Spoiler alert: Do not read until you’ve watched Episode 5 of Furious.
Emmy Rossum has made a meal out of playing complex and beloved female personalities from Fiona Gallagher on Shameless to the titular icon Angelyne. Halfway through Furious, Liz Meriwether‘s new Hulu series about a female serial killer and the FBI agent hunting her, Rossum’s Agent Alice Black is already proving to be the most complex of them all, though.
“Liz’s writing is so bold, and I think all the performances are incredible,” Rossum tells Gold Derby.
Alice traded the prestige of being a NYPD homicide detective for starting out on the lowest rung of the FBI, and her first case reconnects her with her old precinct as the agencies clash over jurisdiction. She also has an ex in that precinct, Marshall (Jake Lacy), whom she was dating since she was a teenager, but who was physically abusive to her. She reported the abuse, but the NYPD is still a boys’ club and she has been under pressure to withdraw her report while he kisses the rings for a promotion.
Her trauma runs so deep that she avoids taking showers since that is where he used to beat her, and she seeks out new men who will get physical with her under the guise of a hook-up. But her pain isn’t just from Marshall: She got pregnant when she was a teenager and her father threw her out of her house. So she may have more in common with — and therefore better understand — what serial killer Catherine (Lola Petticrew) has been through and why she is doing what she is doing.
In the fifth episode of Furious, titled “Pick a Sticker,” Catherine is focused on getting answers about who killed her friend Isabel (Larissa Campos) when they were teenagers, being trafficked to rich older men, including Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie). She kidnaps and kills Easton’s lawyer (Campbell Scott) as her new fiancé, Alden (Steve Way), copies incriminating files off the lawyer’s laptop.
Alice is still trying to track down info on Isabel, known to her as a Jane Doe, convinced her case is connected to the new killings. But she gets benched because Marshall reported her for pulling a gun on him outside of his house. “He’s costing her her job. He’s costing her her sanity. He’s costing her a potential relationship with Danny [her former partner, played by Scott McNairy],” Rossum says.
Lead FBI Agent Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) tells Alice “unless she can make [pulling a gun on Marshall] go away, [she’s] a liability.” That leads Alice to entice Marshall to come to her home, where she gets him drunk and tries to get him to be violent with her. He doesn’t take the bait of hitting her, but when he leaves, she calls a neighbor to mention there is a drunken man with a gun outside so the neighbor will call the police.
“I was more nervous about that 10- or 12-page sequence than a lot of other things in the show,” Rossum says. “The stakes just could not be higher here. You watch Alice lay the trap for him at the office and then invite the monster into the house.”
Alice’s attention isn’t split for long, though. While looking through old photos of her and Marshall as she’s planning her revenge, she finds her old sonogram — which makes her wonder if the paper bracelet on Jane Doe’s wrist could be from a safe surrender box after giving up her baby. It’s a spark that proves to be a turning point in the case, as Alice ends up at a shelter she thinks Jane Doe may have gone to, only to find Catherine there.
Gold Derby: It’s not often TV series let characters spend 10- to 12-pages in a scene together, yet even before Marshall shows up at Alice’s door, you’re fully invested in what’s about to happen because of the nature of their relationship. Walk us through how you landed on how subtle to play Alice’s manipulations of him, both for the characters but also to maybe hold the audience in confusion or intensity just a little bit longer.
Emmy Rossum: That’s a really delicate needle to thread because you always want to root the character in truth and you never want the audience to feel lied to, but at the same time, one of the most interesting things about playing her is how she has so much rage and so much complexity, and she buries a lot of that all the time.
I think that Alice is a shapeshifter. It’s almost like she’s acting a lot of the time, but we get to see her vulnerability and her truth when we’re alone with her. But a lot like what I think acting is, she’s often using the truth to make a trick work — or a commitment to a truth to make a trick work — and so we see her shapeshift into a softer, younger [version here]. Her clothes are different, her approach is different. I wanted her voice timbre to be different and subtler and softer. There are some things that she’s saying that are true: She is a little bit drunk; she did have a terrible day at work; she is wearing those old clothes; she is really bad at decorating the house. But she’s saying them in a way that lures him in and won’t make him suspect that her ultimate goal is to waterboard him with whiskey – to tempt him, to lure him in, and to compromise his sobriety.
