Ella Purnell on Producing Serial Killer Comedy ‘Sweetpea’

On a flight not so long ago, Ella Purnell managed to terrify the woman sat next to her after accidentally giving her a glimpse of the recent viewing history on her laptop.

“It was basically 50 shows about serial killers,” she recalls, speaking over coffee in a café near her flat in East London (which she admits she’s rarely been in due to excessive recent travel). “But specifically female serial killers, because they’re very different from male serial killers.”

As Purnell notes, the concerned neighbor was carrying a baby, which she then “literally moved” away from her. 

“So I had to explain. I was like, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m actually researching, it’s part of my job… I promise you, I’m not a monster,’” she recalls. “But I’m not sure how convincing I was.”

The Brit was, thankfully, telling the truth. A year on, the darkly comic “Sweetpea” — in which she stars as Rhiannon, an unassuming and under-appreciated young woman who eventually snaps and takes it upon herself to murder those who have wronged her — is landing on Starz and Sky on Thursday. 

While the research may admittedly have taken Purnell to some “fucked up places,” the six-part series also marks the next chapter for the 28-year-old, who has already spent more than half her life in the industry. 

Currently most recognizable for her lead role in Amazon Prime Video’s acclaimed video game adaptation “Fallout” as the wide-eyed, blue-suited and frequently blood-splattered vault dweller Lucy — a role she says was initially described to her as “Ned Flanders meets Lesley Knope in the apocalypse” — Purnell was also part of the ensemble cast for Showtime’s ratings smash “Yellowjackets,” playing the ill-fated soccer team captain Jackie (spoiler alert: it doesn’t end so well for her). 

But these are just the most recent hits in a career that began back in 2008. When she was just 12 years old, Purnell was selected from hundreds of other hopefuls for a role in “Oliver!” at London’s Theatre Royal. From this early start, her big screen debut came a couple of years later, playing a young Keira Knightley in “Never Let Me Go,” and she would go on to appear in films such as “Kick-Ass 2,” “Maleficent” (as a teen Maleficent), Tim Burton’s “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” (playing a peculiar child who can manipulate air) and, most recently, “Army of the Dead” (as Dave Bautista’s estranged daughter). 

On the small screen, there’s been BBC’s Agatha Christie miniseries “Ordeal by Innocence” (as Bill Nighy’s aristocratic and alcoholic daughter), Julian Fellowes “Belgravia” (as another aristocratic heiress), “Star Trek: Prodigy” (voicing a teenage alien on board an abandoned Starfleet ship) and animated video game adaptation “Arcane: League of Legends” (voicing manic archenemy Jinx). 

With “Sweetpea,” however, alongside leading a show in which she’s rarely out of the frame, Purnell takes her first major step behind the camera, having executive produced the series and enjoying a hands-on role in its development. 

“I really put everything into this — it’s the most I’ve ever put into a project,” she says, adding she’s far more anxious about what people will think of “Sweetpea” than anything she’s done previously. “I’m nervous for it to come out, but I’m also excited, because I’ve never done anything like this before.”

Purnell says she’d been looking for something she could get her teeth into more creatively, having just directed her first short “Junk Male” (starring musician Max Bennett Kelly as a boxer) and had been taking various meetings with that in mind. One of these was with Patrick Walters, exec producer of Netflix hit “Heartstopper,” working from his Fanboy label under the umbrella of British powerhouse producers See-Saw Films. 

“It was just general meeting, really, I was like ‘Hi, I’m Ella and I would like to make things,’” she explains. “He was pitching a few things to me, but ‘Sweetpea’ really stood out.” 

Thankfully, Walters was open for Purnell to not only lead the series as its chief murderous protagonist, but join the project — which was originally pitched as “Fleabag” meets “Dexter” — as an exec producer. 

“And it was important — really heavily important — to me that it wasn’t just a vanity credit,” she notes, adding that she thinks they had been specifically looking for an actor to come aboard in such a manner “because they knew it was so important to be inside this woman’s head in order to tell this kind of story.”

So Purnell was part of the project a full year before the shoot, getting involved in the writer’s room and having a say in matters such as hair and makeup, costumes and set design, especially Rhiannon’s bedroom.

