Before I landed my dream job at Who What Wear nine years ago, I worked as a waitress at a fancy establishment in my hometown, a personal fact I contribute to the immediate kinship I feel with actress Ella Purnell upon speaking with her. To be fair, Purnell is not actually a waitress, though she does play one on the Starz series Sweetbitter, a role that allows us to bond for a full 10 minutes over the “mental” restaurant industry; the long hours, the romantic relationships that inevitably form, and of course, the drama. We LOVE the drama.

My phone call with Purnell takes place days after she wrapped a whirlwind NYC press trip (and this shoot!) for the second season of Sweetbitter, which premiered last Sunday. She is back in her hometown of London working on her next project, the corset drama Belgravia, which is set for 2020. It’s been nonstop for the actress, but despite the fact that it’s 10 p.m. her time and she is just getting home from a long day of filming, I’m greeted with a cheerful tone on the other end of the line. We dive straight into the important topics: fashion, career, and Sweetbitter and Tess, a character whose personal growth experiences on the show are coincidentally mirroring Purnell’s own. “It’s kind of funny how those things work out,” she tells me of the similarities between herself and her on-screen counterpart. This may be the year Tess happens to life, as Purnell puts it, but it’s also the year Purnell happens to life, revealing it’s been one full of intriguing career firsts. Oh, what a thrilling time to be the 22-year-old.

 Photoshoots > 2019 > Set 003 – Who What Wear

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Photoshoots > 2019 > Set 002 – Into The Gloss

“Every child actor has to go through the transition to adult actor. I was 11 when I got Never Let Me Go—I grew up pretty fast. As tempting as it is to just keep working, if you want to make the transition in a healthy, constructive way, it is important to step out. I had gotten to the point where I was not getting the kinds of scripts I wanted—it was the girlfriend of the main guy, or the one who was just there to be objectified—so I took some time off to recalibrate. It was only eight months, but it was the longest I’d gone without working since I was 10. Then I got Sweetbitter, and I fell in love with acting again. Not to be cheesy, but it completely changed my life—I moved from East London, where I had lived my whole life, to New York. Everything just flipped. Obviously I had a lot of acting experience, but I had grown up doing films—the whole industry of TV is new to me. The show could get picked up, it could not, you don’t get the script until the day before it shoots… It’s a completely different job. In the show, Tess is thrown into this restaurant industry and she has no idea what’s happening, and I was like that with TV, just trying to stay afloat.I ended up learning with her. A cliche, but life does imitate art. It’s funny how that happens, right?

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On January 22, Ella Purnell attended the Chanel fashion show in Paris, during the Fashion Week. Check out the pictures in the gallery :

 Public Appearances > 2019 > Chanel fashion show Haute-Couture S/S 2019 photocall in Paris – January 22

   

Photoshoots > 2018 > 001 – The Telegraph

 

Ella Purnell could feel it in her bones that something really bad was about to happen. She was hyperventilating and completely at a loss as to what was wrong. Her mum suggested that it was probably nothing to worry about, and said she might have drunk too much coffee.

In fact, she was having her first panic attack aged just 13.

“I couldn’t identify what the feeling was,” Purnell recalls. “I felt worried and scared but I didn’t know why.”

Purnell – who had recently filmed Never Let Me Go, playing a younger version of Keira Knightly – feels the British education system let her down, by not providing the tools she desperately needed to help her understand and cope.

“I felt low and down, but thought you could only have ‘depression’ if something really bad had happened in your life,” she says. “It hadn’t, so I thought ‘I can’t have that’. It’s is a big scary word and it didn’t feel like something I was allowed to have, because we never talked about it.”

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Finally some news of Ella ! On october 21, the british actress attended The Ferryman opening night at The Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New-York. Ella Purnell has moved recently to New-York and is currently shooting season 2 of Sweetbitter. Check out the pics in the gallery.

Public Appearances > 2018 > ‘The Ferryman’ Broadway opening night at The Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in NYC October 21, 2018

Today, September 17 2018, Ella Purnell is turning 22 ! Ella Purnell Fans wishes her a very happy birthday surrounded by her friends and family and we can’t wait to see her new projects this year ! Send her a birthday message on her twitter or her instagram.

British actress Ella Purnell landed her first-ever television role as the lead in Starz series “Sweetbitter,” based on the novel of the same name. Purnell, who appeared in her first film at age 12, says she feels like her career “snowballed” overnight.

Photoshoots > 2018 > SET 015 – Variety

How do you select projects?

Being in this weird transition [from] child to adult in the last two years has changed the way I view roles. I have a responsibility to young women to represent them the way they should be and to represent humans and real relationships. I will no longer take anything that is damaging to society or a specific group of people.

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But her life has not always been so easy, as she reveals to Nick Curtis

Photoshoots > 2018 > SET 010 – Evening Standard Magazine

In a noisy corner of Shoreditch House, Ella Purnell plonks two cubes of sugar into her coffee.

‘No judgement, please,’ the 21-year-old actress says, her saucer-sized eyes mockingly wide.

Until now the former child star was best-known for playing juvenile versions of Keira Knightley, Angelina Jolie and Margot Robbie in Never Let Me Go, Maleficent and The Legend of Tarzan — and latterly as grist to the relentless tabloid gossip mill that ‘linked’ her to Brad Pitt and Spider-Man star Tom Holland. But this year Purnell has come of age. She is currently on screen in the Sunday-night must-see Agatha Christie adaptation, Ordeal by Innocence, and has shot her first grown-up lead role, as waitress Tess in the Starz network’s controversial adaptation of Stephanie Danler’s New York-set bestseller, Sweetbitter. She has a new role as brand ambassador for her red-carpet favourite, Chanel. And she is also a year into a relationship with James Coates, ‘a singer and a good egg’, and in a place where she can talk for the first time about the depression she suffered in her teens.

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Ella Purnell couldn’t help herself: she needed a Lenny Kravitz sighting.

In town for the premiere of her new Starz show, “Sweetbitter,” Purnell had gone along to the annual Tribeca Film Festival dinner Chanel throws, and while waiting for the bathroom downstairs at Balthazar, had caught a glimpse of the night’s surprise guest. So there she stationed herself in a leather chair, making for one of the night’s cutest photo ops.

Seeing Mr. Kravitz in the flesh had made all the difference.

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