Emmy Rossum Is Back With a Vengeance

Danielle McNallyThu, October 22, 2026 at 11:52 AM UTC

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Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

The meeting spot is Eli’s—a no-frills offshoot of one of New York’s most iconic gourmet markets, located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Emmy Rossum bounds in, immediately recognizable by her voluminous curls, and pours herself a cup of self-serve iced coffee. She doesn’t notice me at first; she’s listening to a voicemail, multitasking as moms of young kids are required to do. (More on that later.) I offer a wave. She gives me a hug. We set out, walking west on a particularly glorious late September morning.

Unlike many celebrities, Rossum hasn’t chosen the discreet corner of an in-demand restaurant or the expansive suite of an exclusive hotel for our interview. Instead, we head to the least private of places: Central Park, every New Yorkers’ backyard. I am both surprised and disarmed. I remain disarmed by Rossum throughout our conversation—she is open, candid, sarcastic—but my surprise quickly turns to understanding: She knows, as does any good New Yorker (which Rossum is through-and-through, having lived her entire life here, save for nine years spent shooting Shameless in L.A.), that this is a city you can disappear into. Despite Rossum’s stunning natural beauty (I can attest that, indeed, her jawline is as sharp as it appears on television. Her secret: an iS Clinical neck cream and intra-mouth massage), decades in the industry, and current hit television series (Furious, of course, more on that later, too), we walk, unnoticed, for nearly 10,000 steps.

600 Steps

Ebullient. Rossum’s energy is ebullient. She’s practically skipping along the bridle path that circles the Central Park reservoir, brimming with excitement as she points out, en route, Spence (“where I went to K through 5, then dropped out of school forever”), and the Guggenheim Museum, where her wedding reception was held (she married Mr. Robot creator, Sam Esmail, in 2017), and her “therapy bench”—which she started sitting on in 2020 while pregnant with her daughter to catch her breath, watch the leaves change, and, yes, sometimes Zoom with a mental health professional.

Balenciaga dress and gloves; Graff bracelet and earrings.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

“Home,” Rossum says without hesitation when I ask about the significance of the area for her. She means it not simply as where she resides now. But her home home. Where she grew up; the place that made her who she is. “It toughens you in a way,” she says “because you’re forced to deal with complicated public transportation systems and difficult weather patterns and…navigating different loud sounds and sights and smells and frozen dog poop in the winter.” (We laugh about that, but the frozen dog poop really was so bad this year.) “There’s so much possibility for surprise in the city, in a way that there’s not in vehicle cities. I also love people watching and imagining my way into characters and physicalities. This is the path that I walk when I’m learning lines,” she says, gesturing to the dirt trail beneath our feet. “It really is all I’ve ever known. And in a way, maybe it’s actually quite provincial for me.”

That she’d raise her kids here, too, was never a question. She’s built her village—her best friend since Kindergarten bought an apartment three floors down and she and Esmail regularly host game nights (pastimes of choice: Mafia and Salad Bowl) and do Sunday dinners with a couple they met on the playground. “As the only child of a single mom, who does not have a built-in network like that, my friends are really important to me,” Rossum says. She pauses to remove her plush white sweater—the temperature is not-quite-summer/not-yet-fall—revealing a dazzling tennis necklace and gold watch that adorn an otherwise ordinary outfit of gray T-shirt, light-wash jeans, and chunky sneakers. “They are a huge part of my soul, my history,” she continues. Living here was just a matter of making sure that she could still do her work.

So she set out to find an ongoing series set in the city, featuring the kind of character that lit her fire and which she could produce under her own banner, Composition 8 (name inspired by the Kandinsky painting). “I knew I had to build it. I don’t have a company yet”—emphasis on yet—“like LuckyChap or Hello Sunshine,” she says, referencing the production companies of Margot Robbie and Reese Witherspoon, respectively. “[We don’t] get all the hot hot books first…because [we’re in competition] with these incredible female juggernauts. So we have to be scrappier and we have to look in places that other people aren’t looking.”

