Yellowjackets‘ Ella Purnell to star in the Fallout TV show
The Arcane actor joins an already-cast Walton Goggins in the Amazon-fronted series
Aux News Fallout
Amazon’s Fallout TV series continues to be ever more of a thing, despite our continued general disbelief that Fallout—one of the greatest, least TV-friendly video game series of all time—is being turned into a TV show. Today, Deadline reports that Ella Purnell, who lately made waves as an performer in Yellowjackets and animated series Arcane, is joining the show’s cast.
Who is Purnell playing? We have no goddamn idea, since Amazon is keeping extremely tight-lipped about this particular show, which is being produced by Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan. All we’ve got to go on is that her character might be named “Jean,” and be “a young woman with a can-do attitude who may be hiding a dangerous secret.” Also: That she could be the protagonist of the show.
Purnell joins a cast that so far has exactly one other name on it: Walton Goggins, whose role is also a big ol’ radioactive question mark at the moment. Purnell comes to the series after a breakout performance in the first season of Yellowjackets, in which her soccer team captain character Jackie had the sort of bad time (after the show’s central plane crash) that meant that nobody needed to bother casting an actor to play her adult self. She also co-starred in last year’s Army Of The Dead, and played one of the central voice roles in Netflix animated series Arcane.
As to what’ll happen in the Fallout show itself, we honestly have no idea: The game series takes place a few hundred years in the future, after nuclear bombs blast a huge swathe of the planet straight into Mad Max land. There are a few obvious story hooks that Nolan and his team—including showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner—might possibly pursue, though, including the sinister Vault-Tec (a pre-War company that turned bomb shelters into evil psychological research projects), the Enclave (xenophobic remnants of the U.S. government who view all other survivors as “mutants”), or the Brotherhood Of Steel (technology-hoarding semi-fascists who sometimes end up as the series’ “good guys” by grim default). But there’s been a lot of Fallout over the years, so trying to pick out the proper entry point the show will go with feels like a fool’s errand.
We’ll know more, presumably, when Fallout begins production some time later this year.
17 Comments
The whole cast of Yellowjackets is great, both the younger and older performers, but it is a shame to lose her & not to have someone playing grown up Jackie in s2. I was thinking Sarah Michelle Gellar
Who wants to tell him? Anyone?
I’m sure she’ll appear in flashbacks/visions/whatever but yeah, Jackie was such a standout in the show and it sucks they offed her
Her death was pretty important though for having the impact it needed to.
Exactly. Jackie & Laura Lee were the two characters helping keep everyone grounded in reality. Now that they’re gone…
I am still in denial about poor Laura Lee, hoping against hope she wades out of the lake with her equally heroic teddy bear Leonard, both slightly singed
I’m still in denial about that death. Her journal, as read in the present day, makes references to movies that weren’t out by the time they were stranded. Either her best friend filled them in for some reason, or there’s more to the story. And no one in the present refers to her as dead, just “not here.”Yep, strong denial here.
I believe the showrunner said Shauna filled in the diary entries that were after Jackie’s death. But I hope that is wrong & you are right.
I think I read something like that as well, or they may have alluded to it without saying it directly. But I’m strongly denying that as well.Partially because I think her death needs to be something bigger if she is to die on the show. Waking up to her frozen to death was incredibly underwhelming.
She dead 8 eps in. Take the bet.
It’s gonna be Bethesda Fallout. They don’t have the balls to do Obsidian/Black Isle Fallout.
Just show me one goddamn crucifixion, damn it
she was great in Yellowjackets. i couldn’t believe she was british in real life, i totally fell for her as a american teen.
She was great in Sweetbitter on Starz too.
She was pretty great as Jinx (which is a hard character to give nuance to, honestly). And apparently Yellowjackets is amazing. So I’m pumped for this casting along with Goggins. But as it’s a vidya IP, I’m just waiting for some shoe to drop and it’ll end up being a prequel pre-war series or some fucking bullshit.
I’m confused by the beginning of this article. What makes Fallout an unlikely video game to be adapted for TV compared to other series? If anything it seems a bit late, as the whole dystopian future thing seems to have played out on TV and in movies several years ago. I’m a longtime fan of the Fallout video game series, but I find it to be a bit less appealing right now, as the prospect of widespread nuclear war feels much more likely than it ever has in my 39 years of life.
Wow. This site is still not covering Arcane.
Wow.