Your bag is empty.
“Rage doesn’t scare me because rage, I think, is fear and desperation kind of unleashed,” Emmy Rossum says about the intense emotion coursing through her probational FBI agent Alice Black in the new TV series Furious. “What scared me about the character was her complexity…I wanted to embrace her wholeheartedly. She’s just like the killer, who is also a victim of violence.” Rossum’s traumatized former NYPD homicide detective has left the department to escape an abusive cop ex-boyfriend (Jake Lacy). She’s pursuing a diabolical female serial killer (Lola Petticrew) exacting revenge on the men who preyed on her as a girl.
Rossum’s own childhood pursuits were more elevated. At age seven she started singing in the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus, after her second-grade teacher suggested auditioning. By 11, she was acting on a soap opera, and has been performing ever since.
To get in fighting shape for this role, Rossum—who previously transformed herself into a mysterious billboard bombshell for Angelyne, and played the fierce Fiona Gallagher on Shameless—trained with a former FBI agent. Alice’s tenaciousness came naturally. “I can certainly relate to being totally obsessed with your work. Being kind of a dog with a bone. In wanting to do the impossible when people think it might not be possible [and] don’t believe in your idea as much as you believe in it,” she says. “Since I was a kid, I’ve had this kind of engine inside me. I love doing things and making things and being creative…even if I’m exhausted at the end of the day.”
Rossum recharges at the Manhattan home she shares with her husband, writer-director Sam Esmail, and their two kids, ages 3 and 5. Ahead of the show’s launch on Hulu, the thirty-nine-year-old talked about performing a violent sex scene, what working with Sean Penn taught her, Esmail’s bathtub marriage proposal, how her “Virgo perfectionism” manifests itself, and more.
I read that when you were making Mystic River, Sean Penn told you that you should be picky and only take roles that are fun. Is that true?
Probably something like that. I think fun for me is something that’s a challenge, like a [character that’s a] deeply layered onion that I’m struggling to get to the inside of. A lot of the fun of [acting] is getting to play people that are so different from yourself or, alternatively, getting to channel things that are very familiar. What I was most struck by when I worked with Sean was his complete security in knowing he had a process and being unafraid to let the crew see it. I found that to be really bold and amazing. Coming from a more rigid background in opera, I had to show up and get it right on the first take. And he had a way of kind of…. you got to see how the sausage was being made. That was really profound because it impacted the way I would go onto future sets.
You said ambition and wanting to be in the driver’s seat of your life is not something to be shied away from. That being “likable should not be the focus.” Was there a particular experience that made you adopt that attitude?
Ambition sometimes has a negative connotation when you apply it to a woman, and I don’t think it should. I don’t know if there was a specific instance. But I was really inspired by watching the filmmakers and actors who were in the driver’s seat of their lives, who did have opinions and were able to communicate that.
I bet most of those filmmakers were men, so were you adopting a male attitude?
Yeah. But I think there are also feminine qualities that are powerful, like knowing how to take care of your crew. Like knowing how to feed people.That’s very traditionally feminine, but feeding people is my love language. I think that there are ways in which women take care of the people around them that are very, very powerful, and can go hand in hand with being ambitious.
In Furious, Alice doesn’t care if she’s liked. She’s thorny, and her kink is violent sex. What was it like to act that out? Did you have a body double?
It was me. She was in a relationship that was dominated by control and violence. That’s led to a relationship with her sexual self that is quite thorny. The parts that are desiring physical intensity, and inviting people into her house to fight before she kicks them out and masturbates. That scene [in the first episode], I really had to work around my own fears of what we were saying about her. Liz [Furious creator Elizabeth Meriwether] is so bold. She likes to set a fire, and I like to run to it. The actor I was working with, we initially worked on choreography with our stunt coordinator to learn how to do the fight. I would rehearse with the male stunt double, and [he] would rehearse with the female stunt double, so that we could really understand the mechanics of the moves.
At one point, Scoot McNary’s NYPD detective tells Alice that the FBI has made her a good liar. She replies that she’s always been one. How about you?
