Furious star Emmy Rossum believes ‘there should be more stories about women than men’

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If you’re not already watching Furious, you’ve probably heard your friends talking about it.

It’s the thriller taking the TV world by storm after launching in the UK on Disney Plus. Shameless star Emmy Rossum plays Alice Black, an FBI agent who’s hunting down a female serial killer and who has also suffered violence in her past.

While there are shows out there like Killing Eve, which centred on the cut-throat assassin Villanelle, serial killer dramas still tend to focus on male antagonists. That change in dynamic was one of the reasons why actor and executive producer Emmy wanted to work on Furious.

‘I was looking for a character that was as rich and dynamic as the one that I played on Shameless for so long,’ she told Metro, having played Fiona in the US version of the series for eight years.

Around three or four years ago, Emmy came across the 1987 psychological thriller Black Widow, which follows a federal investigator played by Debra Winger who embarks on a search to catch a female serial killer who marries wealthy men and then murders them.

‘The second that I finished the movie, I thought, “Well, that’s it. That’s the perfect shape,”’ she recalled. ‘The dynamics are there. The idea of an FBI agent, a woman hunting a female serial killer, it feels fresh. It feels exciting.

‘The dynamics that were at play within the FBI office – Debra Winger encountered men underestimating her, and she had to go rogue and exist in this moral grey area because she was so underestimated and no one believed in her. That resonated deeply for me as a woman, having to zag when everyone else is zigging, and pursuing something that she really believed in. So, I thought this was ripe for adaptation.’

From there, Emmy was ‘able to set it up and to get Liz Meriwether interested in it’, who some people might know best as the creator of fan-favourite sitcom New Girl. One might wonder how a show as serious as this could be infused with humour – but it sounds as though that came naturally.

‘Humour is something that really came through, a dark humour, in all the law enforcement that we met. It’s almost a coping mechanism, and I think that the darker our story gets, the more that we need humour to kind of break it up,’ Emmy explained.

‘I have always been interested in the absurdity of life, the ways in which we use humour as survival and coping mechanisms. Walking the tonal line for so many years on Shameless between high tragedy and high comedy is something that feels very natural to me.’

According to research conducted by Penn State University psychology professor Marissa Harrison and her colleagues in 2015, ‘one in six serial killers are female’.

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Reporting on the research, The British Psychological Society states: ‘Harrison and her team highlight several noticeable patterns in the data: a greater proportion of the women, as compared with the general population, had: a history of having been physically or sexually abused; drug or alcohol problems; and a diagnosis or signs of mental illness.’

Emmy outlined how she and Furious creator Liz were both inspired by the film Black Widow, as it ‘really sparked something in both of us of systemic failures, of the rage that exists in women, of why a female serial killer would be killing’.

‘All female serial killers are victims of violence, and I think that was something that resonated deeply for me and Liz.’

In a 2025 study of 15 female serial killers by Walden University, it stated: ‘Key common characteristics identified include having histories of child abuse and exposure to domestic and parental mental health/substance abuse issues as well as a poor mother-child relationship that negatively impacted future development.’

While Furious is fictional, Liz did a ‘phenomenal amount of research’ for the story, including delving into ‘the FBI, the NYPD, female serial killers, human trafficking, speaking to former sex workers and people that had been trafficked, women, and really getting inside of this’.

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‘I was able to also spend a phenomenal amount of time with former FBI, former NYPD, current FBI and current NYPD, physical training, weapons training, everything from guns to grenades. I did it all,’ Emmy, 40, said.

‘It was an incredible shift within me that I felt, and this other door that opened to this other way of experiencing life with hyper vigilance, with reading every room as if there could be a threat, and really understanding what being in law enforcement is and that identity.’

Emmy’s character Alice is ‘complicated’, because she’s ‘not just looking for justice for others; she’s also a victim of violence herself’.

‘So I think women can be so full of contradictions,’ she continued. ‘You can be both a person that could be powerful and also be overpowered, and I think that there’s a lot of tenderness in the character, a lot of complexity, and this dark humour that’s also very delicious.’

Ahead of the launch of Furious, fans inevitably drew comparisons to Killing Eve, in which Jodie Comer played one of TV’s greatest villains ever, an assassin with lethal skills.

Describing the BBC drama as an ‘incredible piece of art’, Emmy addressed the comparisons, saying that it was ‘great company to be in’.

‘I think the more stories about women, the better,’ she said. ‘There are more women on Earth than men, so there should be slightly more stories about women than there are about men.

‘We’re still not there, and I think that we want to see ourselves reflected. Not just an aspirational version of what we wish our life would be. We want to see our realness reflected. We want to see guts and all. And I think we want to see our rage reflected too, in the way that we feel that the world has let us down, not shown up for us, not serviced us, not given us the justice that we deserve.

‘The idea of this perfect victim, that you have to be a certain way, you can never have made any mistakes in order to be deserving of justice, it’s wildly unfair, and certainly makes me very ragey.’

Furious is available to stream on Disney Plus.

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