Ella Purnell & Kirstie Swain On “Not Being Afraid To Look Ugly” & “S**t Britishness” In ‘Sweetpea’
Yellowjackets breakout Ella Purnell drew on previous experience of “not being afraid to look ugly” when leading Sweetpea, the irreverent Sky-Starz dramedy about a quiet wallflower who becomes a serial killer.
Speaking to Deadline in the days leading up to Sweetpea premiere, Purnell talked up her roles as Jackie in Yellowjackets and Lucy in Fallout, which allowed her to give breadth to her character Rhiannon in the C.J. Skuse adaptation.
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“Yellowjackets was a really fun experiment in not being afraid to look ugly in environments where you initially look put together,” she said of playing Mean Girls-esque queen bee Jackie who ends up in a hole in the ground in the hit Paramount+ series. “Eventually she looks like s**t so bringing a bit of that to Rhiannon who doesn’t have a lot of pride in her appearance was important. As a young woman who has grown up in the industry it can be scary and I probably wouldn’t have been so comfortable with it had I not done Yellowjackets or Fallout.“
Penned by Pure’s Kirstie Swain and produced by Patrick Walters for See-Saw Films’ label Fanboy, Sweetpea sees Rhiannon reach breaking point after compiling a Kill List that then becomes all too real. The Sky-Starz version effectively acts as a prequel to Skuse’s first Sweetpea novel, telling the story of what caused this quiet young woman to head out on a killing spree.
Swain said the show is for “everyone regardless of class, gender or age who has felt overlooked or undermined in their life.” She was attracted to the idea of “doing something about a female sociopath” and joked that the team then posed the question: “What if Dawn from The Office had gone on a killing spree?”
“I love flawed characters, they’re a bit more interesting,” said Swain. “I think smashing together genres and putting ordinary people into extraordinary situations is great.”
Swain and the creative team faced the challenge of transmitting the deep, dark thoughts of a first-person narrator from a book onto the small screen, but the scribe said she was always against voiceover, as she cited the likes of Barry and Fargo as key influences.
“The instinct is sometimes to go voiceover but we took it back to the origin story,” she added. “My feeling was that if we go down the voiceover route then you get to know her and it’s a bit like, ‘Do you really want to know that much about the inner workings of her mind? Will you still go with her when hearing them?’.”
Instead of voiceover, Purnell said the show cleverly utilizes Rhiannon’s Kill List to delve into her psyche.
“Like Lidl sausage rolls in a plastic bag”
Purnell is hot TV property right now after starring in Fallout, Amazon’s second-most-watched series of all time. Having spent the past few years mostly working in LA, she welcomed the opportunity to return to her native London to film Sweetpea, a show that she said is imbued with “politeness” and a sense of “s**t Britishness.” She stars opposite British breakouts such as Mood‘s Nic?le Lecky, Big Boys Jon Pointing and Bridgerton‘s Calam Lynch.
“It’s very realistic,” she added. “It’s not glossy or glam but feels like [popular supermarket] Lidl sausage rolls in a plastic bag. I think British people use comedy to cope with darker moments and bring them levity. Will the jokes land as well in the U.S.? Let’s see.”
Purnell, who is also an EP on Sweetpea, has had to master an American accent and U.S. on-set terminology for recent roles and joked that “every time they said ‘action’ [on Sweetpea] I would involuntarily slip into a weird American accent,” while she “felt like I was betraying my nation” when forgetting “the [British] lingo you use on set.”
“But it was so nice coming back to the UK and remembering how brilliant British TV and film is,” she added.
For Swain, she hopes that Sweetpea will be a reminder of the power of dramedy amid calls from the likes of the head of BBC comedy for producers to pitch more traditional sitcoms.
“A few years ago I felt like we [in the UK] were moving to a more American model and [Lena Dunham’s] Girls really set the tone for that,” she added. “These shows are funny and dramatic with half-hour episodes and I hope we keep making them because that’s what I watch and that’s what I want to write.”
Sweetpea launches on October 10.
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