Interview: Executive Producers Quinn Shephard and Samir Mehta Say ‘Under the Bridge’ is a Journey of Empathy and Forgiveness

As I ended my conversation with Under the Bridge writer/creator Quinn Shephard (previously interviewed by Joey here) and show runner Samir Mehta I mentioned that I could not say I enjoyed the series. Not the typical way to end a conversation. The reason for such a frank statement had to do with the subject matter the series was based on.

(Major spoilers ahead) Under the Bridge tells the tragic real-life murder Reena Virk in 1997. Reena disappeared after leaving to meet friends at a party and was later found dead. The series follows local cop (Lily Gladstone) and the author of the book the series is based on, Rebecca Godfrey (portrayed by Riley Keough) as they try to find the true killer.

Seven teenage girls and a boy, some whom were considered Reena’s friends, were accused in her brutal killing. So, it would not be unfair to say it can be a difficult and quite an emotionally challenging watch at times. With that said, I did walk away appreciating and contemplating all the themes the series presented. Ultimately, that may be a much more appropriate takeaway. The themes of bullying and racism are strongly represented, but it’s the messages of empathy and forgiveness that linger.

Here is my conversation with Quinn Shephard and Samir Mehta.

Awards Radar: First and foremost, congratulations on the series. It was quite a difficult one to watch, which means it’s effective, but unfortunately we have to tell these stories today. I want to start with Quinn, you worked with Rebecca Godfrey on this project before her death and I was wondering how that relationship began.

Quinn Shephard: I mean, I met her. I met her because of the project obviously like I, I had the idea to make her a character before we had met, but she was in communication with one of my producers and so I knew that she was kind of okay with the idea of being a character and me giving like an initial pitch to Hulu on what I thought it might be. I truly, I think I felt a connection to her from the time that I like first started reading her interviews, which I did like right after reading Under the Bridge.

I just thought that her own history in the town, and the fact that she had a really troubled childhood and she had this tragedy in her childhood that affected the way that she wrote the book and there were just so many things that I felt were very personal and very interesting. I think also most notably like I was a woman in my 20s thinking about adapting this story and she was a woman in her 20s who had gone into this world and like gained the trust of these teens in a way that nobody else could and I thought that was really fascinating. So I met her kind of having already had a little bit of like a parasocial relationship like I’d read every single interview she’d ever done and so I was a little nervous when I met her I was like oh my god, like it was like a celebrity, but then we got really close and she really kind of entrusted me and gave me so much freedom and gave me everything from her diaries to all the research she had done and we ended up working together for almost three years and it was like a very beautiful relationship.

AR: And Samir, why did you want to tell Reena’s story? 

Samir Mehta: A couple reasons I think. Well, strangely enough, at first I wasn’t sure I did want to I think that I had a certain ambivalence around true crime storytelling in general. So there were a few things about this particular case, though, that as I learned more about it, I realized that there actually was an importance to telling this story. I think on a personal level, I think, aside from the crime and what happened to Reena in the end, I thought the parent-child relationship was a fascinating one. Being first generation American myself, child of Indian immigrants, I think that cultural divide and just the attempt to bridge, for lack of a better word, that gap in culture is just a fascinating place to tell a story.

And I think it might have been hard, unfortunately, to tell a story purely about that in a pure character drama. It’s somewhat unfortunate that we need this true crime event to tell that story, but I was aware that this might be a way to actually kind of sneak that in, which was the more important part for me. I think secondly, getting to the end of the story and discovering that Reena’s mom, Suman, forgave Warren Glowatzki, I just thought that level of forgiveness and that level of empathy to find that we can sort of always recommend that people engage in a practice of forgiveness.

And we can say all of the things like, oh, the forgiveness is for you. It’s not really for the perpetrator. But to put it into practice in a way that’s this extreme was really startling to me and I thought inspiring. So I thought in some ways putting that into the world would ultimately be a good thing.

AR:  Quinn, did you have a reason you wanted to tell this story? I know the book really connected with you.

