Jonathan Sim
From New Girl creator Liz Meriwether, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating female serial killer (Lola Petticrew). Both walk their paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur.
The cast and creative team gathered at the Metrograph in New York City for the show’s red carpet premiere, where the conversation kept circling back to the same idea: that Furious isn’t just a thriller built to hook an audience, but a piece of television meant to sit with them after the credits roll.
Emmy Rossum, who leads the series as Alice Black, described training alongside current and former FBI agents and detectives to bring authenticity to the role, recalling that “just how much meat you can eat when you’re trying to put on muscle” surprised her as much as anything, saying “I did a lot of training for this. I got to be trained by current and former FBI, and current and former detectives, to add depth and reality to it. On my second day of training in Texas, there was a surprise guest — someone shooting back at me with a BB gun. Pretty intense — stomach-churning, for sure.”
That heightened state didn’t come naturally, she said, adding that “the adrenaline I felt, and the level of vigilance that I don’t carry with me on a day-to-day basis, was also surprising,” especially given drills that had her “walking down New York City streets, trying to remember license plates, trying to remember people who’d walked past me, and then quizzing me on it.” Off camera, Rossum said that vigilance doesn’t carry into her own life in the city, “except when I’m with my kids. Then I’m a little more on guard, certainly crossing the street. The DNA of this character was very far from mine, so it was really fun to channel and get inside and understand it.”
New York itself became something like a character in its own right during production, with Rossum pointing to a Halloween sequence shot across all five boroughs: “We really made New York a main character. Liz Meriwether, who wrote and created the show, and I both live in New York and raise our families here, so getting the chance to work here — it’s such a character, there are such incredible actors here. It’s an amazing pool of talent to work with, and an amazing city to be in.”
Asked whether there’s a genre she hasn’t tackled yet, Rossum, who has moved fluidly between comedy and drama throughout her career, said she’s “open to really anything, as long as it feels kind of different,” maybe even “musical comedy,” and that playing Alice Black stood apart from her past roles because of “the intensity of the character, how disconnected she is from herself. I generally play people who are more energetically similar to myself, so playing someone so different was really fun.”
Lola Petticrew, who plays the show’s calculating serial killer opposite Rossum, remembered being floored from the very first pages: “My jaw was on the floor. It was monumental. The caliber of Liz’s writing, her material, is so fantastic — her previous work speaks for itself. Pretty immediately, I was all in. This character is such a rarity, and I think this piece in general is such a rarity.”
Away from home for long stretches during the shoot, Petticrew said her favorite memory wasn’t a scene but the crew itself, including a trip that suited her love of the season: “I got close with a lot of the crew, and they really took care of me. I was away from home for a very long time, and I made a lot of friends on the crew — we took a trip up to Sleepy Hollow. I love all things Halloween, so that was pretty cool too.” On what she hopes viewers take from the show, Petticrew framed it as an invitation to sit in discomfort: “I just hope audiences go in with a really open mind and give themselves the space to change their minds and be challenged. I think the show is going to be a really great conversation starter — a bit of a shaker and a mover.”
Jake Lacy described the moment the scripts landed in his hands with an almost disbelieving reverence, recalling that “I got the script and I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s all there.’ So my job is to just fulfill what she has created. I think the scripts are so good, and it’s a great show.” For Lacy, that meant approaching the role less as a performance to construct than a truth to locate: “My job is to take what’s there and personalize it — to try to understand what kind of pain this person is in, what these relationships are, what these dynamics are, and try to build that within you and let it grow, so it can resonate,” he said, adding that “human trafficking is real. It’s happening right now, in terms of domestic violence. There’s going to be some great conversation around that.”
Asked what he hopes audiences take away, Lacy was careful not to prescribe a single reaction: “I never go down there. I don’t participate in these things with any agenda as to what I hope someone takes away. I hope that people are engaged with the subject, curious about it, and that it creates an awareness that maybe wasn’t there before.”
Larissa Campos lit up recalling her first read of the script: “I thought that this was everything. I thought, this is what the audience needs to see — this is a story that needs to be told. When we found out the title was going to be Furious, I thought, this is perfect. It was incredible — absolutely floored.” When it came to favorite memories from set, Campos didn’t hesitate, pointing to the people who worked closest to her, out of frame: “The hair and makeup trailer — shout out to Sarit and Joelle. I spent so much time with them and became really close to them, and they’ll be a part of my life forever. I love them dearly. They took such good care of me.”
Steve Way made clear the project asked more of him than a typical comedic role, saying “it’s not just a comedy. I was ready for a challenge — I had to push myself, but the experience made me feel so welcomed. I never felt alone. I was ready. I did it.” For Way, the standout memory of the shoot came down to the people rather than any single scene: “Just working with everyone — such wonderful, talented people, on a human level. It’s so rare to meet people like that. It’s such an honor.”
Child actress Riley Vinson knew immediately from the page that the material would demand something heavier than most first reads, saying “I was like, oh wow — this is heavy, this is intense. There’s a lot going on here.” Asked about a standout day on set, Vinson pointed, somewhat counterintuitively, to the show’s most emotionally demanding scenes: “Probably the intense crying scenes. I actually enjoyed filming those,” a process that required drawing on memory rather than technique — “I just think about things that make me sad — memories of my grandpa, who passed, and stuff like that.” When it came to naming what made the whole experience special, Vinson kept it simple: “Just being able to work with Emmy and Lola was so amazing.”
Quincy Tyler Bernstine didn’t need much convincing to sign on, though the script itself still managed to surprise her: “I thought it was absolutely incredible. They sent me an email asking if I wanted to audition for this project of Liz Meriwether’s, and I didn’t even need to read the script, honestly, because I would do anything she’s a part of. But I read it, and my breath was taken away — the character of Nora that she had written was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I was thrilled, and really hopeful that I could somehow be a part of it.”
Like several of her co-stars, Bernstine circled back to the show’s real-world stakes when asked what she hopes audiences take from it, pointing directly to the issue woven through the story: “I hope they’ll be entertained, of course — that’s why we’re here in the first place. But I really hope they’ll be inspired — that they’ll become curious. This issue of sex trafficking is so prevalent, happening everywhere, all the time, right under our noses, and I don’t know how many people are aware of that. I hope this show will inspire conversation about the issue.”
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