Versace coat, dress, and heels; Graff earrings.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

What they found was Furious. The hit series takes its bones from the 1987 movie Black Widow: female FBI agent hunting a female serial killer. “It just felt immediately obvious,” Rossum says, “I could see myself in the role.” Today’s version, which Rossum developed with showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether (The Dropout, Dying for Sex) after selling Hulu on the idea, follows Alice (Rossum), an NYPD detective-turned-rookie FBI agent, who starts connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated murders to discover that they lead to Catherine (played by Lola Petticrew), a young woman out for revenge for the abuse she suffered as a teen at the hands of powerful men. No spoilers (though, if you haven’t watched it yet, why not?), but the show’s propulsive pacing, captivating performances, and reflection of current events, combined to make it one of the year’s most buzzed-about shows. According to the streamer, views for the finale were up 90 percent from the premiere. Season two was greenlit the week prior. Furious has garnered 43 million viewing hours globally as of September, and risen to the apex of Hulu’s Top 15. It has a 99-percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Zero. No. Not at all No. No. Definitely not,” Rossum stammers when I ask if she always knew it was going to be a huge hit, still seemingly a bit in awe of its success. “I knew it was good. And I knew it was bold and different. And also that it was working with themes and current ideas and events that felt… unfortunately, that felt really prevalent in my gut. And so I knew if people were able to find it, it might work.”

“It’s a story about people that we don’t see, that we don’t talk about, that don’t generally have voices in our society,” says co-star Quincy Tyler Bernstine, who plays fellow FBI agent Nora Washington, when I reach her a few weeks later. That’s one of the reasons why Bernstine wanted to be a part of Furious—that, and acting opposite Rossum. She calls Rossum “a gift” of a scene partner. “She knows her character inside and out, backwards and forwards, and she is so brave and so fierce, and so I feel like I, as an actor, can just jump in the boxing ring with her, you know? We can be fearless together.”

The two, who bonded on-set over their shared love of the New York Knicks, may have been going toe-to-toe when the cameras were rolling, but when the director yelled “cut,” Rossum went into Mom Mode. “She is a caretaker,” Bernstine says. “You can tell how deeply she cares about [the show] and all of us. …That is an incredible quality for a producer to have, especially on a project like this where it’s sensitive material, sensitive subject matter. It’s just a very intense situation.”

Christian Siriano dress; Chanel Fine Jewelry rings and earrings.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

The show’s themes have taken on new relevance in the week leading up to our conversation as the details of the Cornell Seven case make their way into the national news. “It’s like every single week, there’s a new horrible thing about violence against women,” Rossum laments. I ask her about the cases she considered when developing the show or honing her portrayal. “You could throw a dart and hit [Jeffrey Epstein], [Harvey] Weinstein, people in our government. There are so many to choose from, who are protected. …This idea of ‘being the right kind of victim’ was something that kept coming up. Like, what is the right kind of woman who deserves justice? Who deserves to be protected? Who deserves our sympathy and energy towards her justice? I think that idea is so horrifying.”

Rossum bristles at the thought, her outrage at the real-life situations women all too often find themselves in simmering just beneath the surface. The show is overt in its embrace of female rage. There’s the title (an obvious reference to the Greek goddesses of vengeance) and the poster (Rossum, mouth agape, screaming into the void). It’s a bold choice, especially in this country, especially in a time when our culture seems keen on returning women to an era when they were seen and not heard.

“Anger and women: America doesn’t really love that,” Rossum points out. The show doesn’t shy away from the fact that women are angry, have things to be angry about. “When the systems that claim to be there to help us, to protect us, fail, there’s nowhere to put our feelings but for them to become desperation and rage.”

