FALLOUT Star Ella Purnell Explains Why Season 2 Filming Was a Nightmare, and It Involves "Poop Finger"
Ella Purnell, who plays the ever-optimistic Lucy in Prime Video’s Fallout series, recently talked about one aspect of filmming Season 2 that was extreamly rough for her, and it ivolves “Poop Finger.”
In the first season, Lucy goes through quite the ordeal, including losing a finger at the hands of Walton Goggins’ The Ghoul. A robot doctor patches her up with a "gently used" replacement, but it doesn’t quite match the rest of her hand. That small detail led to a big headache for Purnell on set.
At MegaCon Orlando (via ScreenRant), Purnell shared just how much of a pain it’s been to have that mismatched finger every single day:
"That would actually be one of the worst things to happen to me. You know how annoying it is to have that finger painted on me every single day? This finger is the bane of my life. It's the worst thing.
“We tried certain things because they paint it, right? I don't know if you guys know this, that you use the most for everything, all the time. And then you have to take it off, you put it back on, it's very annoying.
“I just have this, like, poop finger all the time. I have to tell people when I go home at the end of the day, like, this is... It's okay, I'll freak out, it's just... Whatever, it's just very annoying. So I don't want to lose any more fingers. I just don't want to lose any fingers."
Because of the darker color of Lucy’s new finger, Purnell gave it the unfortunate nickname of “Poop Finger.” And, in true Fallout fashion, it stuck—so much so that it became part of the production’s official lingo.
"I think it was Mike Harvey, who was the makeup designer, and he started calling it poop finger and it caught like wildfire, and everybody started saying it, and then they, yeah, that's the name of it now. It's on the call sheet. It's a number on the call sheet."
So, at some point during Fallout Season 2, someone actually had to check a call sheet for “poop finger.” Incredible.
Of course, Purnell isn’t the only cast member dealing with grueling makeup work. Walton Goggins has his own challenges transforming into The Ghoul, but at least he doesn’t have to explain away a single rogue digit every day.
Fallout is the story of “haves and have-nots in a world in which there’s almost nothing left to have. 200 years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.”
The world of Fallout is “one where the future envisioned by Americans in the late 1940s explodes upon itself through a nuclear war in 2077.
“In Fallout, the harshness of the wasteland is set against the previous generation’s utopian idea of a better world through nuclear energy. It is serious in tone, yet sprinkled with moments of ironic humor and B-movie-nuclear-fantasies.”
The cast also includes Aaron Moten is Maximus, as well as Kyle MacLachlan, Moisés Arias, Sarita Choudhury, Michael Emerson, Leslie Uggams, Frances Turner, Dave Register, Zach Cherry, Johnny Pemberton, Rodrigo Luzzi, Annabel O’Hagan and Xelia Mendes-Jones.
The series comes from Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy.