In the midst of a rainy July afternoon in New York, V spoke with Emmy Rossum, the spunky former Shameless actor and founder of her own production company Composition 8. Rossum embraces her natural and voluminous curls and dawns a “summery” beaded Net-A-Porter necklace as she discusses her latest project which she both stars in and served as an executive producer: Hulu’s Furious created by Elizabeth Meriwether.

Furious unpacts the complexities of the justice system through an ongoing case involving a female serial killer. Rossum plays Alice Black, a former NYPD detective who joins the FBI to follow the case of a young woman killing a string of men as a means for revenge. But as the eight episode mini-series plays out, the audience may find the agent and killer are more similar than they are different.

Below, Rossum passionately expresses the fascinating realities she learned about the FBI industry, her eventful weapons training experience, how a niche 1987 film inspired her latest project and why she’s never backing down from fear.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

V Magazine: Can I say… this is one of the coolest pieces of media that I’ve ever watched. I really hope it resonates with audiences. I’m literally floored. I sobbed during the last episode. That was so moving.

Emmy Rossum: Let’s just end the interview now. I’m gonna cry. Thank you so much. It feels so nice. I’ve spent three or four years working on this, so to have it come to fruition and to be able to share it with the world in just a couple days, it’s humbling and exciting. And to have it resonate… you’re who we made it for. Women are who we made the show for, and that feels really good. There’s a lot of women in front of and behind the camera, so it’s really exciting to have it resonate.

We wrapped a couple days before Christmas and really went right into the edit, and so we’ve really been in post [production]

up until a couple weeks ago. That’s what I spent most of my winter doing. Then spent the month of June in Rhode Island making a very funny indie comedy called Rubber Hunt—first time, feature female writer-director named Hanna Organschi, who has made some awesome shorts. It’s a very different role for me.

V: You shadowed FBI agents and police people for this role [in Furious]. What was that experience like for you? What do you hope is portrayed correctly in Furious about that?

ER: There have been so many incredible detective stories that we have seen in movies and TV. I think learning it firsthand from the ground up for me and Liz [Meriwether] was really important. Liz had former FBI and NYPD as consultants in the writers’ room and we also had them on set.

I really put my producer hat on and my eager student hat on when it comes to being an actor. I got to sit with two female FBI agents and talk to them about their experiences and their job—how it impacts their life at home, motherhood, and what the job means to them, how it grinds on them. This was the same for female detectives that I sat with as well. Even when it feels like sometimes they don’t fully get justice, they have the belief in the job still to keep going. [I] really understand how their vulnerability and femininity gets left at the door. It needs to be sublimated in order to do the job… From [the] current NYPD, [that] was very helpful in terms of understanding Alice’s background and understanding interview tactics.

Really, the training that I did before in the year leading up to it physically… weapons training in West Texas, I was really amazed by how little I knew about guns and about the job, even having watched so many movies and shows.

V: Do you think there’s any misconceptions that the public or maybe the media has about the FBI?

ER: One person in law enforcement shared with me that they did not feel that the line between good guy and bad guy was that wide. If you could potentially pull a trigger, you could potentially pull a trigger. Certainly not speaking on behalf of everyone. People have a lot of thoughts about the job, about justice, about how passionate they are about justice. I would say the through line was always that you don’t judge a victim, victims deserve justice no matter who they are. All victims had a mom and a dad, and you’re often getting justice for the living relatives.

There was one female detective that I connected with, who told me that she and her partner on the job have not been able to get justice in one specific case. They feel they are missing a piece of what would satisfy the prosecution—they know who the perpetrator is and don’t have exactly what it takes to make the case make sense for a jury. This is a person these detectives see at their 7-11 weekly. The idea that you could be confronted in the real world at the 7-11 with someone that you know in your gut has gotten away with something and still be waiting for that one time… you’re playing the long game. That was very interesting to me. Ultimately, the good guys are waiting. Even if it takes 20 years to get justice, they know they’re gonna get it eventually.

V: What did you learn when shadowing these people about the realities of the job and how was that portrayed in the show?

ER: I realized that I certainly did not have what it takes to be an FBI agent. The first day after weapons training in Texas, I had done all the drills and Jennifer Coffindaffer—who’s a former FBI agent—was basically like, “You got it, girl. You know how to handle this weapon. You passed all the tests.” I was really feeling hot on myself. The second day, she put me through some drills, but she gave me a BB gun, not a real firearm. I was like, “Jen, come on. I got it.” She was like, “So now we’re gonna do some situational things.. Your friend is out of town and you told her you would go and check in on her cat and feed the cat.” We’re in the pouring rain, in Texas, with rolling fields and cows walking past. And she’s [Koffendaffer]

like, “You’re going in to check on the cat and you never know what’s gonna happen when you go into someone’s house.” And I’m like, “Huh? Jennifer, what’s going on?” She said, “You know, I told you to be prepared and take the house.”

