Sweetpea season 1 episode 4: Ella Purnell on Rhiannon’s motive
As we do get prepared to see Sweetpea season 1 episode 4 on Starz next week, it is fair to think a lot about motives. Or, to be more specific, why Rhiannon Lewis continues to feel compelled to kill. She has at least two victims at this point, and there is a legitimately good chance that she could soon have a third. While Julia is still breathing, who knows if she is going to stay that way? It does not seem like she has just a ton of options at this point.
What makes Rhiannon so complicated and dangerous of a character is that she doesn’t have some clearly-defined code. Instead, she kills as a reaction to her own trauma.
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Speaking in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times, star / executive producer Ella Purnell explained how she honed in on her performance, and also what she considered to be her character’s main motive:
… I focused on the emotional component — it’s not rage that leads her to kill. She doesn’t kill because she feels anger in that moment. She kills because she is addicted to the feeling of being seen, I think as a result of having been invisible for so many years. That led me to the root of her feeling of invisibility, which is the childhood trauma, being bullied. Rhiannon’s perspective is perhaps warped by her victim mentality. Not all the people that she kills are fully bad. Her moral code can no longer stand.
All of this makes even more sense when you think for a moment about the character’s feelings towards Julia. While she was a bully and treated Rhiannon terribly, she is also not responsible for every bad thing in her life. Purnell’s character projects a lot of her feelings onto her, thinking that she needs someone to blame for a lot of the ills in her life. Because she can convince herself of some of this evil, it also feels easier to say that she could convince herself of just about anything else. This, once more, is what makes her so dangerous at the halfway point of this story.
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What do you think we are going to see moving into Sweetpea season 1 episode 4?
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This article was written by Jessica BunBun.