QS: I think that what Samir is saying about the show is touching on like radical forgiveness and sort of a journey in which empathy is encouraged in order to discourage violence is like something that I’ve always been very passionate about. I’m really fascinated by like challenging yourself to feel empathy for people who’ve done a terrible thing is something that’s very hard, but I also think is like a very important part of being a human being in order to stop things like this from happening.

So I think that I was really fascinated by like, when I read a summary description of this crime, and it’s kind of unimaginably horrible. And yet the story is able to find a lot of very like human allegory within all of the characters and something that is like very applicable and relatable to like everyday life for I think most people. And especially I think the fact that it’s extremely rare to read a story like this, where it’s almost entirely like young girls at the center.

And as somebody who I think has been really passionate in my career about giving space in media for young women’s pain and passion and everything from the funny parts of them to the most tragic parts of them to be seen is so important to me. And with Renna, I think that she was not like she was so targeted because I think she was very, very misunderstood. And it felt like an opportunity for both of us to bring her to life in the show and to like let an audience really relate to her and see themselves in her because her life was ultimately far more interesting than her death.

And what did telling the story from Rebecca’s perspective allow you to accomplish when telling it? Well, I mean, what I would say is like, I think that there’s only one aspect of the show that’s from Rebecca’s perspective. Like, I think we very intentionally like under the bridge, the book, while Rebecca doesn’t talk about herself as a character, like that is her perspective on the crime. And that was something that like the deeper we got into our own research, like the more we became conscious of that it was like a how what her personal takeaway was from getting to know the kids and the crime.

And so I think in the show, we wanted her perspective to become something that could be debated and observed and unpacked within the context of like her actual like her history in the town, her biases, her like her own ties to trauma and guilt. And so I think it was actually very important for us that we have a more that we’re able to observe Rebecca Godfrey’s perspective, but that we also have Cam’s perspective. And we also have Jimen’s perspective on the crime and we have the girls themselves and Renna’s storyline so that kind of the audience is able to form their own opinion, hopefully through seeing the opinions of so many.

SM: Just until this moment with this show, this story has largely been told, obviously, through Under the Bridge, the book and various forms of crime journalism.

I think that tends to be obviously from one perspective, it becomes how the history is written and it tends to really focus on various individuals and a somewhat traditional view of law and order, truth and justice. And what we wanted to do with the show was actually take a view of systems as a whole, communities as a whole, how these things are not the product of any one individual, but many individuals and the way that they interact. And I felt like that was something that we could really only accomplish with the space to tell a story that vast and the ability to use filmmaking to tell an emotional story from all of these characters’ perspectives.

AR:  When you do see into each of these characters and so many of them are unlikable for what they did. Because you allow us into their lives and you get to see this from different perspectives. You feel for them, you empathize a lot more than you would if they’re not just drawn with as bad and good.

Which makes it much more difficult to process because you want to have a simple answer as to why this happened, but there’s not one.

SM: I think it’s like the show is essentially a study in the fundamental attribution error where you sort of, anytime someone does something, you often wrongly attribute why they’re doing that for something that you’re projecting onto them because you’re not actually deeply aware of all of the things that preceded that event that caused them to do it. And I think because the show is able to go into many different worlds and dip in and out and then see how those pieces connect, you can really see, because the audience has the perspective that no individual character in the story does, you can see how these characters are talking past each other or missing each other.

And if only they had a little bit of context, maybe they’d be able to connect a little bit better. And we do that with the entire ensemble. And bullying and racism are very strong throughout this.

What was your approach to tackling these subjects and doing it properly? People will listen because they come up a lot nowadays, but yet it still can fall on deaf ears if you feel like you’re hearing the same thing over and it does not register.

I mean, it was, yeah, it’s sort of what I was just kind of saying, I think to put it another way, it’s like, it’s that concept of hurt people hurt people. I think that was a guiding principle was that bullies appear to be bullies from the perspective of the bullied.

But then you go into that person’s world, more likely than not, they are being bullied by somebody else. And it is this chain of violence, whether it’s emotional or physical, that is just sort of spilling from one person to the next. And that really to tie back to what was so kind of attractive about the story to begin with was it takes somebody to step up and break that cycle by doing the opposite, essentially, of what all of the people that came before did.

