Warning: The following story contains spoilers for Episode 7 of Furious.
Although Hulu’s Furious centers on a cat-and-mouse drama between FBI Agent Alice (Emmy Rossum) and serial killer Catherine (Lola Petticrew), there is another formidable woman no one should count out. And the seventh episode, titled “Some Days It Don’t Come Easy,” proves why.
Emma Easton (Hope Davis) has been her father, Jay Easton’s (Peter McRobbie), right-hand woman for years, not just taking care of their family business, but also procuring teenage girls for him and covering up his sexual assaults and, in Isabel’s (Larissa Campos) case, death. In fact she’s still doing so. After getting tipped off by Ed (Danny McCarthy) that their house may be searched, she destroys evidence of decades of abuse.
“It’s a really disturbing subject matter,” Davis tells Gold Derby. “I’m the mother of two daughters, and so it’s upsetting. It was challenging to step into the family that’s doing the terrible things.”
But as with Alice and Catherine, who have complicated, dark pasts, so too does Emma, says Davis. “The backstory that Liz [Meriwether, Furious creator and showrunner] and I discussed is that Emma was abused by her father her whole life,” she reveals. “It was really important that you know Emma is more a victim of this kind of violence than a perpetrator of it.”
In Episode 7, even though he is near death, in a wheelchair and on oxygen, Emma pays another teenage girl to come to the house. While the girl gets assault, Emma leaves the house to avoid hearing it — then cleans up the evidence afterward. She also forces her father to hand over the code to his bedroom safe when he admits he saved a few hard drives — desperate to destroy all traces of proof of what her father has done and what she has helped with.
Gold Derby: From your perspective, why is Emma helping her father to the extent that she is? How much of it is loyalty vs fear?
Hope Davis: I think Emma just wasn’t strong enough to break out of the toxic bond between herself and her father. I think she’s mentally unwell. She wasn’t strong enough to ever call the cops or get away herself, and so she just stayed home in the mansion and did what they told her and helped to run the business and ferried and took care of her ailing father. So I think Emma’s a very unwell person. This is part of the point of the show: What are the repercussions when sexual violence occurs against women? What happens down the road to people?
Right, but this backstory is not explicitly said. What was the discussion about it being something you have to play on your face, in your emotions, maybe even in your actions, but something that we’re not going to talk about?
It is somewhat ambiguous; it’s for the audience to decide how they feel, or what they think that character is, or why she’s doing what she’s doing. I do think there are clues in just the way she talks to her father and the way he talks to her, and then there’s the way she defends him to people, and then there’s the birthday moment. [Editor’s note: Her birthday is the code to his safe.]
In a show like this, people have very different opinions about the characters and who’s right and who’s wrong, and that’s OK. I like to give Liz and Emmy a lot of different takes on a scene so they can edit [and] make it what they want it to be.
But there was never a scene you shot where you talked about the abuse and it got cut?
No, no. It’s just implied in that relationship.
In Episode 7 we see just how far Emma has been going for her father, but we also see the toll it has taken on her to do so. When she leaves him with the latest girl, she goes out to the greenhouse and works with soil. Do you feel like that’s a moment where Emma’s trying to ground herself or disassociate from what she knows is happening inside the house?
She’s trying to ground herself in the place where she tends to living things, with her plants. We also talked about the fact that it’s probably something that her father wanted: for her to be far enough away to not hear anybody scream. So she’s made a little safe room for herself, far from where the things are happening so she doesn’t have to hear anything. She’s very aware of what’s going on and obviously has a lot of guilt about what’s happening.
When it’s over, Emma puts the girl in a car and the girl asks her who she is. You don’t respond, but was there a verbal response that got cut? And whether or not there was, why do you feel it was more compelling to just end on the look on your face and the close of the door?
No, there was no scripted line. What would Emma say? Emma doesn’t know who she is. She’s a victim of abuse; she’s a mess. What is she going to say? “I’m my father’s daughter”? I don’t think Emma has a good answer for that and doesn’t want to. It’s like if you don’t say it, it’s not true, right? So she just keeps quiet.
