My Body Didn’t Want To Bring That Knife Down

[Editor’s note: The following contains some spoilers for Sweetpea.]

The drama series Sweetpea, available to watch on Starz, follows Rhiannon Lewis (Ella Purnell), a woman that goes largely unnoticed and is often overlooked, in both her professional and personal life. Finally getting pushed over the edge and losing control results in her stabbing and killing a man and dumping his body. With the floodgates open, the kill list of people who have underestimated and wronged her becomes much less of the mere fantasy it was before and Rhiannon finds empowerment and a taste for blood that becomes addicting.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Purnell talked about how Rhiannon surprised her, getting to be in the writers’ room during development, the challenge of getting the audience into her character’s head, relating to her emotions but not her actions, why Rhiannon made her feel “icky,” how her Sweetpea characters fit in with Jackie in Yellowjackets and Lucy in Fallout, the fun of being an agent of chaos in a story, and the challenge of shooting the murder scenes.

Collider: What most surprised you about this character? Obviously, you knew what you were going to be doing, going into it, but once you’re actually in it, what surprised you that you didn’t realize until you were doing it?

ELLA PURNELL: God, that’s a great question. I underestimated her, and not in the murder sense, but just because someone’s quiet doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot to say. In the early episodes, when Rhiannon is this invisible wallflower that people don’t see and they don’t pay attention to, she’s really funny and she’s really smart and she’s got a lot of love to give. She’s got these funny little one-liners and funny little quirks, it’s just that no one’s around to hear them. What surprised me, actually, was that I hadn’t taken that into account. I’d thought a lot about how she was gonna end up and how funny she was gonna be in episode six, but I didn’t think about that in episode one, back in pre-production.

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Did you know what her full journey would be when you started down this path, or did you only have some of her story, and then you learned what the end would be once you started shooting? How much did you know about what her arc was going to be?

PURNELL: I knew a lot. I’m lucky enough to be an executive producer on this show. I came on board maybe 10 months before we started filming and they very graciously really wanted my input and wanted to collaborate in that way. So, I was in the writers’ room and we were developing the series outline, reading scripts early, and giving feedback on scripts, so I always knew where she was gonna end up. I maybe didn’t know the specifics of it, but I knew where she was gonna end up. Also, it’s based on a book, but the show and the book are very different. In the book, she’s a lot more advanced. She’s definitely fully Sweetpea. The show is the making of Sweetpea, but I used the book as my end goal for Rhiannon. Episode six of the show is chapter one in the book, not maybe in terms of what she’s done, but in terms of who she is. You don’t always get that in TV. With TV, a lot of the time, you get the script the day before, and then you just wing it. They could tell you to do anything and they just own you. You’ve gotta do what you’re told. But in this case, it was almost like shooting a movie, where I actually knew my A to B.

There is so much going on with this character internally because she doesn’t really have people to have conversations and share her feelings with.

PURNELL: That was actually one of the challenges we faced when we were developing the show. For the first episode, she’s very lonely. She doesn’t really have anyone to talk to. And when you’re telling a story, which is almost a one-character perspective story, at least in the first episode where the whole thing is from Rhiannon’s eyes and it’s from her perspective, it’s very hard to get the audience in her head, and to actually get them to understand what she’s thinking and her motives and get them to relate to her, when they don’t know her. There’s no way for them to get in. There are ways you can do that with flashbacks or a dear diary situation or narration, but we didn’t have any of those devices at our disposal. The writers are wonderful and they did an incredible job, but that was definitely a challenge.

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This is such an interesting character because she’s doing this awful thing, but we can sympathize with the quiet girl who was bullied, who is grieving a family member, and who is being faced with this person from her past that she never fully recovered from. The breaking point is even understandable, until she crosses the line.

PURNELL: We relate to her emotions, but not her actions.

How did you find yourself most connecting with her and what most scared you about her? Were you ever concerned about connecting with her too much?

PURNELL: That’s a really great question. It’s a delicate line that you’re constantly struggling with. As an actor, you’re taught never to judge your characters. No bad guy thinks they’re the bad guy. You have to get into that character’s head and find things to relate to, even in the most dire circumstances. With Rhiannon, specifically, that first episode, she goes through so much. When you see what young Rhiannon goes through, it’s very easy to empathize. I actually found episode two to be the most challenging, in terms of judging my character. It was never the case that I got too close. It was always the opposite of feeling icky. It was really hard to play that character with so much empathy, as an actor, when she does things that feel slightly unforgivable, but you have to. Episode two, I found difficult, with her coming to terms with who she is and what she’s done. She’s developed this moral code, as a desperate attempt to convince herself that she’s not a monster. She’s subconsciously seeking a way to justify her actions, and that was tricky. Ella Jones is probably my creative soulmate. I just adore her. At this point, we are so in each other’s minds, we can almost communicate telepathically. There was such a trusting relationship there. She helped me through everything. Every question I had, every moment I was stuck, she always had an answer that was three thousand times better than mine. In those moments where it did become challenging, leaning on the creatives around me was the key.

