your heartstrings in the same way, because you wouldn’t have been fully inside her head in the same way.”
The television adaptation is more of an origin story to the original text.
“It’s so interesting to go on that journey with her. You sort of do see yourself in her. And those problems are problems that normal people have.”
Sweetpea also sees Purnell take on the role of executive producer. She’d been looking for a project in the UK after filming Fallout in New York – Purnell is British and grew up in London’s Whitechapel, a neighbourhood steeped in serial killer infamy. After reading the Sweetpea script and learning that See-Saw Films was open to her stepping into that role too, she seized the opportunity.
“It is this female rage story where she is seeking vengeance and television is always such a great outlet for you to experience things that you’re not experiencing in your own life,” she explains. “Maybe it suggests that at the moment in the world, women are full of rage and want an outlet.”
Rhiannon, Jackie, Lucy. They’re all complicated, relatable women dealing with radically changed circumstances, and Purnell’s drawn to these kinds of roles. “Those are the characters I want to play.”
She enjoys the challenge of empathising and understanding them, finding that bit of yourself in there, and then embodying their experience as something extraordinary happens in their world. “In all of the things I’ve done that seems to be the recurring theme.”
Most women will see something of themselves in Rhiannon, whether it’s picking your nails or being passed over for a promotion. As for the fact that she can take someone’s life and find power in doing so, the why and how looms large. “Rhiannon doesn’t know either,” says Purnell. “She’s terrified of herself.”
She doesn’t have the answer. “Nobody has the answers. Nobody knows what makes somebody do something like that. It’s unthinkable,” she explains. “My job was not to understand that. And I can’t. But what I can do is not judge my character. And remember that no bad guy thinks that they’re the bad guy.”
Rhiannon developed this moral code as a “desperate attempt to justify” what she’s done, believing she’s a good person.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever done something that you can’t rationalise, can’t understand?” People do bad things all the time – cheating, lying, saying something hurtful – and then struggle to cope with their actions and the fall out.
“We spend a lot of time trying to understand why we’ve done that, because we think we know how who we are.”
Sweetpea is screening in New Zealand on Neon from October 10.
Emma Gleason is the Herald’s lifestyle and entertainment deputy editor. Based in Auckland, she covers culture, media and more.
NYT: A Million Little Pieces became a global scandal – 20 years later, James Frey is back.