With her huge doll-like eyes, Ella Purnell doesn’t exactly have the face of a killer. But that fact was exactly what drew her to Starz’s Sweetpea, an adaptation of CJ Skuse’s 2017 novel about a murderous wallflower, Rhiannon, whose social invisibility cloaks her crimes.
The 28-year-old London-born actor likes to keep fans on their toes: After breaking through as Jackie, the doomed queen bee in Yellowjackets, she went on to star in the postapolcalyptic action drama Fallout. “There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t feel challenging to me because I feel like I’ve done it, or I feel like I could do it easily,” she says of other roles she’s been approached to play since Yellowjackets. “I don’t want to do anything that I’ve done before. I want to do things that scare me, and I want to take risks.” For her latest project, she knew she wanted to up the ante.
Sweetpea premieres on Starz on Friday, October 10.
Not only does Purnell take the leading role in Sweetpea, but she also serves as an executive producer. A big-picture thinker, she was thrilled to have a hand in everything from Rhiannon’s bedroom set to her makeup. “As the series progresses and she develops this confidence, there’s very subtle changes that I hope the audience won’t even perceive,” she says. “She built up a little bit of blusher, started using a warmer foundation, wearing brighter colors—things that should subconsciously influence the way you perceive that character as she becomes more attractive; sort of like in Jennifer’s Body, when she gets more vibrant [and] more full of life as she kills.”
For all her big breaks, Purnell is in no rush to ascend to the upper echelons of Hollywood. “It has very much been a marathon, not a sprint,” she says of her acting career, which she began as a child. “There’s no end goal for me that revolves around success. It revolves around my personal growth and personal challenges.”
Below, Purnell tells Vogue about adding “executive producer” to her résumé, failing publicly, and choosing her groovy Rabanne Emmys look.