We’re being passed by pairs of joggers and packs of tourists, their guides holding up little colored flags. There’s something oddly satisfying and equally unspectacular in talking about trauma and tragedy with Rossum while out for a walk—we’re just any two women in America, trying to make sense of the world we live in. She doesn’t share with me any specific personal experiences she drew from to build her character, but certainly, unfortunately, she has them. I bring up a story she’s shared publicly before, about a director demanding that she meet with him in a bikini. “There are so many more horrific things that are so much worse than that that have happened to me or people I know in real life and in the industry,” she says, her voice brimming with indignation. The exploitation and objectification that’s all too common for women and girls, Rossum is not forgetting it now that she’s the one in a position of power. “It’s hard to hold this idea in your mind of: You can be a smart, confident, powerful woman, and also someone who has been hurt, someone who could be hurt, someone who could also be vulnerable,” she says. “And it also makes me, at 40, so aligned with what’s right, and so watchful and caring about the conduct that’s happening around me, and how young people are treated at work. All those things that I was subjected to and the boundaries that were blurred have just made me so much clearer about what’s right and what’s wrong in a workplace. And it’s made me, by this point, feel like, You know, I’m going to use my voice now to say, ‘We shouldn’t do it that way.’ ”

Louis Vuitton dress and Chopard necklace.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson4,400 Steps

Rossum is working in overdrive right now, but there was a time in the recent past when she was hardly working at all. “A couple years ago, I made so little money that I got notified by [the Screen Actors Guild] that I no longer had health insurance,” she reveals. “I was so embarrassed.” She’d left Shameless to produce her own projects. She started shooting the first, Angelyne, about America’s original influencer, so to speak, in the ‘80s, which saw Rossum don a bleached-blonde wig, facial prosthetics, and fake boobs that weighed 3 pounds each—then Covid hit. Partway through that she got pregnant with her first child. The 2023 actors’ strike followed. Even once that was settled, Rossum found herself saying “no” to projects that took her away from NYC; Esmail was shooting overseas, and it was important to the couple as parents that one of them always be present for their daughter, now 5, and son, two years younger.

“There were times when I was choosing not to take jobs that I didn’t love and [instead] spend time with my kids, or volunteer substitute teach [at their preschool], or do a play, when I was really wondering, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to work at the level that I want to again? I wonder if I can ever get something greenlit again? I wonder if I still matter? And those were scary moments,” she tells me. We’ve rounded the corner for our second loop around the reservoir, a metaphor perhaps, for second opinions, second acts, second selves. “It’s why I value being at home with my kids when I’m home and being on set when [I’m on set]. Because I know it can come and go; it’s not guaranteed. And I am picky about what I work on, and sometimes it means that I don’t have health insurance, I guess.”

Hermès dress; Van Cleef & Arpels ring and earrings.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

I’d like to think that Rossum’s candor on our West Wing–esque walk-and-talk is due to my shrewd interviewing skills, but openness seems to be just part of who she is. She’s spoken before about her struggles with PCOS and her journey to becoming a mother through IVF and the postpartum anxiety that washed over her after giving birth. “It doesn’t really cost me anything,” she offers as the why behind sharing her personal experiences with the public. “It feels like we should be able to talk about the parts of our bodies that aren’t working.”

Infertility can still be accompanied by shame. Postpartum can be so isolating. “We really need our village. We really need our people when our brains and our bodies are doing things that are scary and unfamiliar. I really had moments when I wondered if I would ever feel like myself again,” Rossum says. As part of grappling with that, she wrote a short sci-fi story that was published in the literary magazine Guernica last month. “I think it’s important to have those conversations to normalize them.”

Chopard necklace and earrings.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

“And we need to be kind to ourselves, and always value ourselves. Even when the world isn’t choosing us at that moment, we still need to choose ourselves. So my kids have been very helpful to me because they always choose me,” she continues. Her daughter, in particular, has helped Rossum accept parts of herself she previously rejected. Coming up in the industry, Rossum felt pressure, internally, to straighten her natural curls. “I felt most confident going out with a blowout or a flattened beach wave because that was all I was seeing. I didn’t see myself represented, so I didn’t know if it was beautiful. I didn’t know if it was acceptable. I didn’t know if it was too much,” she recalls. “And then when my daughter was born with very curly hair, I thought, Well, somebody’s got to be out there with this look. Legitimizing it.” We show off pictures of our curly-haired kids. Both her daughter and my son’s tresses are more wavy now, but her youngest still boasts spirals. “It’s important to be authentic. It’s important to embrace the parts of yourself that are unique, and to show that there are different ways of feeling powerful. I went on the journey for her, but it actually turned out to be for myself.”