Do you think Alice needed Nora to set this in motion, or was there enough going on with Marshall where she might have tried to set him up at some point anyway?
No way. She double locks her door at night. You see her, every time she comes home look over her shoulder. She can’t get into the shower – not only because she can’t shower, but because she can’t take the gun into the shower and be vulnerable for a second. I think she’s doing everything she possibly can to not let the monster into her house. So the fact that she lets the monster into her house — welcomes him in, invites him in barefoot, and then drops below him … I got literally, physically below him and put his hands around my neck. I remember being like, “This is a crazy, wild choice.”
How did you work that physicality out with Jake and the director and any intimacy coordinator? How many specific details like that came from the script?
Liz is an incredible writer and obviously was a playwright. That scene really read like a play. There was minimal stage direction written; it was mostly just a flow of dialogue and some sparse stage direction. The licking [was] scripted.
We got the opportunity to come in a couple days before with Liz and our director [Destiny Ekaragha] and an intimacy coordinator, Claire Warden, and Jill [Brown], our stunt coordinator, and really work through what we call the “whiskey waterboarding scene.” We got the chance to workshop it and to talk about our questions and our fears about it and how physical we were going to be with the material.
And the way we shot the scene, we shot everything up to the tackle – everything up to the waterboarding — in one day, and the waterboarding and destroying of the apartment and the phone call on another half of a day. It was a very intense day, but Jake is such an amazing scene partner. He’s so brave and he’s so vulnerable, and he has such an access to this deep humanity where he brings a vulnerability to this guy who’s just trying to figure out how he could be a monster when he doesn’t feel like a monster — when he really loves this woman.
Whose choice was it for you to put his hands around your neck?
That was me. “Onto her knees” [was] scripted and I asked, “Can I put your hands around my neck?”
The line is like, “I belong to you.” And to me, in order to really set the trap, she has to serve herself up on a platter and get small and be hurtable in order to, in the end, triumph and crush him.
Do you think it really was a triumph? We already know what a boys’ club this NYPD is and what happened when she reported him. Is Alice really satisfied with how things went?
I think [that] might be answered by when we see Alice walk into work the next day: She is not buttoned up in a suit. Her hair is down. The beast has been unleashed. She is wearing color. The top button is not completely buttoned. Somebody who has been very androgynous and very, “Don’t look at me” is suddenly in the FBI with a mane of curls, not in a suit, that’s somebody to me that reads highly confident … [and] not somebody that can be f–ked with anymore.
That moment also comes across as her feeling successful about the break in the case, getting info on safe surrender boxes. The audience is getting Alice’s backstory a bit piecemeal as episodes unfold, but I’m sure as an executive producer you knew it all from the beginning. What are your thoughts on how the information is coming out for the audience?
Every person and certainly every character that is as deep as the ones Liz has written is made up of their history, and that history doesn’t go back to one incident. It’s many, especially for women.
Trauma doesn’t feel chronological. You forget things; you dissociate from things; and so, I think the building of the character and her survival instinct and why she’s actually so good at this job and how she’s become so dissociated from herself and her own feelings that she actually needs to invite violence into her life — not with this Marshall thing but with strangers — in order to feel anything is a very, very fascinating trauma response. Also, I think it’s a response to the intensity of the work itself and how you have to separate from your sensitivities in order to do the job every day.
Alice is a victim of violence, and she has had this complicated relationship with this person that hurt her in the past. [That’s] a great kind of foundational starting point. Then we realize the relationship is much more complicated, and this person was also an oasis to her and a pseudo-family to her, and we understand the relationship with Marshall’s mom, and then that turns and becomes something brutal as well.
Before we even get to those last two episodes, though, the next one, Episode 6, will bring you and Lola head-to-head since Alice stumbled upon Catherine in the shelter waiting room. Obviously we’re expecting their interactions to be filled with tension, but do you feel the episode also comes with a sense of relief, simply from the fact that both sides of the story are finally intersecting?
From a storytelling perspective, it’s so fascinating and exciting: When do we bring these two people who have been magnetically tied to each other throughout the course of the story together, and how will it feel? And again, we’re going to see one of these large stretches of time that two people are spending in a room, kind of negotiating. And I will say that definitely there is some stuff in Episode 6 that is some of the most challenging stuff I have had to do from an acting and from a technical perspective and from an emotional perspective.
New episodes of Furious drop Mondays on Hulu.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
