Why Ella Purnell ‘wanted to destroy’ Lucy on ‘Fallout’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
[WARNING: The following story contains spoilers about Season 1 of “Fallout.”]
When viewers first meet Lucy (Ella Purnell) in the “Fallout” series premiere, the Vault 33 dweller is applying for an arranged marriage. She is kind, sweet, charming, optimistic, a Golden Rule abider — and quite naive. Vault life is all she knows, and all she’s been told is that it is every vault dweller’s duty to get married and procreate.
“It’s this Vault-Tec propaganda of, ‘One day, we are gonna rebuild America.’ It’s more cult-y than that,” Purnell tells Gold Derby (watch the exclusive video interview above). “I do think you do see moments with Lucy maybe doubting that in the first episode. It’s something me and [executive producer and director] Jonah [Nolan] talked about a lot, and it was really important to him and to me as well that we mapped in those little moments of fear before she gets married and then certainly moments after she gets married … where there’s little moments of like, ‘Is this it? Is this really going to be my life?’ It’s like the goalpost keeps moving. You think you want something and you get all the way there and you get it, and you go, ‘Huh?'”
Those moments tee up the journey Lucy would go on for the rest of the season (and continue to go on in Season 2). By the end of the pilot, Lucy, trying to rescue her father, Overseer Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), ventures to the surface of the irradiated wasteland of 2296 Los Angeles. She crosses paths with the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a former actor who turned into a noseless ghoul after the thermonuclear war in 2077. While Lucy radiates (no pun intended) optimism, the Ghoul radiates cynicism. But their interactions — which includes him provoking her into biting off his finger — and her grueling experiences on the wasteland slowly eat away at Lucy’s naivete and positivity.
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“That’s the part that really drew me to this role and the part I really wanted to do. Lucy, in Episode 1, she’s really funny, she’s really strong, she’s really smart, but I wasn’t interested in playing this perfectly put-together character for eight episodes,” the “Yellowjackets” alum shares. “I wanted to destroy her. I wanted to break down and get to the very limits of desperation, where you get to when you are forced to survive. I think Episodes 3 and 4 Lucy are my favorite version, even though she’s being tortured, she’s starving, she’s thirsty, she’s got one shoe, she’s got radiation poisoning, she’s being used as human bait in an irradiated river with a 15-foot salamander trying to eat her. She’s really f—ing — sorry to swear — but she’s really going through it. I remember having a conversation with the writers going, ‘We are really gonna mess her up, right? I want her to look really messed up. I want her to look like she’s really going through it.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, but we’re still gonna make it like Hollywood, like Hollywood suffering, like she’s pretty but she’s suffering.’ I’m like, ‘No! She’s not pretty! You look at her and you wince. You need to feel how far she’s fallen from Episode 1.’ I loved that.”
By the final moments of the season finale, Lucy hits an even lower point and must confront feelings and emotions she’s never felt before. She is completely paralyzed when she learns that Hank was a Vault-Tec employee, which dropped the bombs in 2077, and destroyed Shady Sands when her mom Rose tried to escape to the newly built city with their children. The ghoul at a table next to her was her mom. Everything Lucy has been told, the life she’s led, has been a lie. As the Ghoul talks her into joining him to meet her makers, Lucy kills her mom and uttered her once-chirpy catchphrase “Okey dokey” with the energy of a lightbulb on its last legs.
“We tried a couple versions of that ending actually. We tried a very emotional version. We tried a version shouting. We actually reshot that ending over a separate week because it was so important to us that we got it right. And all of the bigger versions just wasn’t right,” Purnell explains. “It really came down to, you know, Lucy is an incredibly animated, optimistic person. What does it look like when the happiest, most optimistic, most resilient person you know loses hope? Finally, finally after all that. The one thing that could possibly make you believe the world is not a good place is finding out her father, her anchor, is not a good person. That is the entire fabric of her being just ripped out from beneath her, so I think that catatonic state, that numbness — who’s to say if it’s the right choice or not? But it was definitely a choice I was happy with when we were doing it. … There’s nothing left. That’s her entire being. There’s nothing left. I’m excited to see what’s next for Lucy. How do you rebuild a person?
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