Fallout is one of those shows that lays waste to your sleep schedule; a big-budget, post-apocalyptic adventure that’s far more fun than the end of the world has any right to be, and almost impossible to turn off. But as you’re halfway through a late-night binge, watching Lucy MacLean fight mutants and dodge bullets, the woman who plays her, Ella Purnell, will already be asleep. “I’m like an old lady who’s in bed at nine o’clock every night,” the 29-year-old actor laughs. “If you’d told me that ten years ago, I’d have said, ‘No way.’ But now, it’s a foam roller and a cup of tea. That’s all I need.”
But for all its fanfare, the TV version of Fallout landed in Purnell’s inbox like any other role. She’d never wandered its wastelands, strapped on a Pip-Boy computer or even heard of the game. “I really didn’t know much about the project,” she admits. “I was bad, and didn’t even google it, because I was busy filming [the US survival drama] Yellowjackets.”
Of course, once she signed on, everything became real. “It wasn’t until I got the job, and I started doing my research and my prep for the character, that I really understood exactly what I was getting myself into. That actually, this was quite a big deal and you really want to do that justice.”
“It’s really touching to me that people love this character,” she says, smiling. “She’s so naive because she’s literally lived in a bubble her whole life. She’s never felt the wind before. She’s never looked at long distances before. I found a lot of enjoyment thinking about all the things that we take for granted, that she would have been like, ‘Wow!’”
It’s an environment with clear parallels to the Vault: both carefully controlled, make-believe worlds, shielded from real life. But Purnell sees it another way. “I feel more like a child now than I did when I was a child,” she says. “Now, in the space between ‘action’ and ‘cut’, I’m free, and I’m completely playful. But as a child working, I didn’t feel like that. I was terrified, I was nervous and I didn’t know what was going on or what I was doing.
“As an adult, I love these people. I love this set. I feel like I can speak my mind. I feel like I’m protected. That’s how Lucy feels in the Vault: she has a purpose, she has structure. When she leaves the Vault and all of that falls away, and she’s in completely unfamiliar surroundings and she doesn’t know the rules – that’s how I felt as a child actor.”
“I think if I was one of those people, like Justin Bieber, who became an overnight success, it would’ve really messed with me, and I’m glad that I got a longer, slower build over the course of 20 years.”
That long arc has yielded a new kind of confidence – “I have a little bit more trust and faith that as long as I keep picking projects that I really care about, that’s going to come out in the performance” – as well as an appetite for morally ambiguous characters, like the murderous Rhiannon in Sweetpea, which aired on Sky Atlantic last year.
If anything, Fallout is the perfect sandbox for that exploration; in a world where everyone fights to survive, monsters are a matter of perspective. Take Lucy, Purnell says. “Yes, she has a good heart, and she cares about doing the right thing. But she’s spoilt and she’s privileged, and she can be very ignorant and stubborn. And that’s life.”
And if Ella Purnell were to find herself at the end of the world? “I like to think I’d be Lara Croft, all the gear and great arms, but in reality, that just wouldn’t be me. I am very non-confrontational, I’m very organised, I’m very Type A.” She smiles mischievously. “I’d organise everything instead. You know, if I have access to an Excel spreadsheet, it’s game over for you. I’m going to conquer the world.”
Elle Osili Wood is an award-winning presenter; listen to her Radio 3 show Sound of Gaming on BBC Sounds.
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