‘Sweetpea’ Star Ella Purnell Is Leaning Into the Coming-of-Rage Trend: ‘Female Empowerment Does Seem Threatening’ to Some People
Ella Purnell is done hiding her own rage.
“In a climate where we’re just getting increasingly silenced, [women] have a lot to say, and the more you try to silence someone the louder, in my experience, you want to scream,” the “Yellowjackets” and “Fallout” actress told IndieWire.
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So it makes sense that Purnell’s latest series — and her debut as an executive producer — is with “Sweetpea,” a show that is like the “female ‘Dexter’ meets ‘Fleabag,'” according to the star.
The Starz official series description bills the dark comedy as a “deviously twisted coming-of-rage story,” something that also resonants with Purnell. And while the “rage” emphasis has been made trendy from creatives such as Taylor Swift to Diablo Cody, “Sweetpea” puts a murderous twist on finding your voice.
Purnell plays Rhiannon Lewis, a woman whose life passes her by…that is, until she finds power in wielding an ax. The show is based on C.J. Skuse’s book of the same name, and co-stars Nic?le Lecky, Jon Pointing, Calam Lynch, Leah Harvey, Jeremy Swift, and Dustin Demri-Burns.
“I really latched on to ‘Sweetpea.’ It just felt like something I hadn’t done before. It was something challenging,” Purnell said of her first meeting with Fanboy producer Patrick Walters. “I have a deep and long-lasting love for psychology, and I had never really given much thought to female serial killers and the way that they’re different to male serial killers. We [as women] get held to a different standard; we navigate and interact with the world in a different way. There’s just subconscious beliefs that everybody holds that maybe make you judge women a lot more harshly than you judge men.”
Purnell was drawn to how “Sweetpea” set out to “confuse” the audience as viewers would be “so conflicted by relating to the emotions, but not the actions” of lead character Rhiannon. The goal was to make Rhiannon feel “as authentic of a person as possible” while still maintaining the heightened coming-of-age serial killer origin story.
“There’s a fine line between a sweet coming-of-age story that involves growing up and finding your voice, and a story of empowerment that feels threatening to others,” Purnell said, before joking, “Again, it’s not necessarily relatable with the murders.”
She continued, “However, I think female empowerment does seem threatening to some people and an untapped female rage is something that because we never see it because it’s so rarely represented onscreen. It’s like the boogeyman: it’s terrifying because we don’t know what it looks like. There is something about female rage that feels incredibly raw and untapped. It’s something we don’t see very often. It’s something that we don’t allow ourselves to feel very often, certainly don’t allow ourselves to express as often as we might feel it.”
Purnell added, “It’s also just good storytelling. Everybody loves a serial killer drama.”
In a meta twist, “Sweetpea” also serves as Purnell’s own coming-of-age milestone with her first time as an executive producer. The series further brought Purnell back to Starz, the network where she made her TV debut with “Sweetbitter” back in 2018.
“That was a really big moment for me,” Purnell said. “I was 21 and had just moved to New York. I was a kid. I didn’t know anything. I was terrified. And I really felt like I had my own coming-of-age, growing up and finding myself story when I did that show. So it is really nice to come back at this point in my life and have another ‘first’ as an EP as well.”
Purnell reflected on how the “Sweetpea” script was presented to her at the “right place and right time.”
“I’ve been looking for a project to produce for a really long time and really wanted to hold out until it was the right thing, something that I felt like I could really contribute properly the way that I wanted to,” Purnell said. “I didn’t want a vanity producer credit. I got very lucky and here we are.”
And “Sweetpea” also fit into Purnell’s love of “survival dramas” — except this time, it’s Purnell’s character trying to survive her own psyche.
“There’s a reason why I love survival dramas or jobs where I get to just break a character down,” Purnell, who made her film debut at age 14 in “Never Let Me Go,” said. “I like seeing what happens when you push a human to their brink. You really don’t know how you’re going to respond to a certain situation until you get there. What I like about what I really like about the ‘coming-of-rage’ tagline is that there’s a fine line between love and hate.”
“Sweetpea” premieres Thursday, October 10 at midnight on the Starz app. The series will debut on the Starz channel at 8 p.m. ET/PT in the U.S. on Friday, October 11. The following week, “Sweetpea” will move to Fridays for the remainder of the season.
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