Jake Lacy says one of the things that drew him to Hulu’s new series Furious was creator Elizabeth Meriwether’s commitment to writing characters who feel like real people rather than familiar television archetypes.
The series stars Emmy Rossum as FBI agent Alice Black, who is tracking a mysterious female serial killer while being forced to confront her own past. Lacy plays Marshall, Alice’s former partner, whose complicated history with her unfolds throughout the season.
During the cast’s exclusive interview with BLKCinema.com , Lacy discussed why he appreciated Meriwether’s approach to Marshall and how the show’s emotional story works alongside its crime thriller.
Jake Lacy says Elizabeth Meriwether approached Marshall with ‘specificity and care’
Lacy said his early conversations with Meriwether made it clear she wanted Marshall to be more than a stock television villain.
“I spoke to Liz and she described how she wanted Marshall to be or how she envisioned Marshall,” he said. “And sometimes people have the best of intentions and then can’t really execute that. The reason that tropes of the bad boyfriend or the dirty cop exist is because they’re easy. It’s easy to go to that as a story point to go like, ‘Yeah,’ and then they do this thing and it moves the story ahead.”
Instead, Lacy said Meriwether gave every major character a level of depth that made the material more rewarding to perform.
“And it’s really a huge credit to Liz that each of these characters, without care and talent and some courage to investigate these characters fully, could just be two-dimensional kind of rote characters in a cop show,” he said. “At least for me, I felt like the writing, the backstory for Marshall, the dynamic between Alice and Marshall, all of it was treated with such specificity and care without kid gloves, which made it really fulfilling to work on this and try to then fulfill that thing that she’s set this bar for what the story is.”
‘Furious’ blends a crime thriller with a character drama
Lacy also said the relationship between Alice and Marshall gives the series another layer beyond its central murder investigation.
“And to have this character tension running alongside a whodunit kind of cat-and-mouse thing is so fun,” he said. “The story’s constantly shifting between one of those elements and the other and that they inform one another.”
He contrasted Furious with police procedurals that rely on simple character motivations.
“As opposed to just being like—I don’t want to name names—but there’s some cop shows where you go like, ‘He’s got a bad attitude because his daughter’s going through it.’ And you’re like, ‘Hold on, that’s the whole thing?’ And this gives you the actual human reasons as to why people are making the choices they’re making. Yeah, all credit to Liz.”
The first three episodes of Furious are now streaming on Hulu.
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