What Ella Purnell Faced While Playing Fallout Made Her Realize “I’m Not a Gamer”

Prime Video’s Fallout TV series has managed to keep the fans glued to their screens for a good eight hours after its surprise launch on April 10, 2024. The TV adaptation of the popular Bethesda game, the series revolves around a post-apocalyptic world, where the protagonist finally steps out of the vault.

Ella Purnell, who plays Lucy, the protagonist is being praised for her role. Purnell makes her way to the TV screens as Lucy and is pitted against The Ghoul, played by Walton Goggins. Ahead of the release, the cast of the show revealed some behind-the-scene experiences, such as their interactions with the Fallout game.

Ella Purnell on her interaction with the game

During an interview with The Variety, the cast of the Fallout TV show, namely Walton Goggins, Ella Purnell, and Aaron Moten shared how familiar they were with the game. Interestingly, all three had varying degrees of knowledge about video games in general. Goggins says he had “zero” gaming experience. However, he learned a lot about Fallout in particular from his 13-year-old son.

Meanwhile, Moten who plays Maximus, says he watched Fallout playthroughs on Twitch to prepare for his role. However, Purnell revealed that she did encounter some difficulty. She said,

“I’m not a gamer, but I tried to play ‘Fallout.’ I’m just not good at it, and that annoys me because I’m competitive. It was the controls that I didn’t get the hang of. My thumbs don’t control the right way.”

In another interview with The Wrap, Purnell and Moten had said that before joining the cast of Fallout, they were only vaguely aware of Bethesda’s game franchise.

However, they say as soon as they got the script of the show they were drawn towards the complex characters of Lucy and Maximus, and their unique stories.

Ella Purnell on playing Lucy

Ella Purnell plays the role of the protagonist Lucy, who is a vault dweller. In the post-apocalyptic world, Lucy has lived underground all her life and now has to fight the antagonist The Ghoul, after stepping out. Played by Goggins, The Ghoul is a victim of the nuclear apocalypse, which transforms him into his current form of a seemingly undying mutant.

Purnell, along with Moten, revealed that they actually did not require drastic transformations for their roles, but did have their respective cumbersome costumes to deal with. Moten had a bulky suit of advanced weaponry, that reportedly weighed 120 pounds taking 10-12 minutes to detach from. On the other hand, Purnell wears a blue-and-yellow jumpsuit that has always been iconic to the Fallout video games.

Talking about the struggles with her costume, Purnell says,

“You play these games and you don’t think about how hard it is to pee in a vault suit. Then you wear a costume and you’re working a 16-hour day and suddenly you’re butt-naked in a cubicle, because you got to take your whole thing off to pee.”

Although there were no irradiated monsters or cannibalistic bandits on the set of the Fallout TV series, the blazing heat did make things difficult for the cast. Purnell, nonetheless says, “It’s so ‘Fallout,’ isn’t it?”