That’s a loaded question! I feel like as a young teenager, I was definitely—not a good liar, but I certainly knew how to lie to my mom. My mom was very, very protective, and I was—Yeah, I think I definitely knew how to lie about where I had been. Or I believe there was an incident with me maybe hiding things in my room that I didn’t want her to find early on in my young mid-teens.
Illicit things?
Sure! Things on the fire escape that she might not find if she was looking for things in my room. I definitely had the instinct, as I think all kids do, to hide things from their parents.
Speaking of children, your son is three, and your daughter is five. What if one or both of them has talent and wants to start performing professionally in a couple of years? You haven’t even revealed their names, so I’m guessing that’s a hard “no.”
Well, here’s what it is because I can already tell that they kind of do [have talent]. They’re naturally very imaginative and very curious and very empathic. I mean, everybody thinks their kids are the coolest kids in the whole world. I was really lucky that I had a mom who was an artist, [a professional photographer] and believed that the pursuit of art as a profession was a noble thing to do. My husband, on the other hand, grew up with two parents who never wanted him to be a filmmaker. They wanted him to be a lawyer or doctor, or, you know, a safer profession. I can understand that. But if my kids wanted to do it—I can’t imagine sending my daughter out onto a stage in two years. That, to me, sounds crazy. But I suppose if they wanted to do it, I would have some caveats. Like, you can do it in the summer. But you gotta stay in school.
Pay parity is something that came up for you again recently when you revealed that your Shameless salary battle ended “within a day” of it becoming public in 2016. Now that you’re producing your own projects, Angeline and Furious, are you much more conscious of equal-pay issues?
I think the industry as a whole is more conscious of it. The fact that we [as producers] are no longer allowed to ask for [pay] quotes in negotiation, because you’re not supposed to be basing it on that. So I think there is an evolution of the conversation. But pay parity is not just a male-female thing. When you take into account, you know, race, body size, age, height, sexuality, these inequalities are undeniable. And so I think that my success was a drop in the bucket for positive change.
About the Shameless cast, you said that it was impossible not to be close, that you were “enmeshed” in each other’s lives after spending so much time together for nine years. Are you still in touch with everyone? Have you spoken to Jeremy Allen White since his The Bear success?
Yes. I’m so incredibly proud of him, and the whole cast is just incredible and thriving. This summer, there’s a game night some of them are coming to. There’s a boat trip. We’re going to go see some dolphins on Perry’s [Mattfield]’s boat. It’s hard though because I live in New York, and they all live in LA.
When you were young, you said that you liked intensity in relationships. You had a short marriage at 21 and as you were contemplating saying “yes” to the proposal, you were already thinking about how you’d get a divorce. With Sam, you said it was a “slow burn” until you two eventually broke an L-shaped couch. When he asked you to marry him—I read that you were in a bathtub—were there any thoughts of an exit strategy?
No, never. It was so completely different. I was having very intense menstrual cramps that day. So I was in the bathtub, and we would ordinarily read the Modern Love section of the New York Times together. But I couldn’t even read that day. I was like, “I’m just getting in the bath.” And he was disappointed because I don’t think he wanted the proposal to be with me in the bath. But I was, and he came into the bathroom, and I was kind of soaking there, cramping. And he knelt down by the side of the bathtub and said, “Okay, well, I really think you should read it.” And I was like, “Fine, okay, I’ll read it in the tub.” And I opened it up, and what I didn’t know was that he had reached out to [editor] Daniel Jones, and gotten the [layout] for everything. He had written our love story, and had it printed on newspaper, and even put a fake ad for a Ralph Lauren bag on the bottom of the page. It really looked seamless. So when I started reading the story of the couple and realized it was our story, I thought he had actually put the proposal in the real newspaper and didn’t realize it was just for us. But it was a slam-dunk “yes.” And then I … took some Advil and we went to a really nice dinner.
When you first met and worked together on Comet, you said that you would wonder what he was thinking or doing. Is your connection such now that you always know?
I think I felt that other people that I had dated were rather opaque. And maybe that’s also a way of me saying they weren’t always honest. That they weren’t always forthright, that they weren’t always faithful. And that sometimes it took me a while to figure that out. With Sam, I have always felt that he was actually quite transparent. I’ve found him to be almost incapable of lying, almost to a fault. He is incredibly communicative [and] I always feel like my heart is in really good hands. We are very transparent with each other. I mean, it’s only, like 9:20 AM, but we’ve had 10 conversations already today.
