Purvis' father was a Photographer, and as a teenager, Purvis was in a film club that focused on 1940s cinema.

Wade and Purvis' screenplay for Let Him Have It (1991) (based on the true story of Derek Bentley, a young man who gets caught up in street gangs in post war London and is later controversially hanged), displayed the writers' "outrage toward a system hell-bent on vengeance" and was called "first rate, no non-sense".

Barbara Broccoli, Producer of the James Bond films, hired Wade and Purvis to write their first Bond script because she had seen their film Plunkett & Macleane (1999) and liked that it was "dark, witty, sexy and inventive". Purvis described their approach when they joined the Bond franchise as to "come in with ideas, things we've found in science magazines, on the internet, interesting weapons and what's happening in Technology. Then we find a journey for Bond to go through." In their Bond collaborations, Wade generally does "all the verbiage at the beginning of the script." They created a novelisation of their Bond script for The World Is Not Enough in collaboration with Raymond Benson. Wade and Purvis also wrote a script for a Bond spin-off featuring the Die Another Day character Jinx (Halle Berry), which was attached to Director Stephan Frears, but nixed by MGM for budget concerns and "creative differences".

Their 2003 Bond parody, Johnny English, was widely panned by critics, receiving a 33% "fresh" rating at the review site RottenTomatoes.com. However, the film earned $160.5 million in its global box office receipts. A sequel, Johnny English Reborn, based upon their characters but written by Hamish McColl, was released in 2011.

In 2005 they co-authored the bio-pic Stoned (also known as The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones) about the last days of the life of The Rolling Stones co-founder, Brian Jones, which they base on an account from a builder on the farm where Jones died, claiming that Jones' death was not accidental as recorded by the coroner. The film was criticised for "fail[ing] to convey what mattered about Jones artistically, what he contributed to music, why we should feel more than pity."

Their screenplay for Skyfall, which they co-wrote with John Logan, was described by Frank DiGiacomo of Movieline as being "very wily" for having Bond experience a mid-life crisis. In 2012, it was announced that "after a tremendous run" with the Bond franchise, Wade and Purvis would not be involved in the 24th Bond film, which would be solo written by Logan. However, on 27 June 2014, it was announced that they were being brought on to Polish the screenplay for the next film.

On March 10, 2017, it was reported that they were approached to write the script for Bond 25. In July 2017, it was confirmed they will write the screenplay.