‘It’s not a weakness to be nice’: Ella Purnell is on the rise – and she’s using her power for good

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Ella Purnell sees a lot of herself in Lucy MacLean, the sunny-sided vault-dweller who surfaces into a lawless post-nuclear wasteland in Fallout – Amazon Prime Video’s blockbuster adaptation of the popular video game franchise by the same name, which returns for season two next week.

“She’s probably the character that I’m the most similar to that I’ve ever played, in our tendency to always try to make the best of a bad situation,” she says during a visit to Sydney to promote the show. “Though our optimism is born from different things.”

That’s a slight understatement. The 29-year-old British actor didn’t grow up underground in a self-sufficient bunker, only for half of her community to be killed by raiders and her father kidnapped on her wedding day. Nor has she chainsawed off a man’s head.

Instead, Purnell grew up on film sets, a child actor often cast as the younger versions of A-list actors, including Keira Knightley, Margot Robbie and Angelina Jolie. Her buoyant, doe eyes made her a natural fit for flashbacks to an innocent youth.

But as an adult, they’re wells of depth – perhaps because she spent those early years on set trying to scoop up any wisdom on offer, a secret of stardom that would guarantee success.

“I always wanted it to be the movie version of life, but there was no one big, profound sentence that changed my life and shaped me as a person,” says Purnell. “I think it was the tiny, micro lessons along the way.”

Instead, she studied how the actors handled themselves, used their call sheet placement to advocate for the crew and made unexpected choices in scenes.

“[I ended up] being grateful that no single person has all the answers,” she says. “No single person is going to give me the guidebook on how to live my life and be a good actor. But I think opening myself up to learning from them and watching, just being the observer on set – it’s puzzle-pieced its way together.”

Ella Purnell says she has learnt a lot from her Fallout character. “Lucy helped me have a newfound appreciation for kindness, that it’s not a weakness to be nice.”

Her first lead role came in 2018, as a naive New York transplant in drama series Sweetbitter (streaming on Stan*), constantly scanning the world to see who she could become. But her breakthrough arrived in 2021 on acclaimed US show Yellowjackets (Paramount+) as Jackie, the prom queen captain of a soccer team left stranded after a plane crash, whose light slowly fades as she struggles to accept what survival requires.

Shortly after, Purnell landed the lead in Fallout. It’s hard to imagine another actor in the role, with Purnell’s eyes betraying an increasingly weathered optimism. Lucy continually attempts to shake off blood, guts and disappointment at humanity with a Pollyanna outlook that’s difficult to maintain at the best of times, let alone when people keep trying to kill you or harvest your organs.

Set two centuries after a nuclear holocaust collapsed a retro-futuristic United States in 2077, Fallout sees Lucy chase after her kidnapped father (Kyle MacLachlan), teaming up at times with a young soldier (Aaron Moten) and the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a bounty hunter and mutated undead survivor of the nuclear attacks.

Hollywood has circled Fallout since the series’ first game was released in 1997, with several attempts to transform its barren wasteland into a verdant film franchise before Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the co-creators and married couple behind HBO’s Westworld, developed it as a TV show. It’s one of Amazon Prime Video’s most ambitious and expensive shows, with season one reportedly costing $US153 million ($230 million) to shoot, filmed in expensive 355-millimetre format and in remote locations, including Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.

But the gamble paid off. Fallout was an instant hit upon release last April, becoming the streamer’s second-biggest show to date (behind Lord of the Rings prequel The Rings of Power), with 65 million viewers in its first 16 days of release. Acclaimed, too, with glowing reviews and three Emmy nominations, including for Most Outstanding Drama Series.

The streamer is all in on the series, with a month-long worldwide press tour for the second season – which started in Sydney in November – while production on season three is already under way.

Evidently, Fallout’s appeal goes far beyond the game’s audience, with general audiences far more receptive to adaptations than a decade ago. That’s true for films – 2023’s The Super Mario Bros Movie raked in more than $US1 billion, while last year’s megahit A Minecraft Movie is close behind – and TV, which boasts more acclaimed hits, most notably HBO series The Last of Us and Netflix’s Arcane, an animated take on League of Legends that Purnell also lends her voice to.

Despite two video game adaptations to her name, Purnell isn’t much of a gamer, and hasn’t played much of Fallout. Instead, she was drawn into the pilot’s script by two things: Lucy’s incredible naivety, signified best when she leaves the vault and is startled by a tumbleweed, and the immense scale of world-building.

Ella Purnell plays a killer in Sweetpea.

Sophie Nélisse (left) as teen Shauna and Ella Purnell as teen Jackie in Yellowjackets.

Ella Purnell in Belgravia, which is set in the early 1800s.

“There was so much attention to detail,” Purnell says of the pilot script. “I remember one bit so clearly, describing what one woman’s earrings looked like, how they were the skull of a bird. Those tiny details that may not even end up on screen explained what this world was. I knew it was going to be epic.”

Season two picks up with Lucy still with the Ghoul, searching for her father after learning about his role in shadowy company Vault-Tec. It’s a revelation that upends her belief in the vaults as humanity’s last hope, but in season two’s opening episodes at least, only sees her double down on her kindness-first, no-murder approach.

“I think a lot of humans, we like to put things in these black and white boxes to gain some illusion of control,” says Purnell. “And the reality is, everything exists in this grey area. What Lucy does is what I think anybody would do in the face of a personal identity crisis. You go back to what you know. You try to keep on keeping on.”

Purnell has a similarly pragmatic approach to the attention she’s garnered post Fallout, skyrocketing to 1.4 million Instagram followers near-overnight (and now sitting close to 2 million).

Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell and Aaron Moten at the Fallout season two special screening at Hoyts Entertainment Quarter in Sydney.

“I was just grateful that not everybody hated it, and that some people liked it,” she says. “That’s how low the bar was for me when the show came out. I think you have to detach to a certain degree.

“But nothing can really prepare you for how any of that’s gonna go. You think, ‘I can’t believe this is my life’. And then you put one foot in front of the other, and you keep going, and that’s just it, really.

“Shit happens to us. And every time, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, you think, ‘I can’t f---ing believe this is happening to me’. And then you just get on with it, because that’s what humans do.”

Since Fallout, Purnell used her new-found star power to executive-produce and play the lead in Sweetpea (Binge), a UK adaptation of the ultra-dark novel of the same name by CJ Skuse.

She plays Rhiannon Lewis, a downtrodden, bullied woman in a small town who finds newfound confidence via murder.

The role’s arguably a 180-turn from Lucy, with Purnell eager to keep exploring flawed characters of all kinds, though she stresses that she’s much more inspired in her personal life by Fallout’s heroine.

“Lucy helped me have a newfound appreciation for kindness, that it’s not a weakness to be nice,” says Purnell. “I think in a hardened world, it can sometimes feel like a flaw, to some degree.”

“It’s what I love about Lucy so much – she continues to choose to believe in people and goodness, even when she’s repeatedly shown again and again and again that there’s so much violence, cruelty and chaos in the world and cruelty in the world. That’s strength, that’s a choice. That’s one of the hardest things in the world to do, is to continue to remain soft in a hard world.”

Fallout (season two) streams on Amazon Prime Video from December 17.

*Stan is owned by Nine which also owns this masthead.

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