You’ve mentioned your “Virgo perfectionism.” Are your sun signs compatible?
I have no idea. All I know is [we] are both Virgos, so it’s a big Virgo house. We are very organized, very focused. There’s a lot of labels in our house. There’s a place for everything. And we don’t have a lot of stuff. We live in an apartment in New York. Our kids probably have more stuff than we do, but everything has a place. When we designed our apartment, we made a closet that cannibalized some of a pantry so that it would be deep enough to push strollers all the way in. That has transitioned into the bike and scooter closet now. We really prioritize experiences over stuff, and we like to live kind of a “no more than 10 pairs of pants” life.
Do you have favorite films that you watch over and over again?
Julia Roberts movies. They are so feel-good, like Notting Hill, My Best Friend’s Wedding. I also love The Family Stone. Yeah, I like big happy ensemble comedies. I would say the film that I have probably watched the most in my life, that had such an impact on me as a child is Mrs. Doubtfire. I love it so much because inherently that story was kind of answering a childhood prayer of mine. I grew up without my dad and in that movie, the dad [Robin Williams] is going through a divorce and will stop at nothing, even insane tactics, to be present in his kids’ lives. And for me, the idea of a parent wanting so much to be there, that they would do anything—including create another character— so they could be present for you. I know every line in that film, all of the jokes. Some of it doesn’t quite hold up [viewed] with today’s eyes. But it was very meaningful to me as a kid.
You’re a huge Knicks fan, and said that you’re obsessed with basketball. You respond to the “emotional narrative” in the players’ faces. You want to see their drive. Any other sports that do that for you?
I do love sports where you can really see the interactions. I like tennis for that reason. I started to get into a bit of soccer during the World Cup because you could see the interactions with the players. But it’s very hard for me to connect to hockey or football because I can’t really get a sense of the drama between the players. I really want to understand kind of who they are.
How much time do you spend on your phone?
Too much. I mean, in my defense, I feel like a lot of my communication happens on the phone. My workout happens on my phone, my meditation happens on my phone. Therapy is virtual for me now. So I feel like there are a lot of hours clocked that are beneficial. But I do set timers and limits, and I do try to leave it on the dock when I get home. I don’t want it in and around my kids.
Do you have a favorite behind-the-scenes career memory?
I did a movie [Grace & Glorie] when I was maybe 12 with Gena Rowlands and Diane Lane, and I just remember how incredibly warm and welcoming they were. So many actresses that I’ve worked with when I was a child were like that. Ellen Burstyn [whom] I worked with when I was 11 or 12 [on the miniseries A Will of Their Own]. I just remember thinking they were so kind and professional and knew how to set the tone on set for younger actors, and that felt very cool to be around.
What’s your favorite thing to do during your downtime when you’re not working?
I love to write. I like to write short stories. I like to sit in [Central] Park at the Reservoir and at the little duck pond. I like to paint with my kids. I like to make stuff with clay. I like to make new recipes.
Will you ever try and get the stories published?
Yeah, one of them is actually gonna be published in September, I believe, in Guernica.
What’s your guilty pleasure TV show?
Real Housewives of Rhode Island. I haven’t done a full deep-dive into why Liz [McGraw] is leaving. But she will be missed because she was a real part of that show.
Sam was raised Muslim, and you were raised Jewish. You got married at Central Synagogue in New York City. We live in an increasingly fractured world. I’m wondering if your personal experience has given you any insight into how people can get along better.
Well, obviously, what’s happening in the world is heartbreaking and a horrifying situation. As a mother, I watch what’s happening to those children [in Gaza], and me and my husband are both devastated. I don’t think any mother can look at that and not be horrified. I fell in love with my husband, and he fell in love with me. We got married in a synagogue with a female cantor, who was raised Buddhist and Jewish, and our ceremony was in English, Arabic, and Hebrew. I can only speak for myself because I’m certainly not an authority on the issue. But our house is about love and togetherness and respect.