At this point, she had already shocked and awed me earlier in the day by surprising me with a secret former paramilitary armed person, who popped out of a safe house and shot me with a BB gun. I was already in full hypervigilance, panic mode. I was like, “I can’t believe this guy that I didn’t know was on our course and shot me.” So in this one she said, “You’re gonna go into your friend’s house, and you’re gonna check on her cat.” I was amped going in there. I knew that guy was gonna be in that house and I was gonna take him out. I was so proud. I pulled a move where I saw him and then I ducked down behind the wall, but he didn’t see me duck down, and I popped out and shot him in the foot.

It was incredibly helpful to be in real scenarios training to really understand what it is like to have adrenaline course through your body that way because there was someone with a BB gun and shooting at me. So as a gal from New York City who has never been in that situation, and certainly has her own share of historic trauma and issues as I think all women do, these were interesting scenarios to be in. The one that I said no to, she [Koffender] was like, “Okay, so you’re an FBI agent, and you’re not working today, but you have your service weapon. You’re just gonna take a jog through the woods and maybe a guy is gonna run up behind you.” And I was like, “Jen, we’re done for the day… I cannot be jogging; I jog in Central Park.”

V: You went full on for this, what was the process to ground yourself back to reality after? There’s so many heavy scenes that you filmed for this show

EM: It’s great when you have a team of incredible people from your DP to your directors that you trust. I would say, one of the hardest scenes to do was the one in episode three with Marshall and the fight after the mom in the hall. I like doing rolling takes—you don’t cut in between, you just reset and do it again—That was one of the first times that I’ve actually lost myself in a scene, and had to sit down…the director had to cut because it just went too far, but I think it’s really good to have. One of our operators, Wylda, would sometimes reach out and take my hand, we would hold hands quietly right before we would roll. These scenes are intense and you’re channeling real things. But I think it’s important also to remember that you are telling a character’s story. It’s not your story. Even if things deeply resonate with you, it’s so important to bring your whole self to the table and to go just up to the line but not over.

V: This show is incredibly important because it resonates with a lot of underlying issues that are happening in society right now. Is there a specific message that you hope audiences take away from watching Furious that can potentially be related to the society we live in?

EM: I think women are very underestimated and that can be very frustrating, but it also can provide an avenue for surprise. Certainly, they do some pretty questionable things as we move in season, but I think that’s what makes them so compelling to watch. And Liz is so great at drawing these incredibly specific female characters. I mean, the fact that she made Alice afraid to shower because of the trauma, and therefore Alice smells…creating a character, especially a female character that smells, is something that you can’t fully appreciate on television, but I think there’s a real shame around it in society. It’s also interesting because making yourself smell bad is also kind of a repellent in and of itself, and I think Alice is trying to keep people away from her very unconsciously to make your body repulsive so people don’t wanna come near you and hurt you.

V: You watched Black Widow [1987], and you were like, “This is it.” This is the idea that really spoke to you. Why did you think it was the one?

EM: It had a couple of things going for it. Number one, it has a really easy elevator pitch, which I think is half the battle of selling something. “Female FBI agent hunting female serial killer.” I’m leaning in. I think it had the potential in a contemporary adaptation to talk about the underestimation of women, the limits of the justice system—why people go rogue, right? Because both Debra Winger’s character and the female killer are carving patterns that most women wouldn’t or ordinarily. I think that it had an opportunity to mine the characters, because I’m character first, over plot. I care about connecting and understanding, being intrigued by and being fascinated by a character first and foremost. I felt there was the ability to go deep in a way the movie can’t in 90 minutes and to really understand what these two women were about and explore the kind of invisible thread that is between them. The movie’s also cool and weird and not conventional in a lot of ways… and it’s kind of culty. It’s not something that everybody knows and has an association with, but some people do. So I felt that it was kind of a slam dunk. It was a really good opportunity.

V: You’ve really come into your own. This is, I feel like, the biggest project that I think is going to resonate with a lot of people. What do you think is the biggest lesson you’ve learned about yourself since starting in Shameless to now in this project?

EM: I think that I’m only starting to just get to know myself and to know what I am capable of. I have to move towards things when I’m afraid or intimidated by them because often that means there’s something there to be explored.

Furious is now streaming on Hulu with episodes released every Monday until August 31st.