Suman had every right to want to be very vengeful and angry and really hope that these kids got punished. But chances are that level of punishment would just perpetuate the cycle. So we wanted to, A, illustrate how bullying happens and how it is this kind of hot potato of pain and resentment that people keep passing around. And it takes somebody to actually just hold it and feel the burn of it to stop that from perpetuating.

QS: And I think Samir’s talked about in the past, like, the way that this story was covered, like, kind of through multiple rounds of media, like, always tries to simplify the motive in that, like, there was, like, a huge amount of just, like, this is an anti-bullying story. And then, like, race is not talked about as like a massive factor.

There’s also people who have been like race was the only factor. It was a hate crime. And I think that it’s like any what we really tried to hold in the writers room is that, like, what actually contributed to this crime was a multitude of factors, all of which are important to recognize.

And some of which certain characters in the show fail to recognize out of a desire to justify it through something that they understand. And I think that we really tried to, again, yeah, hold all of that in the show so that the audience could see how a lot of those things were factors, but in ways that weren’t boldfaced. Like, maybe some of the perpetrators didn’t even fully understand why they were doing what they were doing.

But we as a show are trying to help the audience, but also sort of them, like, the characters, like, unpack how the characters might not have even fully understood their motives.

SM: I mean, we’re obviously, very in favor of anti-bullying advocacy. But I do think that sometimes it gets simplified to please don’t bully, which, of course, we all get.

It’s not to do that, it is to maybe ignore the actual root causes of what’s. And like sometimes people, I think it’s not to be an apologist for the bully to look at the root cause of why that person has become one. 

AR: As a parent of two daughters in their teens that’s what really hit me. There’s bullying going on. It happens. How do you stop this? When those who should be protecting you. They’re also the ones hurting you.

QS:  I think it’s why we challenged ourselves to feel for the characters, even when it was the hardest. Like Samir saying without being apologists, it’s like why you have to challenge yourself to feel deep empathy for the people who did this, because I actually think that a lot of the conversations around bullying don’t get into the root cause. And the hope is that this is something that if somebody could see themselves in the character in a bully, like that’s the goal.

Like the goal is for the show for you to watch it and be like, I could have maybe seen how I could have ended up in those circumstances. And what is it in within me that I need to confront that could lead to that sort of anger rather than treating people who are capable of something like this is alien and separate from ourselves. Because I don’t actually think that’s true.

And I think that like what you’re saying, not only do we see echoes of a crime exactly like this happening, like right now, but like cruelty, everyone sort of knows for all of time has been like a very deep part of the teen female experience. Like women, like as a society, we hate young women, but no one hates young women more than other young women and themselves. And they’re very encouraged to act that way.

And I think that’s why the show, even with the horrible and shocking acts of cruelty that are happening, is really aiming to go, but who has taught these girls and what has taught these girls to treat each other this way? Because if we tackle that, maybe we actually do have a shot at stopping this.

AR: And sadly, with social media, the ability for these hurt people to hurt others becomes much more powerful. You can do it from anywhere and in 30 seconds ruin someone’s life.

SM: Right. It’s kind of a megaphone in which to do it. 

AR: So the final shot. The final shot with, with Reena’s parents on the bed. It’s devastating.

It’s poignant. I know what my take was on it, but what does it mean to you? 

SM: To me, I think that it’s, it is the first, it’s like an incremental step that the parents are taking toward understanding their daughter when it was too late to do so. You know, this is some, like, it’s a small thing, but it’s like something they fought about was like her interests and the music she was in, like, she was trying to listen to.

And it was this curiosity. I think it ties pretty tightly to that moment in the car with Raj in episode six, where he sort of confronts his sister and says like, you never really listened to her. And I think that really sat with Suman.

And so in this moment, the real tragedy of it is that her putting that on and kind of contemplating, was it necessarily so bad? Did I need to be so strict? Was there a little bit of space for me to lean in a bit and try to meet my daughter where she was rather than expecting that she’d come to me or even meeting halfway? Maybe what I owe her as a parent is actually to go most of the way to her because she’s coming up in the world. I think all of that is going on. And that’s the tragedy of it.

