Ella Purnell didn’t quite have the appetite to watch one of her onscreen characters go.
After starring in the first season of Showtime‘s Yellowjackets, the actress recently opened up about the “disconcerting” experience of seeing her character Jackie’s dead body on the show following her death at the end of the Season 1 finale.
“Yeah, it was weird. I knew it was gonna happen, I kind of put two and two together,” she noted at a recent Fan Expo in Chicago. “But I was filming Fallout, and the schedule was very, very demanding. I was exhausted. And I was getting the scripts for Season 2 [of Yellowjackets] but I wasn’t maybe reading them as quickly as I should have been, because I had a lot going on.”
Purnell added, “And I just woke up one morning, and I had all these pictures from my Yellowjackets castmates of them taking selfies with my charred corpse. You know when you wake up and you don’t know where you are? It was like that but on steroids, because I woke up and I was like, ‘Am I dead? What’s happened?’ So, it was a little bit disconcerting.”
After Jackie is exiled by her teammates in ‘Sic Transit Gloria Mundi’, the finale of Season 1, she freezes to death when it unexpectedly snows overnight. As the team starts to starve, they resort to eating Jackie in the Season 2 episode ‘Edible Complex’.
“I’m gonna tell you a secret: I actually haven’t watched that episode because I don’t know what it’s gonna do to my mental health,” admitted Purnell. “I don’t really want to risk it, so I haven’t seen it.”
Created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, Yellowjackets follows a New Jersey high school girls’ soccer team that becomes stranded in the Canadian wilderness for 19 months when their plane crashes in 1996. Meanwhile, their adult counterparts struggle to bury the secrets of what they went through.
After filming kicked off for Season 3 in May, the series is expected to return in 2025.
