The Shards Star Igby Rigney on Stepping Into Bret Easton Ellis’s Twisted Youth

Igby Rigney’s acting career began on a dare. The New York native and star of FX’s The Shards was spending a summer at camp, happily passing the days playing guitar, when someone challenged him to audition for the production of The Pirates of Penzance. “I thought it would be so silly and goofy, but I fucking loved it,” he recalls of his first experience onstage.

Now 23 and living full-time in Los Angeles, Rigney has moved well beyond playing pirates on makeshift upstate stages. His credits include Blue Bloods, the 2020 drama Joe Bell—“I guess the Wahlbergs really liked me”—and three Mike Flanagan projects, including 2023’s The Fall of the House of Usher. But his latest role, as a teenage Bret Easton Ellis in Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of the author’s 2023 autofictional horror novel, is undoubtedly his buzziest yet.

In The Shards, Rigney anchors an ensemble of relative newcomers including Homer Gere—the son of Richard Gere, who caught the public’s attention earlier this year on Euphoria—alongside more familiar names like Evan Rachel Wood and Kaia Gerber. The series follows a group of privileged teens as they embark on their senior year in 1981 Los Angeles. Drugs are as accessible as their parents’ bank accounts, and from their homes in the Hollywood Hills, they seem to rule the world. But when mysterious new student Robert Mallory (Gere) enrolls at their elite high school just as a gruesome murderer begins picking off their classmates one by one, their gilded lives start to unravel.

There is a fanbase already baked into a project like The Shards. Murphy devotees will tune in for the creator’s signature maximalism—and will find plenty of it here—while Ellis diehards will be eager to assess the latest adaptation of his work. Rigney, who serves as both narrator and emotional tether for the story’s often flippant characters, is remarkably calm about the expectations surrounding the series. He acknowledges that the show occasionally departs from its source material but isn’t particularly concerned about how purists will respond. “I think they’re justified,” he says of the changes. “There are hours of driving in the book. That would have felt a bit repetitive onscreen.”

In conversation, Rigney has an easygoing air that is worlds away from the uptight, increasingly paranoid Bret he plays. Between gushing about his castmates, he says he has wanted to work with Murphy for “five-ever”—one degree beyond forever.

It is, admittedly, charming. Rigney approaches the project with the kind of reverence perhaps found only in young actors who have not yet been jaded by the industry. Before his audition, he deliberately avoided reading the novel. “I got such a beautiful scene from the pilot, and I wanted to respect the material on the page,” he says. Though Murphy appreciated the impulse, he asked Rigney to return once he’d done his homework.

So Rigney listened to the book on Audible instead. Because Ellis narrates the audiobook himself, the format proved particularly useful as the actor developed Bret’s voice. Rigney never actually spoke directly with Ellis, but it’s clear he studied the recording closely. At moments, his performance verges on impersonation, especially in the weighty cadence he adopts. But the heightened effect feels at home within both the Murphy universe and the show’s vision of early-’80s Los Angeles, an era when excess and exaggeration reigned.

Born in Westchester, New York in 2003, Rigney relished the opportunity to inhabit a period so removed from his own. “The cars, the costumes, the hair—it really helped set the tone,” he says. Those details also helped him separate himself from Bret, an important distinction when the character and his friends are enmeshed in a world of lies, satanic cults, and a serial killer dubbed the Trawler. “The setting removed the character from my actual life,” Rigney says. “Looking like a different person in the mirror was super helpful.”

That doesn’t mean the shoot was always easy. There are scenes in which Rigney acts opposite a severed head and a knife-wielding maniac. Still, the most difficult day for him came when Bret and his friends appear on the popular after-school show Dance Off! “I am not a dancer,” Rigney says with a laugh.

Listening to Rigney discuss The Shards, one could almost forget that the series deals in murder, mental illness, and sexuality. He prefers to focus on the more joyful parts of the experience, like his friendship with Gere. Onscreen, Gere’s character Robert is Bret’s foil: His cool smile and calculated tilt of the sunglasses repeatedly unsettle the high-strung, suspicious Bret. Off camera, Rigney insists the two became the best of friends. “We were both so supportive of each other’s work,” he says. He likens their onscreen dynamic to “a really good game of tennis,” invoking Challengers, a comparison that feels fitting given the sexual tension coursing through The Shards. “We were just bouncing back and forth, and I was like, ‘Oh God, this is the stuff.’”

That camaraderie has continued beyond the set. The cast is currently promoting the series, attending red carpets and appearing on morning shows together. It’s clear that they’re having fun— especially with fashion, as Rigney has stepped out in a series of statement looks. The public appearances and parties are a welcome light-hearted change of pace for Rigney. He reflects on times, later in the production, when he felt isolated from his co-stars. “The group scenes in the early days were great,” he says with a hint of nostalgia. “But post-Trawler, I just had to stare longingly in the distance, reminding myself that people were being kidnapped and none of these fools fucking cared.” These days, at least, he is back to being silly and goofy.