Ella Purnell Says Channeling Her Rage to Play a Killer in ‘Sweetpea’ Was Therapeutic (VIDEO)

Ella Purnell is hard to ignore. The wide-eyed British actress has drawn raves as a plucky survivor in Prime Video‘s apocalyptic drama Fallout, and in her breakout role as a teenage queen bee in Showtime supernatural thriller Yellowjackets.

TV Insider spoke with Purnell about her new darkly comedic and suspenseful six-part series, Sweetpea, In the Starz thriller, she pulls off playing someone invisible: the ignored and sidelined Rhiannon Lewis, a receptionist at a local newspaper who develops an intoxicatingly liberating taste for murder.

Purnell shares what it felt like shooting Rhiannon’s first kill: “The animal comes out. It’s not something we ever do. It’s not something we’re allowed to do, especially as women where we have to really manage our emotions and be quite careful with what we let out and when we let it out to be encouraged to just scream, to just explode.

Starz

“I had no idea what that was, I didn’t practice it,” she continues. “I didn’t know what was going to come out. I didn’t know how it was going to go. And you really have to shed obviously years and years and years of conditioning and self-consciousness and embarrassment, just do it. But by the end of it, I was like, ‘I don’t need to go to therapy ever again. That was great. It was everything I ever needed.’”

Check out the video above to hear more from Purnell about what draws her to a role; and behind-the-scenes details about shooting Rhiannon’s spells of rage. 

Sweetpea, Series Premiere, Thursday, October 10, 8 p.m. ET/PT on Starz or streaming at midnight on the STARZ App (and moving to Fridays the following week)