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Motherhood may be a source of joy and fulfillment for Rossum, and something she chose over working for a time, but it didn’t make her any less ambitious. (Her words, not mine, she said them to Alex Cooper on ‘Call Her Daddy.’) If anything, being a working mom just means she’s trying to do more at once, dashing from set to the zoo, writing elementary school applications in between calls. She’s trying to trust herself and those around her more, but she’s not sitting on the sidelines. Of any part of her life. Because you never stop being a mother. And you never stop being yourself.

“I like it now,” she says of ambition. “You didn’t always?” I respond. “I was always hungry. And I was always ambitious. Because I’m a dreamer. Sam says that I’m very half-full.” (It was Esmail’s own career aspirations that drew Rossum to him: “I really admired his creativity, his drive, his ambition.”) She goes into every meeting assuming that a pitch will go well. She convinces herself she’s going to get the part, so that even when she doesn’t, she can still have the joy of believing in it for a little bit. She recounts a handful of Millennial classics that Young Emmy Rossum would have been amazing in: Parent Trap, Princess Diaries, Stepmom. “I remember all of those jobs that I really wanted, that I imagined and dreamed my way into,” she says. “So I’ve always been ambitious. But being ambitious and wanting and being hungry for creative experience, creative opportunity, wasn’t supported at large when I was young. Now, I feel like I’m old enough that people can appreciate that it’s my time to be ambitious.”

Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello top and skirt; Bvlgari necklace, earrings, and bracelets.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

One of Rossum’s most well-known career moments, which was coded as capital-A Ambition in the media, is the contract dispute towards the end of her time on Shameless that made her a face of Hollywood’s pay equity battle. To rewind: Rossum’s negotiation with the studio ahead of the show’s eighth season had been going on for months. The eldest Gallagher child was arguing for a salary on-par with male lead William H. Macy, plus extra to make up for the seasons when he earned more. Suddenly, it leaked to the press. The result? Resolution within a day. Rossum admits that had it not become public, she’s not sure she would have gotten what she was asking for. But she still wouldn’t have talked about it herself.

“Hard no. Hard no on speaking out,” she says. “There’s still that part of me that’s scared to speak out, scared to be too bold, scared to have big feelings.” Of course, she’s happy to be part of moving the discussion forward now, though there’s so much ground to be gained. “It’s only one drop in the bucket. When you look at how people are being paid unfairly when it comes to ageism, racism, sizeism, sexuality... I mean, there are so many ways in which the system has told us to inadvertently undervalue people.”

8,200 Steps

Rossum really wanted to stay in that job. She wanted to be paid what she deserved, but she also really loved the work. “I’ve never been really money-motivated,” she says “I’m really motivated by the things that make me feel most curious and most energized in a way.”

Right now that means telling stories that “investigate contemporary womanhood.” Which just so happens to be the founding mission of Composition 8. “Women are more than half of the population. Why are the projects that are being made not reflective of that ratio?” Rossum asks. We’ve made our way off the bridle path and down to her therapy bench for a respite. We compare notes apps—her: groceries, schedule, how many prednisone to take for a cold, how many library books her daughter has checked out; me: Target shopping list, thoughts on Fashion Month, info from my son’s Pre-K Zoom—such is the chaos of working motherhood. (“It’s like a computer screen with so many tabs open at once,” Rossum quips. “And that’s why I have this bench.”) Rossum’s company employs two other full-time staffers. Between the three of them, they are juggling 15 to 20 projects at a time in various stages of development, with an estimated 20 percent ultimately making it to the screen. (Rossum compares the work-when-no-one’s-watching grind of producing to the mindset of current favorite Knicks player, Jalen Brunson: “I love how hard he works. It’s the not-visible work. You’re building something for years before somebody gets to see it, and you still keep working. You plant a lot of seeds, and only a few trees grow.”)

