Like the video games before it, Stand out is a hit. The Prime Video series will always a second seasonwhich means we will see it What’s next for Ella Purnell’s Lucy. After leaving the artificial confines of Vault 33, she received a crash course in life on the surface in the post-apocalyptic world – as well as the dark truth about her history.
In conversation with GQPurnell admitted that she felt a lot of pressure even though she knew this Stand out already had a loyal following and Prime Video’s huge platform meant the show would attract even more attention. “I’m just Stand out-centered in the moment. I eat, breathe, live, shit Stand out, all the time,” she joked. But the interview – which, yes, includes a discussion of that gruesome fingering scene with Walton Goggins; Purnell said it was “so much fun” to film – and also touches on how Lucy feels at the end of the season.
She has just learned that her father, former Vault-Tec executive Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), whom she is desperately trying to save, is involved in the nuclear destruction that doomed civilization hundreds of years ago. Worse, he was directly involved in the recent bombings ordered by Vault-Tec to destroy humanity’s irritatingly stubborn survival instinct. Even worseher mother, who has been missing for years, is no longer human but an irradiated ghoul – and Lucy finally shoots her to end her obviously miserable existence.
“I thought, ‘What’s the opposite of Lucy?'” Purnell recalled how she calibrated her performance in the season finale. “What is the opposite of the woman we met and loved? She is tirelessly optimistic… the opposite of that is watching the light fade from that glimmer of hope; She saw the light disappear from her eyes. And seeing her catatonic. I see you stun. And there is no more fight in her.”
Purnell continued. “I think there’s a part of her that says, ‘I just don’t know where to dig.’ Her insides fall out of her body. This light that exists in their solar plexus, that truly believes in the Golden Rule, her Cold fusion is just gone. It just dissolves… I want the audience to wonder at the end of the show whether their hero is still a good person. I don’t know who she will be in the second season. [but] This is what happens when you break the unbreakable. I don’t know who she will become.”
Of that “okay-dokey” line at the end, Purnell said it conveyed the feeling of “just knowing that everything is completely out of control… I think that’s what Lucy feels about her hope.” She realizes that something inside her has been irrevocably lost or broken. Maybe she’ll keep it the same in season two, but it’ll never be the same. That doesn’t work.”
Read the full interview below GQand look Stand outis the first season on Prime Video.
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