In a cultural landscape that has inundated, if not altogether walloped us over the head, with content about male murderers, Ella Purnell finds herself in a decidedly unique position.
She stars as Rhiannon Lewis, the underappreciated and oft-ignored wallflower turned serial killer in the dark comedy “Sweetpea” which is currently streaming on Starz and is based on the popular book series by C. J. Skuse.
Rhiannon’s breaking point looks quite different than most people’s. Traumatized by memories of a childhood punctuated with vicious bullying and bereft at the more recent death of her father, the beleaguered administrative assistant soon finds solace in slashing her way to some semblance of justice. Viewers can hear her catalog “People I’d like to kill” at various points throughout the series. Let’s just say it’s a lengthy list.
It’s not like she hasn’t been part of bloody ensembles before. Prior to portraying Rhiannon, Purnell played Jackie, the doomed soccer team captain on Showtime’s “Yellowjackets.” More recently she’s helmed Amazon Prime Video’s post-apocalyptic drama series, “Fallout,” adapted from the video game of the same name.
But there’s something altogether different about her lead role on “Sweetpea,” and not merely the fact that it’s her first time serving as an executive producer. Speaking to Salon in a recent interview, Purnell explained the intricacies of embodying a character with whom we can simultaneously empathize with and criticize, while also learning how to shed certain gender-based inhibitions.
“We want to kind of try to get the audience to relate to Rhiannon, relate to her emotions — obviously not her actions,” she said. “And that seemed really challenging. I wanted to watch that show; it seemed like something I would want to watch. I'm fascinated by psychology, and I love anything that kind of makes me feel torn.” This same sense of consternation is ultimately what piqued her interest in “Sweetpea.”
“I didn't know if I could do it, to be honest, because it scared me,” Purnell said. “And so, therefore I needed to do it.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
I’m interested to learn what drew you to the project.
For me, it was just the initial pitch. I hadn't even read the script and I knew I wanted to do it. I sat with Patrick Walters, who's our executive producer, and he said, “We want to make this show. It's going to be a dark comedy.” Immediately, I was like, “I'm all ears,” because I love dark comedies.
And we wanted to make it about this female serial killer. We wanted, psychologically — we wanted to make the audience feel conflicted, morally conflicted. We want to kind of try to get the audience to relate to Rhiannon, relate to her emotions — obviously not her actions. And that seemed really challenging. I wanted to watch that show; it seemed like something I would want to watch. I'm fascinated by psychology, and I love anything that kind of makes me feel torn.
I didn't know if I could do it, to be honest, because it scared me. And so, therefore I needed to do it.
I like that you brought that up because one of my questions relates to the viewer’s connection to Rhiannon. I think despite her really violent tendencies, she feels like a character with whom we can potentially empathize. Do you agree with that, and do you empathize with her?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have to empathize with her in order to play her. I have to be able to get into her head to a certain degree, obviously. There's this thing with playing villains that is challenging inherently because you're not supposed to ever judge your character. But what I found very useful — an actor said this once and I forget who it is — they said, "No bad guy thinks they're the bad guy."
And that for me was kind of the key to unlocking Rhiannon because I really was struggling. I'd never played a villain really like this — not one this bad, not one who is a serial killer. I was really struggling to understand how and why anyone can do that. And so realizing, “Oh, of course, I'm thinking like Ella, I'm not thinking like Rhiannon, because Rhiannon doesn't know why she can do that.” In fact, the whole series is about her not being able to face what she truly is, not understanding, not even being able to begin to think about, “What is wrong with me? Why have I done that? Why can I do this? Why do I like this?” She doesn't know that.
So actually, to really get into Rhiannon's head, I have to think, “I'm OK, I'm not a monster. These bad things happened to me and I'm a good guy.” That's kind of the key to unlocking her actually.
You obviously play the lead role in "Sweetpea," but you're also an executive producer. Can you discuss your involvement at that level?
Prior to “Sweetpea,” I had produced a couple of shorts and directed a show. I'd been writing and I wanted to get onto the other side of the camera for years, and finally the last couple of years I've actually had more time and been able to do that. I wanted to do it on a larger scale, and I really wanted to hold out for the right project. I wanted to do it properly. I didn't want to just throw my name on something and not be involved. I wanted to really earn my seat at the table and feel like I was able to contribute fully as well as get the experience that I think — that I hope — is gonna make me a better director, a better filmmaker, a better actor in the future.
