Sweet success
Creator Kirstie Swain and director Ella Jones reflect on their partnership behind Sky’s darkly comedic ‘coming of rage’ drama Sweetpea, working with star Ella Purnell and being inspired by workplace mockumentary The Office.
From Derry Girls and Freaks & Geeks to Heartstopper, Euphoria and Skins, the coming-of-age story is a firm television fixture, whether it leans into comedy or drama.
Now, telling the story of a young woman who finally snaps and embarks on murderous killing spree, could Sky original series Sweetpea herald a new era of ‘coming of rage’ shows?
Yellowjackets and Fallout star Ella Purnell plays Rhiannon, a quiet wallflower who, after years of bullying and being overlooked at home and at work, is finally pushed over the edge and develops a vengeful and intoxicatingly liberating taste for murder, beginning when her school bully and worst enemy Julia (Nicôle Lecky) returns to town and upsets Rhiannon’s life once again.
Setting the show apart from similar serial killer series is the fact the story is told through a uniquely dark and comedic lens curated by creator and writer Kirstie Swain (Pure) and director Ella Jones (The Baby) that serves as a metaphor for finding your voice and using it – only here with murderous intent.
“It’s a sweet coming-of-age story with some killing,” Jones tells DQ. “But what I think is interesting about Rhiannon as a serial killer, especially as a female serial killer, is that she’s not a psychopath, which is what we’ve seen before. Instead, she’s probably closer to a sociopath. But she’s built from lots of parts of her history that maybe people can relate to, so she’s scarily close to all of us.”
“I feel like she’s the embodiment of all the latent rage we feel as women,” Swain says of Rhiannon. “I was told I was quiet when I was a teenager and in my 20s, and I could never find my voice. I feel like she is an embodiment of all the rage I used to feel every time someone said, ‘You’re quiet’ in a meeting and I’m like, ‘You’re not listening to me. You’re talking over me.’
“That’s the rage I felt when I was writing [the show]. Obviously you just have to turn on the news to see why women are so angry. So it’s all the rage that has been passed down from our grandmothers through to our mothers and to us, and we will pass on to our daughters if the patriarchy doesn’t let us be.”
Sweetpea has been a part of Swain’s life for the past seven years, ever since she was sent CJ Skuse’s novel by executive producer Patrick Walters (Heartstopper) and invited to consider adapting it for television. “I’ve been wanting to do something about female rage for so long and hadn’t quite found the right thing,” Swain says. That changed when she read Skuse’s book and was drawn to its twist on the serial killer genre.
But while Rhiannon already has a murderous secret at the start of the book, Swain wanted to explore her transformation from “wallflower to Venus flytrap.”
“We always spoke about it like, ‘What would happen if Dawn from The Office went on a rampage?’ It really excited me, the ability to smash those two genres together, the serial killer slasher thriller versus a relationship drama – and a darkly comic one at that.”
Jones joined the project later in development and was inspired by both the story and the tone of Swain’s writing. “As a director, I love that blend of dark comedy, wit and irreverence with dramatic stakes and a real emotional journey,” she says. “That just came across from the script from the start, so I was instantly picturing the world and the characters in my head. As a director, that’s such a gift because it comes to life so organically and collaboratively.”
Jones also compares Rhiannon’s story arc to that of Walter White in Breaking Bad as, like him, she spirals into a life of crime. The Sweetpea creative team similarly had to face up to how audiences would consider conflicting emotions surrounding the show’s central character.
“There’s something really intoxicating about watching a woman on screen go, “Fuck it,’ a little bit, taking what they want and doing what they want,” she says, noting how viewers get to see Rhiannon “piled on” in episode one. “Even if you don’t relate to the individual incidents, you can relate to the feeling of just being at breaking point.”
“I feel like I’m told as a writer to make women likeable, and they have to do so much more work to get away with things on screen than men do,” Swain says. “We wouldn’t have had to do so much work if she was [fellow TV serial killer] Dexter. He doesn’t get questioned. But female serial killers do.”
Swain was joined in the writers room by Krissie Ducker (Killing Eve), Laura Jayne Tunbridge and Selina Lim (Sex Education, Hanna) – until the pandemic forced them to work virtually. With Swain later having a baby during production, she praises her fellow writers for continuing to support her vision for the series alongside story producer Natasha Heliotis.
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In fact, Swain says she was given free rein to adapt the source material, taking many elements from the book and shaking them up a bit so the show is more of an origin story for Rhiannon.
