Deciding to skip college, Purcell started a landscaping company with a few of his friends. “It was an excuse to hang outside and drink,” he says. Quickly bored, Purcell started looking for a new career.- and came up with the idea of acting. ” I was going out with this girl in high school. A real cutie. But I remember us having some relationship trouble. At the same time, we went to see “Grease,” as done by our fellow students. The guys were all geeks in that play. The school nerds. Yet, as soon as they hit the stage, the chicks went wild. My girl included. As I’m in the bathroom during intermission, I couldn’t help thinking that if these geeks got the girls that excited, perhaps I should give it a shot. Between that moment and loving the Mad Max movies as a kid …”
By age 20, he found himself wanting to be “rich, famous, have a house, be adored”– that was an even bigger motivation toward the acting thing. He enrolled in the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts, where he was a classmate of Hugh Jackman. “Hughie’s one of these cats who’s close to everyone. We’re even closer now. Totally charming cat. Tons of stories between us I am sworn to not reveal. Chicks-and-alcohol stuff.”
Purcell became a TV star in Australia, before he ever found himself in Fox State Prison. He landed first acting role in 1997, playing a hip radio DJ in the Australian TV series “RAW F.M.”
He debuted in America as the title character in John Doe (2002), an intriguing Fox series about an amnesiac who knew everything there is to know except his own name. In 2000, he won the Green Card lottery and now lives in Los Angeles, California with his family, wife Rebecca and four children, Joe, Audrey, and twins Lily and Gus. He first got his big break into mainstream stardom when he played the character of Dracula (who was named "Drake") in Blade: Trinity. He then played a futuristic freedom fighter in “Equilibrium” with Christian Bale and Emily Watson. In 2005, he was cast as Lincoln Burrows, a death-row inmate in the Fox drama “Prison Break”
It has been reported that Purcell’s next role will be in "Primeval," a killer-crocodile thriller that would serve as the feature debut of veteran television director Michael Katleman for Touchstone Pictures. Orlando Jones also has signed on to the high-stakes adventure that follows a news producer, reporter and cameraman who are dispatched to South Africa to track down and bring home alive a legendary 25-foot crocodile known as Gustave. Purcell would play the producer, while Jones portrays the cameraman. Also, there has been talk that Fox is planning another series for Purcell, to be called “Strut.” However, for that to happen any time soon, Lincoln Burrows would have to be executed or escape post haste.
Describing how Purcell got the part in “Primeval,” Director Brandon Camp says, “We saw hundreds of actors, but they played the science-fiction angle, not the human angle. A lot of them read the part like androids. We were looking for an unvarnished kind of masculinity, and that seems to be a trademark of the Australian actors, who can be sort of rough around the edges."
In “Prison Break,” heartthrob Wentworth Miller plays the part of Michael Scofield, who stages a phony bank robbery to get himself into the Fox River Penitentiary where his brother Lincoln Burroughs is on death Row after have been found guilty of murdering the President’s brother. Convinced his brother is innocent, and unable to stop the execution, Michael devises a plan to help his brother escape. As the engineer who designed the prison, he has detailed plans of the prison tattooed on his body. This helps him to plan the escape. However, as vicious inmates and psychotic guards get suspicious, it gets tougher and tougher to actually execute the plan. After having been foiled in the first escape attempt, Michael spends the last hours before the execution with his brother, playing cards, and convincing himself,“ I did the best I could.” But did he?
"'Prison Break' is a thriller, but it's really a family drama," says co-star Wentworth Miller, who plays Michael Scofield "It's really the story of: how far would one go to save a loved one? And in Michael's case, it's to the wall. Each episode will test his resolve and ruthlessness and brilliance, running smack into the brick wall that is chance and fate and human nature and all those things you cannot predict or prepare for."
He continues, “But I think the psychology of my character is such that everyone in his life has left him — his mother is gone and the father abandoned them — so his brother is all that he has left. And there are certain things in the story you find out as we go along, which unfortunately I can't reveal to you, that kind of make me complicit in his being behind bars. So I feel a degree of responsibility there. I also think a part of my character enjoys the challenge.”