And it’s kind of why we have that framing of seeing her in the mirror, which is a Looking Glass, which is also the pilot title.

QS: It is what Reena’s name means. 

AR: I saw the finale a few weeks back and it still lingers. What you’re saying about the parents… I think this show changed me a little bit.

So thank you so much for your time today and congrats on the series. I can’t say I “enjoyed” it, but it did really connect with me and make me really think – which is probably better.  So thank you.

Quinn and Samir:  Thank you. Have a great day.

Awards Radar: First and foremost, congratulations on the series. It was quite a difficult one to watch, which means it’s effective, but unfortunately we have to tell these stories today. I want to start with Quinn, you worked with Rebecca Godfrey on this project before her death and I was wondering how that relationship began.

Quinn Shephard: I mean, I met her. I met her because of the project obviously like I, I had the idea to make her a character before we had met, but she was in communication with one of my producers and so I knew that she was kind of okay with the idea of being a character and me giving like an initial pitch to Hulu on what I thought it might be. I truly, I think I felt a connection to her from the time that I like first started reading her interviews, which I did like right after reading Under the Bridge.

I just thought that her own history in the town, and the fact that she had a really troubled childhood and she had this tragedy in her childhood that affected the way that she wrote the book and there were just so many things that I felt were very personal and very interesting. I think also most notably like I was a woman in my 20s thinking about adapting this story and she was a woman in her 20s who had gone into this world and like gained the trust of these teens in a way that nobody else could and I thought that was really fascinating. So I met her kind of having already had a little bit of like a parasocial relationship like I’d read every single interview she’d ever done and so I was a little nervous when I met her I was like oh my god, like it was like a celebrity, but then we got really close and she really kind of entrusted me and gave me so much freedom and gave me everything from her diaries to all the research she had done and we ended up working together for almost three years and it was like a very beautiful relationship.

AR: And Samir, why did you want to tell Reena’s story? 

Samir Mehta: A couple reasons I think. Well, strangely enough, at first I wasn’t sure I did want to I think that I had a certain ambivalence around true crime storytelling in general. So there were a few things about this particular case, though, that as I learned more about it, I realized that there actually was an importance to telling this story. I think on a personal level, I think, aside from the crime and what happened to Reena in the end, I thought the parent-child relationship was a fascinating one. Being first generation American myself, child of Indian immigrants, I think that cultural divide and just the attempt to bridge, for lack of a better word, that gap in culture is just a fascinating place to tell a story.

And I think it might have been hard, unfortunately, to tell a story purely about that in a pure character drama. It’s somewhat unfortunate that we need this true crime event to tell that story, but I was aware that this might be a way to actually kind of sneak that in, which was the more important part for me. I think secondly, getting to the end of the story and discovering that Reena’s mom, Suman, forgave Warren Glowatzky, I just thought that level of forgiveness and that level of empathy to find that we can sort of always recommend that people engage in a practice of forgiveness.

And we can say all of the things like, oh, the forgiveness is for you. It’s not really for the perpetrator. But to put it into practice in a way that’s this extreme was really startling to me and I thought inspiring. So I thought in some ways putting that into the world would ultimately be a good thing.

AR: Quinn, did you have a reason you wanted to tell this story? I know the book really connected with you.

QS: I think that what Samir is saying about the show is touching on like radical forgiveness and sort of a journey in which empathy is encouraged in order to discourage violence is like something that I’ve always been very passionate about. I’m really fascinated by like challenging yourself to feel empathy for people who’ve done a terrible thing is something that’s very hard, but I also think is like a very important part of being a human being in order to stop things like this from happening.

So I think that I was really fascinated by like, when I read a summary description of this crime, and it’s kind of unimaginably horrible. And yet the story is able to find a lot of very like human allegory within all of the characters and something that is like very applicable and relatable to like everyday life for I think most people. And especially I think the fact that it’s extremely rare to read a story like this, where it’s almost entirely like young girls at the center.