“If we’d just done what was in the book, there’s not as much opportunity for her to change and grow in a TV series,” she explains. “You also don’t have the gift of an inner monologue unless you load it with voiceover, which didn’t feel right for us. So we’ve taken it back to her origin story.
“She’s a fully fledged killer in the book, whereas [to begin with] it’s just a fantasy in her head in the TV show, and it just felt like we could tell much more of an interesting arc if we took her back to that point and just see her go from Dawn in The Office, the undermined receptionist. I meet receptionists now and think, ‘I’m going to be really nice to you.’”
Behind the camera, Jones’s task was visualising the tone of the series she and Swain both wanted. Working with DOP Nick Norris, she shot scenes with the “subtle subjectivity” of Rhiannon, always considering where she was in the frame, what the character was thinking and what she was doing.
“Connected to that, I wanted to be able to flow between the comedy and the drama quite easily,” she says. “We were inspired by shows like Fargo, Barry and The End of the F***ing World, which have a really distinctive, ever so slightly heightened style that allows that comedic drama tone to work quite well on screen.
“We had no handheld [camera], our shots were quite clean. There’s a graphic novel element that we were quite inspired by. All of that we built together, with all the other departments as well.”
As an executive producer, star Purnell was also integral to making the series, which is produced by See-Saw Films and Fanboy in association with Sky Studios, with NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution handling international sales. The actor describes working on Sweetpea as “one of the most fulfilling experiences of my career so far.”
Jones says it was a “dream” working with a leading actor who was also heavily invested in the show behind the scenes, from building the appearance of her character to giving script notes to ensure the story always unfolded from Rhiannon’s viewpoint.
With Purnell’s input, the director was also able to develop the visual world of the series, which is set in the fictional town of Carnsham, where Rhiannon lives and works at the local Gazette newspaper with ambitions of becoming a reporter. In fact, Jones describes her vision for Carnsham as “shit Britain” – small-town municipal Britain that’s a bit dated and muted, with a nostalgic feel that reflects Rhiannon’s own stilted development as she remains emotionally tortured by her past.
Doubling for Carnsham was South East London, “which is where I live, so I have a huge affinity for it, even though I’ve just said ‘Shit Britain,’” Jones jokes. “We had an amazing production designer, Simon Walker, and then our amazing DOP Nick who, with me, worked to build a grammar and a visual language that would work best for Rhiannon’s journey.
Costume designer Jo Thompson and makeup designer Helen Speyer were also integral to mapping out Rhiannon’s “subtle and believable” transformation through the series. “A lot of why you walk past Rhiannon is because of how she holds herself. But there’s also the colour of her hair and the clothes she wears that do push her into the background a little bit,” Jones notes. “Her outfit in the office is a bit like a school uniform. She wants to be seen but she’s scared of standing out. Then you’ve got this raincoat, which Jo customised for us and it’s so key and so iconic because it’s both really ordinary and also ‘slasher,’ which is so much fun.”
One standout scene in the series features Rhiannon’s first kill, which was filmed over two nights beside a canal in East London and utilised rain machines, visual effects and special effects blood and prosthetics.
“What I loved about doing that scene was we shot the murders in order, and that was the first time we saw Ella do that side of Rhiannon,” Jones says. “We saw the serial killer side. Obviously so much is resting on whether that’s convincing or whether that works, and she was just phenomenal. That’s when we really knew that it worked.”
“It made me think of Jurassic Park – the velociraptor energy,” Swain adds. “She changes and it’s kind of this reptilian ferociousness. That kill had been in the script from the very start, from the very first draft – and I’ve done a lot of drafts. Seeing it for the first time, it’s just phenomenal what she was able to do in that one scene with her going from wallflower to killer.”
Launching in October, Sweetpea concludes on a knife edge and fans will be hoping a second season can resolve the cliffhanger. And whether she will return to screens or not, Rhiannon still goes on a major the journey through six episodes.
“We’ve just been so excited about the buzz about season one. People are so invested in it, and they all want to see the season two. It’s just been amazing,” says Swain. “In the series Rhiannon goes on quite a good arc; she does have quite a transformation. She’s gone through something quite epic.”
tagged in: Ella Jones, Fanboy, Kirstie Swain, NBCUniversal Global TV Distribution, See-Saw Films, Sky, Sky Studios, Sweetpea