Steven Prusakowski
Emmy. Emmy. Emmy! It seems to be on everyone’s minds these days. While typically this time of year people would probably be discussing the Emmy Awards, right now the world is abuzz over the work of Emmy Rossum, who delivers some of the best work of her career in Hulu’s crime thriller Furious. Now, when people should be talking about this year’s Emmy winners, many are focused on next year’s awards conversation, with Emmy Rossum and Furious already firmly in the mix.
The series, created by Liz Meriwether (Dying for Sex, The Dropout, New Girl), stars Rossum as Alice Black, a former NYPD homicide detective turned FBI agent on the hunt for a mysterious female serial killer, played by Lola Petticrew. As I mentioned in my review, the two are mirrors, sharing elements of the same pain and trauma while traveling very different paths toward justice.
Rossum has been working in the business for nearly 30 years, earning a following from early works like Mystic River and The Phantom of the Opera, where, at 16, she wowed audiences as she delivered her own singing that worthy of being straight from a Broadway stage – it earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy. Then came Shameless, which really put her on the map. While Rossum was not directly Emmy-nominated for the series, she became synonymous with the series make shift matriarch, Fiona Gallagher and earned a devoted following over the show’s eight seasons. Yet never before has she delivered a role where she disappears quite as completely as she does as Alice Black in Furious.
The most astonishing part of her performance is that she does it in plain sight. Unlike her work on Angelyne, where wigs, makeup, and some generous use of prosthetics made her nearly unidentifiable, Rossum disappears here without disguises, elaborate costumes, or wigs. Instead, the actress disappears through the broken spirit of a woman living behind her own shield of previous pain. Gone are her big smile, her trademark curls, and the sparkle often found in her eyes. Rossum ensures Alice is steeped in sadness, a tragic life that forever masks any joy and wonder we strive for and enjoy. While her subdued hair and lack of a smile are easier to notice, it is the dullness in her eyes that silently scream the damage she carries inside.
It is a sad role that often allows us to forget the pain Alice carries because she is also a badass, tougher than nails, who wears her pain like impenetrable armor while behind it is longing to feel something on the inside.
Furious will leave you breathless. It is already chiseled into my and will certainly make many others’ Best of… lists for the year, so it was an honor to speak with Emmy Rossum shortly after the finale aired to discuss her work and the series. While we had 45 minutes, I feel like we could have spoken for hours because, in addition to the themes that resonate and live in your head long after the season concludes, what Rossum invested in the role was fascinating. As executive producer, it was not only about becoming Alice and making her feel as human and damaged as the role demanded, but also carrying the responsibility of being true and respectful to real-life victims of sexual abuse and a justice system that rarely protects them as it should.
Our conversation starts as all TV Topics chats do, digging into Emmy’s TV-viewing DNA. It is not an easy shift from ABC’s TGIF comedy lineup and her JTT crush (Jonathan Taylor Thomas for those unlucky ones not in the know) to the real-life horrors covered in Furious, but somehow we found a way to do both. One minute we are talking about the television that shaped her, and the next we are talking about those hurt by the continuing ripples of violent acts. That is the strange power of television, and of Furious. It can entertain and pull you in, and then leave you sitting with something you cannot simply turn off. I finished our conversation about the series angry, unsettled, and struggling to determine where I stand on where we go from here. The crimes and the system that failed so many are nothing new, but they are finally in the headlines. Furious may be entertaining, but what it pulls off is much, much more than entertainment.
Below are some of the most insightful moments of our conversation. You can watch (or listen to) the full talk at the bottom of this article. Although not included here, there is plenty of television chatter that covers everything from Emmy’s appreciation for Michaela Coel’s incredible I May Destroy You to Survivor, Felicity, and Game of Thrones. She has quite the varied yet distinct TV palette. Sadly, due to time, I did not squeeze in my one Shameless question, but if you hang around, you may just hear Emmy sing.
Be sure to watch her sing metaphorically through all of season one of Furious, streaming in its entirety on Hulu. And, good news, the series has been renewed for season two.
SPOILER WARNING! In these excerpts from our Furious discussion and the podcast, we discuss the right to the very end of the series. If you have not watched yet, return for this conversation later.
Steven Prusakowski: When playing such a dark, damaged character, is there any apprehension taking on that role?
