Ella Purnell Is Maleficent
As the younger Angelina Jolie in Maleficent, Ella Purnell casts a dreamlike spell. Stand back, you fools! And watch her unleash all the powers of hell.
“There’s a joke in my family that I’m going to make a career out of playing other people’s younger selves,” jokes 17-year-old actress Ella Purnell. “I played the younger Keira [Knightley], now I’m playing the younger Angelina. I mean, it’s a good track record, right?” The London native is making light of being cast by executive producer and lead actress Angelina Jolie in this season’s brooding Disney blockbuster Maleficent. Though the two have never met, Jolie handpicked the fashion-adoring actress during the film’s reshoot stage. Purnell, who had originally auditioned for the role of Princess Aurora (which eventually went to Elle Fanning), was not expecting the call, finding out about her appointment while recovering from a hospital stay for appendicitis.
“I was sitting at home with greasy hair, with like operation stuff, half conscious, coming off the anesthetics,” she says. Soon she was flying harnessed, with layers of bandages covering her fresh scars. It was just another droll moment in a young, adventure-filled career that includes a narrowly missed bear attack in 2013’s WildLike and throwing up on cue for Kick-Ass 2. “I don’t know if you’ve ever projectile vomited on someone’s face, but it’s really satisfying,” she says.
In between directing a school play, working two jobs, and acting, the eldest daughter of four, like her Hollywood counterpart, spends time considering cinema through the lens of social progress. “I want to be a part of a movie that changes people’s conceptual framework and suddenly you see things in a different way,” she says. Perhaps that could be a good talking point when she finally meets her maker, at the Maleficent premiere. “I’ll meet Angelina and be like, ‘Hi. I’m you.’ That’s a good conversation starter.”
Originally published in V Magazine
Raised in a culture of storytelling, Warwick's childhood was full of ghost stories featuring good and evil spirits. Not a lot has changed since then. "A lot of my mob don't have access to computers let alone the internet, so oral history is still a strong part of our existence. They say if it's not written down it's not true, but that's such a lie."
Warwick's most recently released film explores this invisible world. The Darkside was created following a callout for Indigenous ghost stories ("the blacker the better"), the best of which were then re-told by actors as a collection of short films. Inspired partly by his experiences going to school in the monastic desert town of New Norcia, a strange place where there were "lots of Jesuses crucified on crosses everywhere you looked" and lots of "saints, sinners and devils", the film is uncomfortable and uncanny.
While many of his fans would say 'uncomfortable' is the running theme in Warwick's work (2009's Samson and Delilah followed a tragic Aboriginal couple reeling from the effects of poverty, drug addiction and suspect Government intervention), the director doesn't see it that way, describing the running threads as love and family — or, simply put, "spirituality", a theme whose manifestations "clash and connect, fight and gel".
His films are also funny. Making jokes in dire situations is a pastime that he inherited growing up in a community where you can't help but bear witness to bad things. Describing the desert as "full of angels and full of demons", Warwick is tapping into a world of contrasts that many try but fail to express in Australian film. He concludes, "Laughter happens in utopia and laughter happens in hell. That's the great truth in humanity and storytelling."
Originally published in Oyster Magazine #105
