Ella Purnell is counting her blessings after an accident earlier this year nearly blinded her. Discussing death, the afterlife, and her ideal last meal during a recent appearance on Josh Scherer’s Mythical Kitchen, the Yellowjackets star, 28, opened up about the scary “near-death” experience she recently had when she fell down the stairs.
“I had a near-death experience quite recently. It wasn’t really a near-death experience, but in my very dramatic mind, it was,” the actress, who can currently stars as Rhiannon Lewis on Starz’s dark dramedy Sweetpea, told Scherer. “I fell down the stairs and I got a concussion and I hit my head next to my eye. There’s a scar there. I had a head wound and a concussion and I really feel like I could’ve died or at the very least blinded myself.”
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Purnell said the accident was a “pivotal moment” in her life, which was “really different” at the time. In the roughly three months since the accident, the actress said she has “made a lot of changes in my life and I’m so much happier now.” Purnell said she is now “saying no to more things” so that she can “prioritize the things that make me happier and kind of putting a greater emphasis on friends and family. I realized I’ve definitely been neglecting my friends and family a lot.” Realizing that she was “working too hard” and needed to “start living,” she also “booked a lot of spontaneous holidays, went on a girls’ trip.”
The Fallout star opened up about the scary accident and how it altered her outlook on life amid a larger discussion about death, a topic that the star admitted she typically doesn’t think about very much. However, she admitted that she does “think about the unfulfilled potential part of it. I actually think of it as a healthy thing; I am scared of death. There are people that aren’t scared of death aren’t there…”
Purnell is currently one of the fastest-rising stars, landing roles in some of TV’s most popular titles. Following her 2016 breakout role in Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, she went on to star as Jackie Taylor, the captain of the WHS Yellowjackets, on Showtime’s hit thriller drama Yellowjackets, which premiered in 2021. She followed it with a starring role as Lucy MacLean on Prime Video’s Fallout adaptation, and can currently be seen in Starz’s adaptation of CJ Skuse’s Sweetpea, which centers around a quiet wallflower that everyone overlooks, who develops a vengeful taste for murder. New episodes of Sweetpea air Fridays on Starz.
