Emmy Rossum and Liz Meriwether’s latest Hulu collaboration, Furious, portrays women who aren’t just fed up—they’re taking action.
In the drama, Rossum takes on the role of FBI Agent Alice Black, a former NYPD officer on the trail of a female serial killer, played by Lola Petticrew, who targets influential men. Petticrew’s character is fueled by deep-seated rage that sparks her killing spree, while Rossum’s Alice is driven by her own past trauma, allowing her to channel her anger into the pursuit of the suspect. Essentially, these characters are done with mere frustration—they are making decisive moves.
Rossum explained to DECIDER about portraying such intense emotion, noting, “Rage is complex; while often seen as destructive in society—and especially unsuitable for Alice’s profession—it’s also a powerful motivator. Alice isn’t initially conscious of her own fury until she starts accepting how it drives her. Rage might be misunderstood, but it carries potent energy that can unify and inspire collective action.”
Rage may seem an intuitive basis for dramatic storytelling, yet it’s an unexpected theme for Meriwether, celebrated for her comedic successes in series like New Girl and Single Parents. Though she hadn’t delved deeply into anger in her previous work, she found crafting these intense emotions to be both freeing and challenging, capturing a new facet of human nature.
Meriwether reflected, “As a comedy writer, deflecting emotion with humor has been my usual go-to. Writing Furious called for me to confront anger more directly on the page, which was a refreshing and somewhat uneasy shift. While it felt strange, embracing the discomfort allowed me to explore and express anger creatively in a way I hadn’t before.”
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.