Ella Purnell (London, 27 years old) doesn’t remember not being in front of a camera. She started working as a model when she was just a baby, at 7 she was already taking singing lessons and at 8 she made her first commercial. Almost two decades later, her big break has come with a leading role in Falloutthe Prime Video series inspired by the video game saga of the same name that has become one of the biggest hits of the year. “Ella Purnell is Hollywood’s new favorite action heroine,” last May the magazine titled Vulture in an extensive profile dedicated to the performer. The success that the British singer is enjoying now is very different from her situation a decade ago, when she was on the verge of giving up acting.
She never thought of becoming an actress, but she started working before she was really old enough to think about her career. Her mother was a yoga teacher and her father worked in the technology sector, so there was no direct connection to the world of acting in her family, but she showed talent for it from a young age. After some time in front of the cameras, she began her acting training at the Young Actors Theatre in Islington, where colleagues such as Asa Butterfield (Otis in the series) have also attended. Sex Education). He was still studying when he landed his first major jobs in titles like Never leave me (2010), which was her breakthrough into film with a small role in which she played the child of the character played by Carey Mulligan. In 2014 we could see her in a similar role, this time as a teenage Angelina Jolie, before becoming a Maleficent.
After several independent projects and minor roles of little impact, when Ella Purnell turned 18, she stopped to think. She told herself that she had not really chosen this profession and wondered if there was something else to dedicate her future to. And she was on the verge of giving it all up. She spent a sabbatical year traveling the world, and just after her return Tim Burton knocked on her door. Far from the archetype of Hollywood beauty, her features, dominated by large rounded eyes that exude expressiveness – a characteristic for which many compare her to Susan Sarandon – fit perfectly into the canon. Burtonian And that’s how the director must have seen it when he chose her for the film. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016). “I didn’t have many dreams, but I had one and it was to work with Tim Burton or Wes Anderson,” Purnell said in Vulture“At the same time, it was like, ‘Shit, no, this was my chance to go to college and start a new life,’” she said of that moment of doubt.
Since then, she has not been short of offers. Like most British actresses, she was quick to take part in a period drama, a genre she is not particularly fond of. In 2017, she became Churchill’s secretary in a biopic of the politician starring Brian Cox (Succession). “I actually hate doing period dramas. I’ve only done one and it was great, but I hate doing them because I don’t like being calm, pretty, refined… I hate it. I like being sweaty, dirty and covered in blood,” she said in a recent interview. in the British edition of GQ.
The fear of fame
Precisely in its last premiere, Fallout, She can be seen in her element: sweaty, with disheveled hair, dirty and trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The series, released on April 11, has become one of the great successes of the year. Although Prime Video does not provide official audience figures, according to the specialized press in the United States, taking as a reference the data collected by Nielsen, in its first week the series broke the record for views in the history of the platform.
Fallout is the television adaptation of the video game of the same name, with Ella Purnell as the absolute protagonist in a cast completed by Aaron Moten and Walton Goggins. The fiction is set in the year 2296, on a devastated planet Earth 200 years after the nuclear apocalypse. Lucy MacLean, Purnell’s character, is one of the inhabitants of the luxurious anti-nuclear shelters where part of humanity resides, but in order to rescue her father (played by Kyle MacLachlan) she is forced to return to the radiation-laden hell that her ancestors left behind.
The intense filming lasted eight months and was accompanied by the physical preparation required for Purnell’s role. The actress herself explained in an interview Collider She even quit smoking to be in top form for the series’ many action scenes, something she achieved thanks to a personal trainer. With this role, the British actress faces a new stage positioned as one of the actresses of the year, although she has been preparing for this moment for some time now. “I am aware that Fallout It has given me a lot of visibility. I see my Instagram followers go up. But it’s all being processed in the outer layer of my brain,” he joked a few weeks ago in response to the series’ reception. “I’ve been doing this for so long that, whether a series succeeds or fails, my insides remain unchanged. And if you’ve hated the series or you’ve hated me, the same, because you can’t let it affect you. Otherwise, it will end up killing you,” he summed up.
In GQ She revealed that she found out she had gotten the role two or three years ago, on Valentine’s Day: “From that day until the moment I started filming, I had to mentally prepare myself for the fact that, whether it went well or badly, it was going to be something very visible. I was going to put myself in a position of being publicly recognized. It’s scary.” This fear of global exposure is not unknown to her. In 2017, when she was only 21 years old and almost anonymous to the general public, searches for her name multiplied overnight. The reason? The actress was romantically linked to Brad Pitt. “I went to bed and the next morning my name was everywhere. It was terrifying, I was really upset. I felt like I couldn’t leave the house, I felt very ashamed,” she said in 2022. in an interview with the newspaper The Independent. In the past she was also linked to actor Tom Holland, but the relationship was never made official. Currently, she is dating musician Max Bennet, with whom she released a short film last year entitled Junk Male and directed by Purnell herself.
“I want to do something different every time”
Making a living in a hostile world seems to be the maxim of many of the actress’s roles. Yellowjacketsanother series acclaimed by audiences and critics, brings to life Jackie Taylor, one of those characters that the public should hate, but ends up loving. The Showtime fiction arrived on Movistar+ in November 2021. Its plot presents a double timeline between 1996 and the present. In that year of the mid-nineties, a women’s soccer team suffers a plane accident and crashes in a remote place where strange phenomena add mystery to a plot as violent as it is addictive. In May, filming of the third season began, although Ella Purnell’s character will not be present.
Where we will see her is in fiction Sweetpeaa thriller in post-production phase, or in the film The Scurrya comedy with a delirious plot (vengeful squirrels seek justice and pest controllers must confront them) that only confirms that Purnell may be the new action heroine, but she doesn’t want to be just that. “My only request is that I want to do something different every time, which is a nightmare for my team. I always ask them to send me everything that comes in to read it,” she detailed in Vulture. Accustomed to reading scripts for years, she knows very well the type of female characters that predominate in the industry. Thus He pointed it out in the magazine She, when he commented that with certain characters he was able to “predict the next sentence they are going to say or what is going to happen.” “At this point in my life I want to see what is inside, not stay on the surface level,” he added. With the second season of Fallout Confirmed a few weeks ago, the Purnell phenomenon has a long way to go.