And with Rihannon, as soon as I read the script and I read the books and it was running in my mind — I just knew her. I had a very clear vision of how I wanted to do it. And this would never have worked out unless those visions had aligned. I sat with Ella Jones, the director. We both care so much about this project and so much about Rihannon. We met and I said, “Look, this is how I would want to do it. What do you think of these ideas?” And she liked them. And I liked the way she had such a clear idea of how it was gonna look. I felt like that lent itself so well to Rihannon’s internal journey that I had in my head. It really just was like, love at first sight.
I was like, “God — this is what it's gonna be like working with this woman! I will follow her into the fire because I just think she's so smart, so articulate, so talented.
And then I just got super involved. I was in the writer's room mapping out the series outline and giving script notes. I was in the edit. I kind of got as involved as I wanted to and I'm really grateful that they welcomed me with open arms and allowed me to be included to the degree that I was. Because I feel like often actors are so sheltered, and I didn't want that to be the case. I didn't want them to shelter me. I wanted to get down and dirty and they really let me do that, so that was great.
And what were your favorite parts of getting “down and dirty” as a producer? Was it being involved in the scriptwriting process, for example, or weighing in on hair and makeup?
You know, that's such a great question. My number one favorite part was the writer's room. That was amazing to be a part of. I've always loved writing and I write a lot and I have always just wondered what that day-to-day looks like, being able to be behind the scenes in that way. And it was everything I ever wanted to be and more. I cannot express enough how much I adore a group of creative people getting together and making something. Even when I'm sitting at a dinner party with my friends and we play the game where you make up a story and you have one word each. I love being creative. I love like, coming up with an app idea with your best friend — anything like that. You just get to collaborate and take each other's ideas and build on them. Like you're building a world, you're building a house from the ground up with other people and it's amazing when you get to do that with a group of incredible women creators.
I also loved the hair and makeup. That's always been very important to me. And in all honesty, that part wasn't too dissimilar to what I've always been doing, because hair and makeup and costume have always been very important to me. I've been lucky enough to always work with fantastic department heads who wanna hear my ideas and wanna work with me to build a character. And so, yeah, getting on calls early on with our costume head of the department in hair and makeup and figuring out how we were gonna physically show that transformation she [Rhiannon] goes through. I also loved the casting process. I got to read in with all of our actors — every single one of them — in person, which I think makes such a huge difference. And I really think you can tell. I think the chemistry between all of these actors is amazing and getting to do a week of rehearsals ahead of time with those actors … I mean, that is invaluable in my opinion.
What were the unique challenges of portraying a female serial killer?
For me, as an actor, it's not being afraid, not concerning yourself with vanity, and not being afraid of being messy and being ugly. I don't care what my face is doing. I don't care if I ugly cry. I don't care if I look bad . . . good. I wanna look like all of those things. There is an inherent fear of being messy. We have it because we've just been conditioned to be so together and so careful with what we say and how we say it and what we look like all the time. So that was just a new experience.
As a producer, it was definitely when we were writing, and we were trying to toe that line with making the audience feel morally conflicted. Rhiannon is not like other people. She is a sociopath and she's capable of murder. There is a very distinct difference between her and most human beings, I hope. But also people — all of us, women included — subconsciously judge women more harshly than men. We all do, it's put into us. It's the result of the society that we're born into. And so, how do we make this unlikeable character someone that we can empathize with, without being caught up in whether she's likable or not? We're not trying to make Rhiannon likable. She's not likable, I don't want her to be likable. And I think being able to empathize with someone that you don't like, that's a tricky thing to try to navigate, whilst also trying to tell a truthful and authentic story.
How do you think we can reconcile Rhiannon's killing with the undeniably real emotion of female rage, which is often presented as something deviant, or that goes against the grain of how we often see women depicted as sort of quiet and controlled?
Rhiannon's not thinking about female rage. In fact, when we were creating the show, we didn't even really talk about female rage that much. We talked about rage. We talked about anger as an emotion that Rhiannon experiences. And since the show has come out, female rage has been talked about a lot in these interviews. And I think that it's probably because we don't see it a lot on screen. So when we see it, it's shocking to us and it's surprising. That's what makes it so scary — its unpredictability because it's so underrepresented.
Rhiannon doesn't kill out of rage. She kills out of a need to be seen. Rage is something that resides in her as a result of unresolved trauma. But the two are not necessarily linked. It's easy for us to link them as a consumer when we're watching that show. It's very easy for us to do that, but Rhiannon doesn't know that.
And so when I was doing it, I was more focused on what's happened to her in her past that hasn't been dealt with, that has psychologically influenced the way that she interacts with the world today as a grownup.
"Sweetpea" is streaming now on Starz.