Just to go back for a minute, avid TV fans may see a greenhouse and be conditioned to think the character tending to it is growing poison in there. Would you speculate that maybe Emma was growing anything like that? Could she ever act against her father that drastically?
I’m sure she’s been fantasizing since she was first raped by him when she was 7 that she would kill him, but she’s never been able to do it.
She does get to a point in this episode where, when they’re fighting about the hard drives he hid from her after she thought she destroyed all of the evidence, she pushes him over. She’s still cleaning up after him, but she’s standing up for herself a bit more. Can you talk about filming that scene and finding the right level of how far she can go to push back when she’s still going to end up doing what he and Ed want her to do?
They’ve been doing this for decades, but suddenly it’s like the wheels are coming off the bus. Her brother is dead, someone is stalking them, and he still won’t stop — he still cannot break himself of his addiction to teenage porn, child porn, having these girls in the house. It’s like the flame just gets turned up higher and higher and higher. And Emma’s starting to come apart and doesn’t know what to do. And so pushing him over, it’s childish, right? It’s a very childish way of reacting.
I think Emma fantasizes about putting a knife in his back, and we didn’t want Emma to be too timid at that point. Her actions were bold, and she was very, very angry and just keeping that flame turned up really hot. So we didn’t give a whole lot of options in that one.
When Emma and Jay are arguing, she says, “What can they do to me? I don’t get to die.” You had her backstory confirmed for you while working the show all along, but for some of the audience, this may be the moment where they realize the extent of her own trauma if she’s saying death is preferable to living this life. What did it feel like to film that scene and say those words that expose her so late in the story?
These two people, Jay Easton and Emma, the father and the daughter, have been saying horrible things to one another for a really long time. So I think she means to say to him, “You’re sick and you’re dying soon, and you’re going to get released from all this, and I’m going to have to sit with it.” I imagine Emma takes heavy duty sleeping pills to sleep at night. I think she’s one of those women that’s medicated to get through the day, and she will live with the mess that he leaves behind. There won’t be a friend in the world to come to her aid, so yeah, it’s heavy stuff to shoot.
We had conversations about a backstory and what could happen to Emma at the end, but what’s really fun about this job is it’s always a surprise. … And that’s why in earlier stuff you try to give a wide range of choices for them to craft the story from, so they can send it where they want to send it because you don’t really know where it’s going.
Did you know that Emma was involved in Isabel’s death early on?
Yes, I think I did know that.
It really brings to mind the “hurt people hurt people” angle, which may soften how some people think about Emma now because she needed therapy, she needed safety, she needed support to get through this, and she didn’t have any of that. And now they might have empathy for someone they didn’t expect to.
Yes, yes, right. Her father was a monster, and from a very young age was abusing her, so how do you put your life together? Some people manage to put themselves together, and some people don’t. And Emma was one of those people [who didn’t]. [The Eastons] only destroyed, and she’s been a part of that because she never left and never called the police and didn’t help.
Do you feel like there was any part of her that felt relief when her brother was killed and when she found out someone was coming for her father? A sense of, “I can’t shut this down, but I’m glad someone is finally going to end this”?
I really do think that Emma is a pill popper, so I’m not sure she’s had a super clear thought in a long time. I think she wants her father gone, and I think she’s wanted to be gone, as most people feel about their abusers, for a long time.
In terms of shaking this character off, what do you do at the end of a shoot?
Definitely the entire story of Furious has very much stayed with me, but it’s not like I carry any residual of Emma. I’m not like her.
I didn’t think you were like her, but that’s what seems hard: diving so deep into this very different, very traumatized mindset, especially when you’re probably still inundated with similar stories when watching or reading the news.
It’s not hard at all. That’s the joy of it, and that’s really the fun of it and the craft of it. Stepping into that room, going through that stuff, and then the day ends and you get in your van and you’re in your home, and it’s over. It’s a story that’s being told for a reason, but it’s a story, and you put it down. It doesn’t haunt you. It’s not like when you watch a really terrifying movie and it haunts your dreams because you’re inside it, and there’s crew people standing all around you, and they say “cut” and then you get a snack.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