And as somebody who I think has been really passionate in my career about giving space in media for young women’s pain and passion and everything from the funny parts of them to the most tragic parts of them to be seen is so important to me. And with Renna, I think that she was not like she was so targeted because I think she was very, very misunderstood. And it felt like an opportunity for both of us to bring her to life in the show and to like let an audience really relate to her and see themselves in her because her life was ultimately far more interesting than her death.

SP: What did telling the story from Rebecca’s perspective allow you to accomplish when telling it?

QS: Well, I mean, what I would say is like, I think that there’s only one aspect of the show that’s from Rebecca’s perspective. Like, I think we very intentionally like Under the Bridge, the book, while Rebecca doesn’t talk about herself as a character, like that is her perspective on the crime. And that was something that like the deeper we got into our own research, like the more we became conscious of that it was like a how what her personal takeaway was from getting to know the kids and the crime.

And so I think in the show, we wanted her perspective to become something that could be debated and observed and unpacked within the context of like her actual like her history in the town, her biases, her like her own ties to trauma and guilt. And so I think it was actually very important for us that we have a more that we’re able to observe Rebecca Godfrey’s perspective, but that we also have Cam’s perspective. And we also have Jimen’s perspective on the crime and we have the girls themselves and Renna’s storyline so that kind of the audience is able to form their own opinion, hopefully through seeing the opinions of so many.

SM: Just until this moment with this show, this story has largely been told, obviously, through Under the Bridge, the book and various forms of crime journalism.

I think that tends to be obviously from one perspective, it becomes how the history is written and it tends to really focus on various individuals and a somewhat traditional view of law and order, truth and justice. And what we wanted to do with the show was actually take a view of systems as a whole, communities as a whole, how these things are not the product of any one individual, but many individuals and the way that they interact. And I felt like that was something that we could really only accomplish with the space to tell a story that vast and the ability to use filmmaking to tell an emotional story from all of these characters’ perspectives.

AR:  When you do see into each of these characters and so many of them are unlikable for what they did. Because you allow us into their lives and you get to see this from different perspectives. You feel for them, you empathize a lot more than you would if they’re not just drawn with as bad and good.

Which makes it much more difficult to process because you want to have a simple answer as to why this happened, but there’s not one.

SM: I think it’s like the show is essentially a study in the fundamental attribution error where you sort of, anytime someone does something, you often wrongly attribute why they’re doing that for something that you’re projecting onto them because you’re not actually deeply aware of all of the things that preceded that event that caused them to do it. And I think because the show is able to go into many different worlds and dip in and out and then see how those pieces connect, you can really see, because the audience has the perspective that no individual character in the story does, you can see how these characters are talking past each other or missing each other.

And if only they had a little bit of context, maybe they’d be able to connect a little bit better. And we do that with the entire ensemble. And bullying and racism are very strong throughout this.

What was your approach to tackling these subjects and doing it properly? People will listen because they come up a lot nowadays, but yet it still can fall on deaf ears if you feel like you’re hearing the same thing over and it does not register.

I mean, it was, yeah, it’s sort of what I was just kind of saying, I think to put it another way, it’s like, it’s that concept of hurt people hurt people. I think that was a guiding principle was that bullies appear to be bullies from the perspective of the bullied.

But then you go into that person’s world, more likely than not, they are being bullied by somebody else. And it is this chain of violence, whether it’s emotional or physical, that is just sort of spilling from one person to the next. And that really to tie back to what was so kind of attractive about the story to begin with was it takes somebody to step up and break that cycle by doing the opposite, essentially, of what all of the people that came before did.

Suman had every right to want to be very vengeful and angry and really hope that these kids got punished. But chances are that level of punishment would just perpetuate the cycle. So we wanted to, A, illustrate how bullying happens and how it is this kind of hot potato of pain and resentment that people keep passing around. And it takes somebody to actually just hold it and feel the burn of it to stop that from perpetuating.

QS: And I think Samir’s talked about in the past, like, the way that this story was covered, like, kind of through multiple rounds of media, like, always tries to simplify the motive in that, like, there was, like, a huge amount of just, like, this is an anti-bullying story. And then, like, race is not talked about as like a massive factor.

