The wasteland is a harsh place. That’s one thing the first season of Fallout, the best reason to have a Prime Video subscription, certainly taught viewers. While Ella Purnell plays Lucy, seemingly one of the last decent people following a nuclear apocalypse, she didn’t escape the first season of the show unscathed. Lucy lost a finger, and the new one has apparently been really frustrating for the actress on set as she films Season 2. (And, spoiler alert, the actress uses the term "poop finger," which is great.)
Lucy has her finger cut off by The Ghoul during the first season, though a robot doctor later fixes her up with a slightly used one. Unfortunately, the finger is a very different color, which means Ella Purnell needed to sit in the makeup chair every day to get the finger painted on while filming Fallout Season 2. Also, because of the darker color of the new finger, Purnell has a special, if mildly disgusting, name for it. Appearing at MegaCon Orlando (via ScreenRant), Purnell said…
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.
It’s far from uncommon for any actor who needs extensive makeup work to get annoyed by it. Walton Goggins himself, who needs much more makeup to become The Ghoul, has talked about that. In Purell’s case, getting just a finger done is certainly easier, but it seems she really doesn’t like having to go through it every day, and when it’s done, she has to walk around with a “poop finger” all day.
And, yes, it appears “poop finger” is the official Fallout term for Lucy’s finger. Purnell says eventually that’s what everybody was calling it, and the joke is now officially part of the production. She continued…
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.
The wasteland of Fallout may be fictional, but the series has seemingly been almost as rough for the cast. The first season of Fallout filmed in a real desert, and the new season had to pause filming due to the wildfires in Southern California. Like so many others, I'm excited to dive back into this series and its vast world of layered characters. I'm hoping that the upcoming season manages to live up to its predecessor.
In the meantime, of course, I now want to know where on the call sheet “poop finger” is and if any of the actual actors are actually listed after “poop finger.”
