Jean Purdy steps determinedly through Cambridge’s cobbled streets in smart black shoes and tights, her nose buried in a medical journal. As the historic English city known for leading the way in the worlds of both academic and religious studies, Cambridge feels like a fitting setting to introduce the woman who—for decades—went unrecognized for the personal and professional struggles she faced as a crucial member of the medical team who invented in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
In 2024, however, Purdy’s story was finally brought to the big screen—or the little screen, depending on how you watch your Netflix. Starring Thomasin McKenzie as Purdy, as well as James Norton and Bill Nighy, Joy tells the incredible true story of the creation of the first “test tube baby” as seen through the eyes of Purdy, the team’s lab manager. But that isn’t the only aspect of Purdy’s life on which the film focuses.
She was also a Christian.
Important People
Who Jean Purdy was as a person, and how she’s represented in the film, is a striking break from the mold of how Christians are often portrayed in movies.
You may wonder why that fact is newsworthy when so many other films feature Christian characters like Jean Purdy. Except they don’t. Joy’s depiction of Purdy’s faith is striking in its difference because it isn’t presented as a “quirk” of her personality. She doesn’t nod along with everyone else, touch the cross around her neck, and then do whatever she wants anyway. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Jean Purdy was a woman who took her beliefs seriously and, as is clear from her life’s dedication to an overlooked group of people, acted them out in her daily life. So, with a wealth of historic information at their disposal, director Ben Taylor and screenwriter Jack Thorne chose instead to focus a large portion of their film on the impact that Purdy’s faith had on her personal and professional decisions.
The film follows Purdy as she applies for, and is accepted into, a position in the lab of Dr. Bob Edwards (Norton), a Cambridge-based scientist interested in reproduction. Together, they recruit the third member of their team: gynecologist Patrick Steptoe (Nighy), an advocate of the newly invented West German “keyhole” surgery (also known as laparoscopy). Their plan is simple: combine Edwards and Steptoe’s work in order to fertilize an egg outside the body, all in the hope of a successful pregnancy.
What’s remarkable about Joy is that it doesn’t shy away from the fact that Jean’s new role in the controversial procedure had a huge impact on her personal life. Responding to her professional pursuits, Purdy’s church community turns away from her. As has been sadly true of many Christian communities both then and now, they ostracise someone with whom they disagree instead of coming alongside them. When Purdy joins the research team, her mother informs her that “Reverend Paulson has advised [she] doesn’t come to church.” Though Purdy asserts that it “isn’t his decision,” her sudden and complete removal from her church community is final. Even Purdy’s mother refuses to let her visit home anymore—until she comes around to their way of thinking, that is.
While the loss of her community and her mother hits Purdy hard, she refuses to be deterred by the people around her, choosing instead to examine her actions against her own beliefs. It is not only her determination to do the right thing in the film that gives us a shining glimpse of positive Christian representation, however.
Jean Purdy is also shown to be real.
A New Kind of Representation
Who Jean Purdy was as a person, and how she’s represented in the film, is a striking break from the mold of how Christians are often portrayed in movies. A far cry from both the prim, proper, and entirely boring Christian moralist and the maniacal, religious zealot, Purdy is an authentic example of a woman driven by her beliefs, trying her hardest to do what is right, and occasionally failing. She’s characterised by laughter; in a heartwarming act designed to give a break to the women desperate to conceive, Purdy arranges for a visit to the beach. There, windswept and momentarily carefree, she’s seen running along the sand, dancing and grinning with the other women. At the start of the film, too, she is shown serving tea and cakes after church, casting witty asides to her mother and chuckling into her pinafore.
In addition to being portrayed as joyful and optimistic, Purdy is also shown to be incredibly intelligent and discerning. Joy’s creators make sure to remind the viewer that she is most certainly not the team’s secretary. A qualified nurse and keen research mind with experience in tissue rejection, she’s shown to be crucial to the breakthroughs that ultimately lead to IVF’s groundbreaking success. Purdy isn’t merely booksmart, though; many scenes reveal that her love and care for the people around her are what truly make a difference. As someone who can’t have children herself, Purdy shows incredible compassion for the women who have joined the trial studies. She also shows patience and resilience when convincing the team to return to their work after major setbacks in the research as well as her mother’s death. Throughout it all, she is guided by their original purpose: to help people.
But Purdy is not depicted as perfect. We all know that Christians are hardly more perfect than anyone else, and showing her mistakes goes a long way towards a realistic Christian representation. For example, when one of the women participating in a study expresses that she “can’t help feeling like cattle” when lining up to get her shots and that Purdy “doesn’t look exactly happy to see [the women],” she’s surprised. She had been so caught up in the personal cost of her research—the loss of her church and family—that she had forgotten to see the women as real human beings whose hurt was right in front of her. When the Medical Research Council refuses to fund their IVF research, Purdy realizes that these women have been entirely overlooked by a society obsessed with practicality, systems, and “the bigger picture.” No one else is going to look after these women, Purdy realizes, and so she decides to focus on them.
As her mother once told her with some exasperation: “You always had so much love.”
A Missed Opportunity
Throughout the film, Purdy’s mother also struggles to reconcile her own faith with her daughter’s work, believing them to be diametrically opposed. This relationship—featuring two women who both take their faith seriously but use it to very different effects—creates a moment which, I believe, highlights why Christians in the world today should be making popular culture, and not just critiquing it.
The moment comes later in the film when Purdy is speaking to her mother, who has fallen ill with a terminal disease, her body wracked with coughing and fatigue. Mother and daughter discuss the latter’s infertility, with Purdy reminding her mother that she is no different from all the women she hopes to help—she is unable to have children. “Nonsense,” her mother responds. Then, during a fit of coughing which leaves blood on her lips, her mother chokes out this sentence: “God will find a way.”
In response, Jean simply rubs her mother’s back and offers to take her to bed.
And here is where I paused the film (thank you modern Netflix conveniences). The sense of a missed opportunity was so tangible, I felt unable to continue for a moment. I longed for Purdy—caring, intelligent, and well-rounded—to not remain silent. As a testament to how Jean is depicted as a thinking, acting Christian, it felt almost unsuited to her character that she didn’t respond with the words that were on my own lips.
“What if we’re the way, mum?” I pictured her saying, pleading with her mother to see God’s workings in a broader context. Begging her to not limit his abilities to the world’s non-medical mysticalities. “What if the work we’re doing is his work?”
The Past, Present, and Future of Media
Moments like that remind us that the portrayal of Christians in popular media is vital and, when used to its full potential, can have an impact beyond what we imagine. The days of believing that television studios and film sets are somehow beyond God’s reach have faded away with the beehive hairstyles of the film’s 1960s and 1970s setting.
With our modern lives punctuated by media at every turn, telling stories like Jean Purdy’s in ways that deal with every aspect of authentic Christian living is more important than ever. Even more than interactions at work or on the street, we engage with ideas through media. Without someone looking right at us, we’re given the opportunity to think seriously about a new idea, or give it the consideration we hadn’t before. Thus, it is vitally important not only to analyze and celebrate Christian characters in film, television and books, but to make them ourselves.
Let us introduce the media-watching generations to realistic Christian figures like Jean Purdy: optimistic, flawed, determined, and conflicted. Let’s show them who we really are, and who we can be.
