'Fallout' Star Ella Purnell and Emmy Ballot Analysis
My first take on submissions
Earlier this week I was in the green room before an FYC panel event and asked the two awards strategists nearest to me what time the Emmy ballots would be available online. “9 a.m. Pacific,” they responded simultaneously, an almost automatic reflex at the end of what some are calling an unusually intense Emmy campaign season.
With the business still recovering from the strikes and seemingly no one knowing where the next hit might come from, an Emmy nomination could be the ticket to career longevity — and now those ballots are out to show us exactly who’s in the mix.
Ahead I’ll dive deep into the Emmy ballots — and even try to predict a few controversies that could emerge between now and nominations day. I’ll also share a conversation with one of those eligible contenders, Ella Purnell, who is the fearless leader of Prime Video’s hit drama series Fallout.
But first — David Oyelowo is ready to dismantle Hollywood’s long-standing assumptions about what audiences want to see, and he’s got the numbers to prove it.
Law & Order
There were more cowboy hats than you’d usually expect to see on Sunset Boulevard this past Monday — and at least one Texas-sized belt buckle. That’s because David Oyelowo was in town, joining The Ankler x Backstage Screening Series for a special viewing and conversation about his hit Paramount+ series Lawmen: Bass Reeves.
I loved talking to Oyelowo both onstage — you can watch our conversation at AnklerEnjoy — and in the lobby beforehand, where he spoke passionately about what led him to launch his own streaming service, Mansa. He was told for years that there wasn’t enough of an audience for a show like Bass Reeves, and now that he’s proven Hollywood undeniably wrong on that count, he seems eager to keep telling stories the industry would otherwise overlook.
Ella Purnell’s Kismet Moment
Ella Purnell is used to being recognized in public for her work — she’s been an actor since she was a child, and between her first big role in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and the breakout success of Yellowjackets, she’s absolutely got a face you recognize.
But she’s never been quite as recognizable as she is in Fallout, Prime Video’s smash drama hit this spring. Though it’s set in a post-nuclear wasteland version of America, featuring things like knights in robotic suits and noseless ghouls, Purnell looks more or less like herself as Lucy, a chipper and privileged girl raised in the safety of a fallout shelter.
“I’m always changing my look, but at the moment I look the most similar to Lucy,” Purnell told me in a Zoom from the Wales set of her next project, The Scurry. “Which is kind of good, because it means I don’t have to wear a wig for season two. But when it’s like six in the morning and I just want to go and get milk and I’m hungover and tired, I’m like, ‘Goddamn it, why didn’t I dye my hair blonde?’”
With Fallout, which has been renewed for a second season and is favored in several Emmy categories, Purnell has found a level of job stability that not even Yellowjackets brought (if you remember the fate of her character, Jackie, you know why).
“After Fallout, I’ve started to be a little bit strategic with planning my time, and usually it’s just really up in the air,” says Purnell, with years of experience as a nomadic actor even at the age of 27. “The only thing that's changed actually is that I would like to do films again.”
That’s what led her to the set of The Scurry, the London native’s first British film in many years, and presumably other projects ahead. Having done so much fearless, physical work on Fallout, including getting repeatedly dunked in a lake with her hands tied behind her back, Purnell is ready to keep taking bold swings. “I try to do things that scare me all the time, because I think that it helps you develop this philosophy of ‘Don't think about it, just do it’,” she tells me. “Scream and see what happens. Let your body surprise you. Sometimes those are the best fucking takes.”
I ask if that kind of fearlessness is something she learned from starting acting so early, learning how to approach work on a set when she was a literal child. “I mean, look, who’s to say,” Purnell says. “There’s probably a thousand alternate universes running at the same time, and I’ve got no idea which one I'm thriving in.”
But she also remembers telling Fallout executive producer Jonathan Nolan on the set that the show felt like kismet “in this weird, hippie, spiritual way. I feel like every experience, bad or good, has helped me prepare for this role.”
What’s in the Ballots
The Emmy ballots are now out to voters, but even if you’re not a Television Academy member, there’s a lot to peruse at the Emmys website. The main thing awards watchers have been busy doing this morning is crunching numbers.
The strikes may not have impacted the output on television as much as it has for movies, but there seems to be some post-strike shrinkage in the number of Emmy submissions this year. According to Variety, there’s a 33 percent dip in the number of series submitted across the drama, comedy and limited series categories.
In the acting races the lower numbers are especially significant, because the number of nominees depends on the number of submissions — and this year there will be fewer slots available.
In the lead comedy categories, with 55 submissions for men and 59 for women, there will be just five nominees for each — on par with last year, but there have been six contenders in recent years. Supporting actors in comedies and lead actors in dramas will have a little more room to breathe, with six slots available. Supporting actors in a drama series have the best odds — seven whole slots!
The ballots also give us a good sense of which episodes each show feels is its strongest. For The Bear, for example, they only submitted the stressful, super-sized “Fishes” in the writing category, with “Fishes” — directed by series creator Christopher Storer— and the Ramy Youssef-directed “Honeydew” as the only directing submissions. Hacks went all in on season finale “Bulletproof” for both writing and directing, while Abbott Elementary offered its season finale episode for directing and its season premiere — written by Quinta Brunson — for writing.
Then there’s the path taken by drama series favorite Shogun, which submitted six episodes for directing and five for writing; its closest competition, The Crown, submitted just two for each. You might think having too many submissions would allow your contenders to cancel each other out, but there’s a proven track record that more is more, for dramas especially. Succession and Game of Thrones often competed against themselves in directing and won anyway.
There’s so much more to dig into on the ballots, including my eternal favorite category for narrators — did you know Tom Hardy narrated a show about cheetahs? — and the always surprising guest actor categories. Just one example: Although the John Mulaney-hosted Everybody’s in L.A. and Saturday Night Live are classified as variety series, their performers go into the guest actor in a comedy series. That’s how this season’s SNL hosts Timothée Chalamet and Bad Bunny will be up against Will Ferrell and Andy Samberg for bits they did with Mulaney impersonating Lakers courtside habitues Lou Adler and Jimmy Goldstein. Hollywood, baby!
I’d love to hear which submissions caught your attention, and I’ll have more time to dig into the ballots in the coming week. Let me know what you’re seeing: katey@theankler.com
And the Honorees Are . . .
Before you start thinking we’re only interested in one awards race over here, the Oscars have given us one of the earliest glimpses of what they’ll have in store this fall. Congratulations to music legend Quincy Jones, casting director Juliet Taylor, writer and director Richard Curtis and Bond producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who will all be Oscar winners before the year is through.
They are the honorees at this year’s Governors Awards, the annual event held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where they can bestow honorary Oscars — but they also offer an extremely valuable campaign stop for major contenders. It’s an always fun and relatively carefree night, with the winners announced in advance and all Oscar possibilities still in play. I’m guessing many will be hoping for the return of host John Mulaney, who was a runaway success last year.
One thing to note about this crop of honorees is it’s the first group in more than a decade not to feature an actor, though Jones is certainly very famous. Tributes are typically given by A-listers, though — last year the presenters included Glenn Close and Regina King — so there ought to be no lack of star power on hand.