There’s also people who have been like race was the only factor. It was a hate crime. And I think that it’s like any what we really tried to hold in the writers room is that, like, what actually contributed to this crime was a multitude of factors, all of which are important to recognize.

And some of which certain characters in the show fail to recognize out of a desire to justify it through something that they understand. And I think that we really tried to, again, yeah, hold all of that in the show so that the audience could see how a lot of those things were factors, but in ways that weren’t boldfaced. Like, maybe some of the perpetrators didn’t even fully understand why they were doing what they were doing.

But we as a show are trying to help the audience, but also sort of them, like, the characters, like, unpack how the characters might not have even fully understood their motives.

SM: I mean, we’re obviously, very in favor of anti-bullying advocacy. But I do think that sometimes it gets simplified to please don’t bully, which, of course, we all get.

It’s not to do that, it is to maybe ignore the actual root causes of what’s. And like sometimes people, I think it’s not to be an apologist for the bully to look at the root cause of why that person has become one.

AR: As a parent of two daughters in their teens that’s what really hit me. There’s bullying going on. It happens. How do you stop this? When those who should be protecting you. They’re also the ones hurting you.

QS:  I think it’s why we challenged ourselves to feel for the characters, even when it was the hardest. Like Samir saying without being apologists, it’s like why you have to challenge yourself to feel deep empathy for the people who did this, because I actually think that a lot of the conversations around bullying don’t get into the root cause. And the hope is that this is something that if somebody could see themselves in the character in a bully, like that’s the goal.

Like the goal is for the show for you to watch it and be like, I could have maybe seen how I could have ended up in those circumstances. And what is it in within me that I need to confront that could lead to that sort of anger rather than treating people who are capable of something like this is alien and separate from ourselves. Because I don’t actually think that’s true.

And I think that like what you’re saying, not only do we see echoes of a crime exactly like this happening, like right now, but like cruelty, everyone sort of knows for all of time has been like a very deep part of the teen female experience. Like women, like as a society, we hate young women, but no one hates young women more than other young women and themselves. And they’re very encouraged to act that way.

That’s why the show, even with the horrible and shocking acts of cruelty that are happening, is really aiming to go, but who has taught these girls and what has taught these girls to treat each other this way? Because if we tackle that, maybe we actually do have a shot at stopping this.

AR: And sadly, with social media, the ability for these hurt people to hurt others becomes much more powerful. You can do it from anywhere and in 30 seconds ruin someone’s life.

SM: Right. It’s kind of a megaphone in which to do it. 

AR: So the final shot. The final shot with, with Reena’s parents on the bed. It’s devastating It’s poignant. I know what my take was on it, but what does it mean to you? 

SM: To me, I think that it’s, it is the first, it’s like an incremental step that the parents are taking toward understanding their daughter when it was too late to do so. You know, this is some, like, it’s a small thing, but it’s like something they fought about was like her interests and the music she was in, like, she was trying to listen to.

And it was this curiosity. I think it ties pretty tightly to that moment in the car with Raj in episode six, where he sort of confronts his sister and says like, you never really listened to her. And I think that really sat with Suman.

So in this moment, the real tragedy of it is that her putting that on and kind of contemplating, was it necessarily so bad? Did I need to be so strict? Was there a little bit of space for me to lean in a bit and try to meet my daughter where she was rather than expecting that she’d come to me or even meeting halfway? Maybe what I owe her as a parent is actually to go most of the way to her because she’s coming up in the world. I think all of that is going on. And that’s the tragedy of it.

And it’s kind of why we have that framing of seeing her in the mirror, which is a Looking Glass, which is also the pilot title.

QS: It is what Reena’s name means. 

AR: I saw the finale a few weeks back and it still lingers. What you’re saying about the parents… I think this show changed me a little bit.

So thank you so much for your time today and congrats on the series. I can’t say I “enjoyed” it, but it did really connect with me and make me really think – which is probably better.  So thank you.

Quinn and Samir:  Thank you. Have a great day.

Under the Bridge is now streaming in its entirety exclusively on Hulu.