Furious is heating up with episode 5, “Pick a Sticker.”
FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) is on the hunt for Catherine (Lola Petticrew), a serial killer on a quest of vengeance. But Alice’s pursuit is being threatened by her abusive ex, Marshall (Jake Lacy), who reported that she pulled a gun on him.
Alice’s boss, Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), tells her to straighten it out, or else she’ll be pulled from the investigation. Digging into the antihero-ness of it all, Alice decides to invite Marshall to her apartment, where she seduces him and gets him drunk to break his sobriety.
In an interview with Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko, Rossum spoke to this scene in particular.
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“We called that the whiskey waterboarding scene,” Rossum explained. “It’s a really intense scene on a number of levels.”
She said, “You have my character [Alice] who’s really been pushed into a corner in her job, who is having her job threatened because she tried to protect herself, because she pulled a gun on him to basically tell him [the abuse is] not going to happen again. He’s used that against her to gain an upper hand in this case — and again, to kind of control her. And you have her understanding that unless she does something, she’s sidelined [in the investigation]. And she knows that she has to make him fall back on his sobriety, because that’s the only way to make people question the veracity of his potential statement against her.”
Speaking to how the scene was shot, Rossum, who is also a producer on Furious, shared, “We knew how complicated it would be emotionally for us as actors, physically for us as actors. We obviously had an intimacy coordinator and a fight coordinator. And we spent a day or two after work in the days leading up to it, blocking, rehearsing, and working through the beats of the scene, understanding the scene in the space, and really talking about all the ways in which these scenes can bring things up for you that can be vulnerable.
“And at the same time,” Rossum added, “When you’re in the great hands of [Furious creator and showrunner] Liz Meriwether, and you have a trusted crew around you, and another actor who is as brilliant and as professional as Jake [Lacy] is — I mean, we shot that scene, that section for about two days. It was really interesting and complicated. And I think once we started getting into the blocking of it, we felt like we knew it was going to work.”
Furious is now streaming on Hulu, with new episodes every Monday through Aug. 31.
