Awards Daily wakes Jackie up from the cold for a conversation with Yellowjackets’ Ella Purnell. *Spoilers ahead*
Yellowjackets‘ Ella Purnell knew her character Jackie’s fate early on and couldn’t keep it a secret among the cast on set.
“Oh, no I told everybody,” says Purnell. “I told everybody like the first day. Maybe I should have kept it a secret. That would have been hilarious. Imagine if I would have kept it a secret until the last episode?”
Purnell has never been concerned about making sure a character she played was likeable, because to her, unlikeable characters are a lot more interesting. But that changed when she played Jackie.
“As the season progressed and Jackie became more and more unhelpful, shall we say, out in the wilderness with everybody else, I did start to think, ‘God, you’re not making it any easier for me’ and then I did become a little concerned about how likable she would be.”
But of course, Jackie proved to have layers. She wasn’t a stereotypical queen bee or mean girl, and deep down, she truly loved her best friend, Shauna. All of this made Jackie become a favorite among Yellowjackets fans, so much so that when she died in the final episode, people were in denial about it.
“That just goes to show that it’s all in the writing, and it actually doesn’t matter if you try to make her likeable, because by the time I died, I thought, no one’s going to care that Jackie’s dead because she’s so bloody annoying that everyone’s going to go ‘Oh, thank God,’ but people seemed to really respond to her and really respond to the character.”
Purnell, too, was in denial about Jackie’s death when they were in the middle of filming. While she initially agreed to a one-year contract, she suddenly had a change of heart because of how much she enjoyed Jackie and working with her Yellowjacket “siblings.”
“What’s funny is actually after I made such a fuss about not wanting to be tied into a long thing, I called up the writers and said, ‘How do we feel about Jackie not dying?’, and they were like ‘Oh, would you want to stay on?’, and I said ‘Yeah,’ and they were like ‘Okay, we’ll think about it,’ and then they called me the next day, and they were like, ‘No, you’ve got to go.'” Jackie’s death is integral to the end of Season 1 and Shauna’s development, after all.
In fact, one of the reasons why Purnell thinks people responded so well to Jackie was her friendship with Shauna.
“Jackie is putting on a facade. She hasn’t got the slightest clue who she is and so she overcompensates with all of this. Really the only person who gives a shit about her, who actually shows up at the end of the day, is Shauna. If it wasn’t for Shauna and Jackie’s whole friendship, I’m not sure she would have been such a fan favorite.”
Especially since Jackie doesn’t always treat Shauna the way she deserves to be treated. After all, she never thought her best friend was capable of stealing her boyfriend.
“She just completely underestimated Shauna. She never thought that Shauna had even kissed a boy or would even have sex or would have sex without her or that anybody would be interested in Shauna. And that’s the problem. Jackie likes being the center of attention. By the time you come into the show, you can already tell that Jackie and Shauna have been drifting for several months.”
Even if Purnell and Sophie Nélisse, the actress who plays 1996 Shauna, became fast friends on set, which made their final scene together, that climactic fight scene, even more emotional.
“We’d been together for almost eight months and we were very aware that it was coming up on the end. It was kind of sad, especially the death scene. You’re dying in the show and you’re putting to rest a character that you really loved playing.”
Although as far as death scenes go, Jackie had a good one. Purnell believes that Shauna’s dream of Jackie coming in from the cold was actually Jackie moving into the next realm.
“The way I interpreted it, was that it was Jackie’s death dream. It was like she began to fade out from the hypothermia and that was what she was imagining because it’s the only thing she’s ever really wanted—to be loved, to be seen, and to be held and nurtured, to be taken care of in that way.”
Yellowjackets Season 1 is available on Showtime.
