The movie that swore Ella Purnell off the horror genre forever: “I can’t watch them”
Now that Fallout Season 2 has begun to drop onto Prime Video as a bit of a pre-Christmas treat for all us fans of video game crossovers (and to keep us going until we get more The Last of Us) it’s worth acknowledging what stellar work Ella Purnell has been doing over the last few years, and not just in the world of New Vegas.
The London-born actor has carved out an impressive position as one of the leading faces in the world of sci-fi and streaming, and it only took her five years to do it. Fallout is not just a hit, but in fact the most acclaimed live-action video game adaptation in history, outdoing the previously mentioned The Last of Us, Twisted Metal and Halo.
And Purnell has also conquered the world of comic book sci-fi on Netflix as well as Prime, voicing ‘Jinx’ in the hugely acclaimed animation Arcane alongside Hailee Steinfeld. Throw the equally well-received teen-thriller Yellowjackets in there, which has run for three seasons, and she pretty much has ‘cool TV for younger people’ locked down completely.
Next year will also see a second season of her dark comedy Sweetpea, the series she made for Sky that she also served as an Executive Producer on, which tells the tale of a young woman with an ordinary, mundane job who develops an obsession with murder.
It’s pretty full on with some bloody moments, which is perhaps a bit of a surprise given Purnell has a full-on fear of horror movies, especially one of the enduring classics of all time, as she told Bafta: “One film that I definitely shouldn’t have watched that a young age was (1981 Stanley Kubrick shocker) The Shining. I remember I went to a girl’s sleepover and I was like, ‘Finally (I’m) invited to the cool kids sleepover,’ and then the really, really cool girl put on The Shining and all the other cool girls were watching and I was just like… (does terrified face).”
To be fair to Purnell, The Shining is indeed incredibly creepy fare, a masterfully constructed tale of an isolated descent into complete madness, complete with a hotel full of blood, monstrously deformed old women in bathtubs and the scariest pair of twins ever committed to celluloid.
Purnell added: “To this day I cannot watch horror films, I hate horror films, I’m terrified of horror films. I’m scared of them, I can’t watch them. I don’t like having an unpleasant movie viewing experience and it’s not fun for me. I put that down to watching that film with the twins.”
Unfortunately for Purnell, she’s going to have to get over her fear of being scared pretty quickly, given one of her upcoming movies is The Scurry, which, much as it sounds like I’m making this up, is all about people stuck in an eco cafe that gets overrun by a horde of bloodthirsty squirrels. That sounds… terrible, but it does feature Rhys Ifans in it, so we’ll give it a pass for now and just hope it’s very funny.
If that weren’t frightening enough, she also has to star alongside Pete Davidson in a film about saving humanity called That Time We Met.
