By Janet Susan R. Nepales
For Emmy Rossum, Hulu’s “Furious” is more than a crime drama: it is a story about contemporary womanhood, moral ambiguity and the uneasy line between justice and vengeance.
Rossum began performing as a child singer with the Metropolitan Opera, moved into television at 11 and made her film debut at 13.
Her breakthrough came with “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004), followed by her role as Christine Daaé in “The Phantom of the Opera” (2004), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination, a Critics Choice Award, and a Saturn Award.
Born and raised in New York City, Rossum has also directed and produced television, including the 2022 limited series “Angelyne,” in which she starred.
She now stars in and executive produces the crime drama “Furious,” playing FBI agent Alice Black, who is pursuing a calculating female serial killer.
In our exclusive interview, Rossum explained why the series became a passion project.
She revealed, “I love telling stories about contemporary womanhood, investigating all parts of humanity, playing in the moral gray area. And telling really entertaining stories that also have things that make us feel seen in ways that maybe we’re longing for more of. So, this was such a joy to make over the last three or four years.”
Loosely inspired by Ronald Bass’s 1987 film “Black Widow” and developed for television by Elizabeth Meriwether, the series follows Alice, a former NYPD homicide detective, as she investigates Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew), who targets wealthy, powerful men with lethal doses of fentanyl.
The cast also includes Scoot McNairy as Danny Kelly, Jake Lacy as Marshall Connelly, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Nora Washington. Hulu renewed the series for a second season in August 2026.
To prepare for the role, Rossum trained repeatedly with law-enforcement professionals.
She disclosed, “I certainly did more than once. I trained with current and former NYPD detectives and also current and former FBI agents. I went for training in Texas. I went to West Point. I did everything from weapons training to grenades to understanding how to interview and find common ground with suspects or victims. I thought deeply about the character’s personal history and worked with psychologists, mining real stories and also my own history to bring all of that to the role.”
Asked what drew her to two flawed women pursuing justice through radically different means, Rossum focused on the demands placed on victims.
“The system wants victims to be perfect to be deserving of justice, to be easy to understand for a jury,” she said. “People are flawed, and people have made mistakes and often had to compromise their own morality to survive. We’re seeing two characters who are more similar than they are different. They’re both looking for justice — or vengeance — for others, not even for themselves.”
LOLA PETTICREW
Rossum also praised Meriwether’s dark humor and the courage of co-stars Petticrew and Bernstine.
“Elizabeth or Liz is an amazing writer, and she is so funny and so deeply, darkly funny. And I think that she lets us also go to darker places. And Lola is an amazing performer who is really courageous, as is Quincy Tyler Bernstine.
“We have such an incredible cast of actors, and loved shooting in New York, loved casting in New York. It’s an amazing city where I grew up. So, I love that I’m getting to play a New Yorker too.”
At a global press conference, Rossum reflected on what might drive a woman to become a serial killer.
“I’m always curious about what it takes to push someone that far,” she said.
QUINCY TYLER BERNSTINE, EMMY ROSSUM
“What does it take for a woman to kill and then kill multiple times? That kind of engine inside, that kind of drive, and real focus and commitment to justice and vengeance. I think that the obsession that can come with finishing something is really fascinating, and so I think sometimes we turn to those stories to wonder if it touches or speaks to something in ourselves.
“Maybe we’re trying to learn as much as we can about how to protect ourselves. But maybe also, we’re wondering if there are pieces of ourselves that feel familiar in some way, and I found myself reading these scripts and then ultimately watching the show and Lola’s incredible performance and being like, ‘Am I identifying with a serial killer right now?’ You know what I mean? Hoping that they find their way in this mission. That kind of unearthing some of that within us is maybe what’s so delicious about it.”
EMMY ROSSUM, QUINCY TYLER BERNSTINE
As both lead actor and executive producer, how did she distinguish empathy for a character from sympathy for that character’s actions?
“Oh, that’s so interesting!” she exclaimed. “I probably should have. As an actor, when you approach a role, if you’re playing the good guy or the bad guy, your job is to approach everything with empathy. And when a character is different than you, that’s what’s so exciting to learn and excavate and cannibalize the parts of yourself that are the darkest that scare you to cannibalize things about your own life and your history for the purpose of bringing the character’s world to life and connecting and touching people that are ultimately watching this.
“Storytelling is at its strongest when it confronts something in us,” Rossum said. “This is a very different character from any I’ve played: she’s internal, reserved, and disconnected from herself. Both women need extremes to feel because of the violence in their pasts.”
“I feel everything deeply, so I had to find my way into someone who disconnects from softer parts of herself — both as a survivor of violence and as a law-enforcement officer working in a male-dominated, high-intensity field year after year.”
“There are dark parts of this role and ways in which both of these characters are exhibiting really risky, dangerous behaviors, but I think that Liz sets a fire, and then as the actors, our job is to run towards it and figure it out.”
Alice’s trauma also creates a central paradox: the traits that complicate her personal life sharpen her professional instincts.
How did Rossum sustain that duality, showing that Alice’s interpersonal limitations are inseparable from her effectiveness as an investigator?
“Wow, I wish I had had that summary of my character before I went in,” she replied. It’s so great to hear that that’s resonating and working, so thanks for reflecting on that.
“Sometimes our superpowers can also be the things that are the trickiest parts about us. The reason that my character has such a magnetic instinct about the Catherine character is that they are really kind of mirrors of each other. We’re going to find out they’re so much more similar than they are different.
“Both women are deeply flawed and striving for justice and vengeance,” she said. “Alice has stopped believing she can obtain justice for herself, so she seeks it on a larger scale. Catherine is outside the law, while Alice still works within a system she knows has failed her.”
Finally, we asked Rossum what makes her furious.
She shared, “There is a fury there at society, women as a whole, what women have endured. You can’t just make it about one predator, because you could throw a dart and hit a lot of predators who have been in the news over the course of the last 25 years or forever.”
Janet Susan R. Nepales is an award-winning journalist and the first Filipina voting member and Associate of the Golden Globe Awards. She has been a member since 2008 and is the first Filipina to be elected to the Advisory Board. She is the author of the coffee table book “FASHION. Filipino. Hollywood. The World” and the co-author of the first FWN book “DISRUPT: Filipina Women: Proud. Loud. Leading Without A Doubt.” A graduate of UST (AB Journalism, cum laude), she is based in Los Angeles and is a Hollywood entertainment journalist and TV correspondent.
