Emmy Rossum’s Furious Asks: What Makes a Female Serial Killer?

Warning: spoilers for episodes 1-3 of Furious

In Furious, now streaming on Hulu, an FBI agent hunts a serial killer—a familiar setup, except that in this procedural series, hunter and hunted are both women, and both survivors. Emmy Rossum plays Alice Black, an agent and domestic abuse survivor on the trail of Catherine (Lola Petticrew), a trafficking survivor methodically killing the men who abused her as part of a criminal conspiracy that evokes Jeffrey Epstein. Created by Elizabeth Meriwether (New Girl, Dying for Sex), the series arrives at a moment when its questions about justice, vengeance, and the treatment of women by society’s systems barely qualify as fiction.

Rossum, who is also an executive producer, has been nurturing the project for years. After nine seasons playing Fiona Gallagher on Shameless—and a memorable sojourn portraying another iconoclast, billboard queen Angelyne, in a 2022 miniseries—Rossum set out in search of another female character with real depth. The New York City native, who grew up performing onstage and onscreen, spent a summer watching old films and found Black Widow, the 1987 thriller starring Debra Winger as a federal agent obsessed with a female serial killer—and the seed of what would, with Meriwether, become Furious.

“You’re wondering, are they going to kill each other or kiss?” Rossum tells W. “I just thought, well, this is really interesting—that you can be hunting something and attracted to it.”

In Furious, your character Alice is unnerving from the first episode. What drew you to that psychology?

Liz would write a scene that would terrify me to play—like the one in the pilot, where my character, who has been in a traumatic, violent relationship in her past, invites strangers to her house to fight them. And that still turns her on. The wreckage of her past is so tangled with her sexuality and her sense of herself. Liz and I shadowed current and former FBI agents and NYPD officers, and came to understand the women who have done these jobs for decades. In order to do this work for many years, and to be great at it, you have to have a certain hypervigilance and disconnection from the more tender parts of yourself. I think Alice needs that level of intensity to feel anything. We see how disconnected from her body she is, and the same resonates for Catherine. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Catherine is a serial killer, and yet the show asks us to empathize with her. Do you think it justifies her actions?

I would never say violence is justified, full stop. But I think there is a level of fury, and a line between justice and vengeance. Alice is looking for justice for people as a whole, but not necessarily for herself. Catherine seeks justice as a greater good—but really, vengeance, because she’s been let down by the justice system and does not believe it can work for her. She was a sex worker. She was trafficked. And we know from what Nora says in the first episode the way our justice system sees women who have been trafficked and taken money for sex, regardless of whether they were high or not in control of their own bodies. In our story, the line between being a good guy and being a bad guy is much thinner than we’re used to seeing. That’s what’s so exciting about it.

The show's title refers to women’s anger. Why did you want to tap into that?

Furious gets its name—Liz is so brilliant—from the Furies, the Greek goddesses who fly through the night sky enacting vengeance. These two characters have a lot to be angry about. We don’t always have to agree with what our characters are doing to understand and empathize with the feelings that motivate those actions.

What did training with the FBI look like?

I was lucky: I had a long runway to speak with our consultants and then train in Texas and at West Point with current and former FBI agents, and to shadow police. Weapons training was very important to me. I’m certainly not someone who has a lot of experience with weapons in my personal life, and for Alice, the weapon had to be an extension of her body. I had a plastic gun that I would wear in my office at all times—I would not go onto the street or into my home with it—and I had an alarm on my phone set for every three minutes. As I was doing my work, learning lines, when the alarm went off, I would pull it and point it at various targets, so that I maintained that sense of readiness in my body: holstering without looking, pulling without looking.

The show is also grounded in the reality of sex trafficking. What research went into portraying that responsibly?

Women who had been trafficked spoke to us and to the writers’ room, and Lola Petticrew—who gives such an incredible performance—and I were given long transcripts of those conversations so we could study and understand them. We also worked with psychologists who specialize in trauma, trafficking, and domestic violence. I spoke to about three different specialists, for instance, concerning Alice’s specific hand movements, which are scripted, and about how trauma lives in the body. It was crucial to us that we were not sensationalizing any of it, that we were grounding it in the real, lived experience of what is going on in cities all over the world right now, as we talk.