“When you tell a story from just one character and that character happens to have no friends and be quite lonely, it can be very difficult to explain her inner narrative if you’re not doing a ‘Dear Diary’ or any other storytelling devices,” she explains. “So her room became a way to do that. I wanted it to be very innocent and show how stuck in the past she was, as if she stopped developing when the initial trauma happened. So she has pictures of boy bands on her walls and lip glosses, old scrunchies and dolls.”

When it came to Rhiannon’s appearance, Purnell add her voice when it came developing her look and feel, emphasising that it was important to “highlight her invisibility” and make her appear “lonely and desperate and ruined.” So she was given dark clothes, mousy hair and dark circles under her eyes. “I wanted her to be the kind of person that makes other people uncomfortable, not because of anything she’s done or said — she actually can be quite sweet — but because there’s this desperation and inability to connect that should put you on edge.”

Purnell admits to being wildly excited about not just playing “without a doubt” the most extreme character on her resume so far, but getting involved in the creative process to such a degree for the very first time. 

Perhaps from being a child actor growing up on sets, Purnell says she’s always had a “deep appreciation” for the crew (she describes the term “below-the-line” as “fucking bullshit”). “I didn’t have a lot of people my own age, so I always started just being quite close with the crew, more than I was with the actors,” she says. 

That being said — and like many performers who step behind the camera for the first time — making “Sweetpea” was still a revelatory experience. 

“When you’re part of the pre-production meetings and put all the faces to the names and go, ‘OK, how many lights do we need to pull off this crane shot?’ and ‘How many rain bars do we need in order to sell that the blood would wash away in the rain?’ Really getting into the nitty gritty of it all, you realize, as actors, God, we’re such idiots,” she says. “We just show up on set and complain about it being cold and wet and three in the morning.”

Using “Sweetpea” as a springboard, the end goal for Purnell is now to expand her horizons behind the camera. She plans to set up a production company — “don’t ask me when” — and is writing something while also looking for her next short film to direct. “I’m also really about find my creative community in London,” she says. “I don’t really know that many DPs, so would really like to meet my creative soulmate in DP form, someone I can work with over a really long time.”

But Purnell is also juggling the demands of being an extremely in-demand and increasingly high-profile global screen star. 

Once the press activity surrounding “Sweetpea” dies down, she’ll be getting in gear to shoot the second season of “Fallout” next year, even though she’s got no idea where the story will go. “I’ve read nothing. I’m so unprepared,” she says. “My only preparation so far is that I’m attempting to work out — and that’s just me knowing that in six months I’m going to be running up a hill 500 times and trying not to have asthma attack.”

She also recently shot “The Scurry,” Craig Roberts’ upcoming and wild-sounding comedy-horror about a pack of killer squirrels — not that she even saw them. “That’s all CGI, I think… we didn’t have any trained squirrels on set, just a lot of green dots running around.”

There’s even the potential for “Sweetpea” to continue beyond its initial first season. “I hope it does, because I don’t think we’re done telling Rhiannon’s story,” she says. “However, with the way it ends I’m not sure how we’d continue — but we’ll figure it out if and when we get there.”

Purnell’s growing celebrity status — 1.4 million Instagram followers and counting — has expanded her work in other ways. Last month, she attended the Venice Film Festival as a guest of Armani Beauty for the hot ticket world premiere of the extremely buzzy “Babygirl.” Sadly, a “wardrobe malfunction” meant she didn’t make it beyond the red carpet. “I won’t go into the details, but it was a small detail with a very large consequence, so I had to leave, get on a boat and go home to change,” she says. “And I was so disappointed, because Nicole Kidman is probably one of my top five actresses. Gutted. Oh well.”

There’ll likely be further trips to Venice up the road (although this time having remembered to pack safety pins). In the meantime, with her first major credit as a “very active” exec produce about to launch, plus the return to a starring role in one of TV’s biggest shows on the horizon — and a small feature to keep the indie fires burning — Purnell is very happy to enjoy this potentially career-changing moment while looking out for future opportunities. 

“Producing ‘Sweatpea’ was just the most amazing experiencing,” she says. “It really felt like, ‘Oh shit, yeah, this is what I should be doing.’”