Fallout has become a massive hit for everybody with a Prime Video subscription, so much so that Fallout Season 2 is already on the way. Nobody really knows what’s in store for the characters, beyond a trip to New Vegas, least of all the actors that play them, but that seemingly won’t be too different from the way filming the actual series was handled, as Ella Purnell says the Fallout stars didn’t even know what was coming for their characters from one episode to the next.
Sometimes it's due to scripts being rewritten until the last minute, sometimes it’s due to attempts to keep secrets to avoid leaks, but it’s become common practice for actors to not see parts of their script until necessary. Ella Purnell tells THR this was the case for Fallout, one of the best Prime Video shows, which resulted in her not knowing what her own character’s story would be, and how she would relate to Walton Goggins’ Ghoul until the very end. She explained…
One of the things I love about TV is that you don’t know what’s going to happen — unless you’ve got lovely showrunners who tell you everything, which has never been my experience. In my experience, showrunners never tell you anything, and then you just read the script until you have to completely recalibrate what you were doing. It’s challenging, but it’s also fun. So I spent most of my time as Lucy just hating the Ghoul, and then, in the last episode, stupidly, it occurred to me far too late that the story that they were really trying to tell was how similar Lucy and the Ghoul are. It lined up with Lucy’s realization that her statement, 'I may look like you, but I’ll never be like you,' may not be 100 percent true.
Purnell says she only realized the connection between her character of Lucy and Goggins’ Ghoul at the end, saying she was stupid for not getting it sooner. Considering the way the series was given to her a piece at a time, I’m not sure the actress is giving herself enough credit. It's possible Walton Goggins felt the same way.
As she says, she didn’t really know what would come with each part of her story, which caused her to have to constantly recalibrate her performance. That doesn’t seem like the optimum way for an actor to perform. If she had understood where her story was going to end in Fallout Season 1, that could have influenced her performance at the beginning.
At the same time, maybe it’s the right way to do it. Lucy the character certainly doesn’t know where her story is going to go, so with each episode, Purnell can only act based on what has already happened and what is currently happening. Maybe that’s the more authentic performance.
Either way, she shouldn’t blame herself for not understanding what the show was doing if she didn’t know where it was going. We know where Season 2 will start based on the Fallout Season 1 ending, with Lucy and the Ghoul on the hunt for Lucy’s dad. Where things will go from there, maybe the showrunners can at least give Ella Purnell a hint.