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I read a previous interview that you did where you said you love taking characters and either completely destroying them, breaking them down or building them up. That got me thinking about how Jackie was completely destroyed in Yellowjackets. Lucy was broken down in Season 1 of Fallout, even though there’s still room to build her backup in Season 2. And this character seems a bit trickier, in the sense that, she’s going down this path of her own making. Where do you feel Rhiannon fits in with your previous characters, especially your most recent handful of them?

PURNELL: That’s a great question again. I love these questions. In a weird way, with this one, I’m doing both. She develops over the series and she gains this confidence. As she develops this intoxicating taste for murder, she grows in confidence. It’s that Jennifer’s Body thing where the more she kills, the more vibrant and alive she becomes. It’s like that with Rhiannon. She has this upward trajectory, but she doesn’t realize that she’s digging herself deeper and deeper and deeper into this morally corrupt sort of hole. And then, they come back together and the finale of the season is when those two points meet again and naturally implode. It will be interesting to see what people think by the end of the series, if she’s up or if she’s down. I’ve got my theories.

Ella Purnell Enjoys Being an Agent of Chaos, Especially With Her Unpredictable ‘Sweetpea’ Character

When it comes to Yellowjackets, Fallout, and Sweetpea, you’re essentially the wrecking ball that comes in and throws things into upheaval for everybody else. What have you most enjoyed about playing these characters that really shake up the world around them and then try to find their place in that whether they’re alive or dead?

PURNELL: I like being an agent of chaos. It’s great. There’s a certain amount of freedom that comes with it. I suppose if you dig deeper, it really is because, if you take who a character thinks she is or what a character thinks they know about themselves and you disrupt that, you pull that fabric out and they crumble, and then you get to do whatever you want. You get to do weird lines or throw-away comments or say things that are unexpected, and it’s very creative for me to not have to be so stuck on one path and constricted in that way. With Rhiannon, she becomes quite unpredictable. You have no idea who she’s gonna become. She doesn’t even know who she’s gonna become. She has no idea who she could be. That untapped potential is quite sweet. It’s almost a coming of age story, but with murder. It’s also terrifying because you know that she’s capable of unthinkable things. That makes her unpredictable, which makes my job really fun.

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Every time you came into a room with Jeremy Swift and he called you “Sweetpea,” it just made me cringe a little bit inside. What was it like to work with him on that dynamic?

PURNELL: I adore Jeremy. I’m such a big Ted Lasso fan. I always tried to keep it to myself. I knew I was acting weird around him, so I just had to be like, “Look, I love you. I think you’re great.” He’s hilarious. He did a lot of improv that really cracked me up. I’ve got no poker face at all. We had to shoot his coverage first, so he could do all of his funny improv lines, and I could just giggle to myself because otherwise I would ruin every single take. He’s also just a lovely guy. We had the nicest cast and the nicest crew on this job, which is important when you’re doing a job that’s got heavy themes, to say the least. Being able to mess around in between takes and get back to yourself and keep things light definitely helps.

Ella Purnell Found the Murder Scenes in ‘Sweetpea’ to Be Emotionally Challenging

What was it like to actually shoot the murder scenes? Especially when she’s stabbing men in the neck and blood is spurting out, how challenging was it to get everything timed exactly right?

PURNELL: On a practical level, it’s probably the easiest element, actually. I had a little bit of experience with that kind of stuff on Fallout, with blood rigs and special effects and timing. It feels almost the same as making sure you hit your marks or faking eyelines or doing technical things that are just part of being an actor. It’s slightly distracting sometimes when you’re trying to really focus on the emotions of the scene, but absolutely necessary and just using a different part of your brain, really. The emotional side of it was challenging. I’ve never killed anyone on screen before, or in real life. I don’t know if I have to say that, but I’m going to put that out there as a disclaimer, just in case. You don’t want to. It’s not natural. There’s a lot of resistance, physically. I didn’t want to do it. My body didn’t want to bring that knife down.

I said “sorry” a lot, the first few times, which is also very British. Brits doing murder shows is hilarious because you spend 99% of your time just apologizing to the people you’re about to murder. It’s actually helpful to lean into the more technical side of it, treating it like choreography, which it is, and treating it like a serious stunt that could go wrong at any time, which it is. You have to remove the actual human when it comes to doing the really emotional part, the part where it’s a close-up of Rhiannon feeling what she feels or becoming an animal or losing her inhibition or whatever it is. We remove the human that is being stabbed to allow you to open up more and really just lose it. I don’t think I could have done that if I there was an actual person. It’s definitely a weird, uncomfortable feeling.

Release Date

October 10, 2024

Cast

Ella Purnell , Nicôle Lecky , Jon Pointing , Calam Lynch , Tim Samuels , Alexander Bellinfantie , Elliot Cable , Lucy Heath , Jessica Brindle , Dino Kelly , Leah Harvey , Jessye Romeo , Luke McGibney , Gurjot Dhaliwal , Alexandra Dowling , Nathan Hall , Cain Aiden , Mark Rainsbury , Malcolm J K Baker , Lee Byford , Guy Robbins

Main Genre

Drama

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Sweetpea airs on Starz. Check out the trailer:

Watch on Starz