Emmy Rossum:
No, because every character and every person has a story and our job is to not judge that story or that history. It’s to understand it. Imagine your way into it. Spend time fleshing out those stories, how they happened, how they came to be, what those rooms looked like, what they smelled like, what those memories sound like. To do enough research to speak to people that have been in similar situations, to excavate your own guts and then to bring humanity to them. The truth is there are real people out there that have been victims of child sex trafficking who have had revenge porn videos taken of them. Those stories are real and they deserve to be honored. It’s our job as actors to move towards them with no judgment and no fear.
SP: It’s incredible where the journey ends compared to and where you start… if you could take a freeze frame of episode 1 and anywhere in the last 15 minutes of the finale, you can see the change in her…
Emmy Rossum:
Alice is a very lonely person who has no friends and no like-minded person around her. And she finds that in Nora and she finds it in Catherine in a very big way. And I think it unlocks something in her. She’s been like a pressure cooker holding in a phenomenal amount of history and rage and feeling like the system wasn’t built to help her, feeling like it’s a system that she works within and believes in. She says in the first episode it’s our duty to get justice for everyone that needs us. And by the end I don’t think she believes she can get justice for herself. In the end you see that she’s been kind of awakened, that Catherine has kind of almost impregnated her with this idea that she could have power, that she could take power back, that it might feel good.
SP: Did you ever have tough days because it’s a lot to take on and to process and live in for so long? Do you ever have days that were just really difficult for you?
Emmy Rossum:
The scene in episode eight where Alice watches the video was certainly a technically difficult scene and an emotionally difficult scene and a very harrowing scene. It is one where you are completely imagining what it is you are seeing and also looking at nothing because you are looking down the barrel of a lens. There’s nothing for you to see. You are imagining, spoiler alert, having to watch your teenage self be assaulted. So that’s a very harrowing place to be. And also then to step out of it after the take and talk about what’s working, what’s not working, because it’s like a minute of complete silence where you are just acting alone by yourself with your camera operator. Those are hard moments at the same time as you have to have strength because those moments in the story are deserving of your whole self.
SP: How do you approach stepping into that sadness, into that pain every single day and becoming her?
Emmy Rossum:
Because of the historical trauma she has obsessive tendencies and she gets very compulsively into her work, which makes her very great at her job. You find the parts of yourself that overlap with the person, at least for me, and enlarge those and then diminish the parts of yourself that are maybe in this case too available. And then for me it was having all these training experiences and spending as much time with law enforcement as I possibly could, getting snuck onto West Point, understanding interrogation techniques, understanding how to form bonds with suspects or how to form bonds with witnesses, understanding actually the acting element of the job, and then doing things that scared me so that it becomes second nature.
Question: With Alice, there are two sides to her. There’s the hard shell, then there’s the healing side…
Emmy Rossum:
There’s the hard shell and then there’s the healing side of her and there’s the part that’s yearning to be loved, yearning that she wasn’t so angry, yearning that she hadn’t been so hurt, yearning to trust. There’s that moment when Danny asks her if she wants to go to the shore with him in Jersey and she really wants to say yes, but she can’t because she doesn’t think she’s deserving of that kind of love. She knows that she’s too broken. She feels like damaged goods. She’s been hurt and used and abused since she was a child. And I don’t think she knows how to be next to that level of goodness. And then when he stays overnight and proves that he is the kind of person that wants to be around her, she opens up to him and says that she loves him. And it is this soft pure young thing. And then when he says he can’t do this you watch how quickly she just puts it back in the bottle.
Question: But then it ends with that slight smile. Can you tell me about that smile?
Emmy Rossum:
Well, it was scripted. I think it’s about seeing a mirror. I think it’s about seeing yourself reflected in that moment that there is a real connection between Alice and Catherine. I mean, since they were on the playground rooftop together like little kids and Alice undercover as Alex tells the story about how she was almost killed in the shower and she hadn’t washed the shampoo out of her hair. That’s what was going through her mind. I think that’s the one moment that she feels like she can tell the truth about herself to Catherine cuz she’s undercover and even though she’s lying to her and trying to get her to come in… I think she does feel this real connection with Catherine. And so when she goes to see her in jail at the end… Alice likes courting danger. She runs towards the fire and she’s always engaging in all kinds of risky behaviors. It’s a risk to go see Katherine. And I think in the end when Catherine knows what she did, Alice is certainly not going to admit it. But I think she has been filled with this power… and there is a little bit of a “oh well, the door has opened in me.”
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out the 50+ episodes of TV Topics, including one with Emmy’s co-star Rob Delaney on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube (and also on AwardsRadar.)
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