In Emmy Rossum and Liz Meriwether‘s new Hulu series, Furious, the women aren’t just getting mad; they’re getting even.
In Furious, Rossum stars as FBI Agent Alice Black, a former NYPD detective tracking down a female serial killer (Lola Petticrew) who is going after high-powered men. On the side of Petticrew’s character, there’s the pent-up anger that is driving her murder spree, but on the side of Rossum’s character, there is a trauma that enables her to tap into that reserve of wrath and hunt down her suspect. In short, these women are mad as hell and are actually doing something about it.
“Rage is an interesting thing because it can certainly be dangerous in society and is not helpful, especially for Alice in her job. She needs to be very removed from that heat, but she has a lot of drive. But I think that she’s really unaware of the level of her own rage and is really kind of starting to embrace and understand how it’s governing her and leading her in a way that she’s not aware of at first,” Rossum told DECIDER of channeling that strong emotion in this performance. “I think that rage probably gets a bad rep, but there’s a lot of energy behind it and it can be a connector, and it can galvanize a movement.”
While rage seems like a perfectly natural jumping-off point for any writer worth their salt to base a show around, it could be perceived as a head-scratcher for Meriwether, who is best known for her work in comedy. The New Girl and Single Parents creator may not have had much experience writing pure ire in many of her other projects, but she describes it as a liberating (if not slightly difficult) experience in capturing another side of humanity in her characters.
“I’m a comedy writer; I mean, before this show, I kind of mostly had written comedy and I think as somebody who writes comedy, I am a very good deflector. I think I use comedy sometimes to deflect from feeling feelings like anger, so it was interesting writing this show because I had to get a little bit more comfortable with anger on the page. Not even in real life, but like writing angry scenes and things. That was interesting and uncomfortable for me in a good way,” Meriwether said.
Meriwether said that it did help while writing the show to remember, however, that anger and rage cannot exist in a vacuum, and that every character has to experience the full breadth of humanity. It also allows the project to transition from a black-widow cat-and-mouse game to a narrative about trauma and the wide array of things that can happen to any person who lets their physical, emotional, and psychological wounds go untreated.
“I think there is a lot of rage in the show, but it’s not the only thing in this show. If the answer was just, ‘Let’s all get angry together,’ it wouldn’t make for a good television. It sort of explores the feeling of anger and then also explores how it can trap you, how it can feel so good, but then ultimately not feel good in the end. It’s hopefully digging into the experience of being a victim and just how complicated and messy that can be and lead to a lot of different roads that someone can go down,” Merriweather said.
For Rossum, it also allows for her own character to see Petticrew’s as much more than just a scorned woman on a path for vengeance or some heartless killer. Seeing one woman who has been harmed and taken advantage of go after justice — the DIY karmic kind, that is — might even allow for her to explore how she, too, can find a sense of retribution for a crime that has gone unpunished.
“The connection between these women and the kind of like invisible thread between them of sisterhood, how we realize that they’re more similar than they are different, it’s very powerful,” Rossum said. “In fact, Alice will start to wonder if the quest for vengeance that this killer is on is not stirring something within her and the justice that she quietly seeks for herself.”
The first three episodes of Furious are now streaming on Hulu. New episodes release Mondays.