Ella Purnell is especially good at playing young women whose optimism comes under pressure. Her Lucy in Fallout gives the grotesque comedy a human cost, and makes a wandering series worth following.
Fi1m perspective
In Fallout (2024), Ella Purnell makes Lucy MacLean’s reactions count. The series can be funny about violence without making her response to it seem foolish, and that is a considerable part of its appeal. We found the brutality harder to laugh off because Purnell gives us someone whose distress we take seriously. She does not use Lucy’s likeability to make the wasteland seem safer than it is.
Her early films included Never Let Me Go (2010), playing young Ruth, and Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016). Television gave her a first US lead in Sweetbitter (2018), then the breakthrough of Jackie Taylor in Yellowjackets (2021). Jackie’s high-school status is tested by the demands of survival. The connection to Lucy is clear: Purnell keeps finding women whose confidence about how life works is about to be tested.
Her expressive eyes are an obvious resource, particularly in close-up, but Arcane (2021–2024) makes it harder to reduce her acting to that. As the voice of Jinx, she moves between playfulness, fragility and menace. Those changes let us hear the character’s conflicting feelings without needing to see Purnell’s face.
The useful comparison in Fallout is with Walton Goggins, whose Ghoul gives the nastier comedy its confidence. Purnell makes the hurt register; Goggins makes the next encounter less predictable. Both performances encourage us to stay with a series whose wandering plot does not always repay the attention. The balance between their strands and that of Aaron Moten’s Maximus is uneven. That can make the slower passages more trying, because we care enough about Lucy to want her next scene to count.
Sweetpea (2024), in which she plays Rhiannon Lewis and serves as executive producer, adds responsibility behind the camera. Her growing list of young women under extreme pressure does suggest a risk of repetition. We would welcome a part that asks something else of her. Start with Fallout, provided its mixture of gore and comedy appeals.
Biography
Ella Purnell is a British actress. Born on 17 September 1996 in Whitechapel, London, she began her career as a child actress in West End theatre and attended weekly classes at the Sylvia Young Theatre School.
Her film roles include Never Let Me Go (2010), Maleficent (2014), Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016) and Army of the Dead (2021). On television she has appeared in Sweetbitter (2018), Belgravia (2020), Yellowjackets (2021–present) and Fallout (2024–present), in which she plays Lucy MacLean. She voiced Jinx in Arcane (2021–2024).