Some projects in Composition 8’s slate are for Rossum to appear in, some are not, but either way, she is deep in the day-to-day, “every day, all day long. I would say I’m probably too involved,” she jokes. “They basically know they only can’t talk to me during bedtime. There’s an hour-and-a-half when I’m not available. And otherwise, we’re on Slack, like, 13 hours a day with ideas: What are you watching?”—for Rossum, it’s Love Island, Survivor, and Big Brother, the latter of which Esmail got her into, plus I Love LA, Task, and The Agency—“What are you reading? News stories—is this interesting?”

What’s interesting to her right now? “I definitely am drawn to characters who are existing in moral gray areas,” Rossum says. “I had an agent a couple years ago who was like, ‘Shouldn’t you be doing more rom-coms?’ And, yeah, if you showed me a rom-com that had teeth and intrigue and great writing and a great hook, I want to do that.” More importantly, does she get the character? If not, even better. “Is there something in this where I can be totally obsessed with not understanding something about it? It’s like, I got to get under it.”

Balenciaga dress and gloves; Graff bracelet and earrings.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

Many of the projects on Rossum’s IMDb page are a commentary on our time—even if she didn’t intentionally plan it that way. Furious’s themes are at the fore of current events (abuse, trauma, power dynamics). Meanwhile, Angelyne, though a period piece, is very much about today’s obsession with fame for fame’s sake. And Shameless, with its exposition of wealth inequality, would likely, as Rossum notes, be even more popular if it were on the air today. (“There are so few shows on television about poverty.”)

“I’m interested in working on the things that I’m thinking about, whether it’s inequality, or how fame is the most strangely desirable currency right now, and how dangerous I think it is,” she says. “I do think people are having a similar experience, and a show can dig into and crystallize an idea around that, or continue and deepen a conversation. [But it has] to be entertaining, first and foremost. Everything has to be a Trojan horse.”

Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello top and skirt; Bvlgari necklace, earrings, and bracelets.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

Rossum spent nine years on Shameless, and though fans may have questioned her decision to exit the show before its series finale, the actress has no regrets about her time there. “That was some of the—I think—the greatest, most challenging scenes being written for women my age, so definitely not. And I loved everyone I worked with,” she effuses. “And I learned so much. I learned how to write. I learned how to direct. I learned about production. I learned every aspect of post-production, pre-production, casting. I learned how to make something from the person who has been one of the most prolific TV producers ever, [John Wells].”

If she had a second chance, though, she might make some changes to her early career. As we make our way back to Eli’s for lunch (barbeque chicken from the hot bar), Rossum shares that, although performing was wholly her own idea (no stage moms here), she wouldn’t necessarily choose this life for her younger self. And would certainly discourage it for her own kids.

“You’re asking children to be in very adult situations,” she says. “You’re asking them to be surrounded by adults. You’re asking them to perform like adults. You’re asking them to work somewhat adult hours. You’re asking them to enact situations that are traumatic or adult in a way and get applause and money for it. I think this changes brain chemistry at a very young age.”

She references Songcatcher, which she turned 13 on the set of. The story is set in 1907 and, as would have happened in that time, the romance is between her character and someone older—the actor playing him was 22. “I don’t think that was traumatizing. But looking back on it, I’m like, Hmm, I wonder how that changed me? I wonder how that shaped me? I wonder how I taught my body to get comfortable with things it wasn’t comfortable with, because I wanted to tell that story that badly? And I wonder how many other opportunities I told my body to ignore what was happening because I had gotten so good at learning how to do that in ways that were not actually traumatic?”

Ultimately, if her kids want to perform, she will be supportive. “But I do think that there have been many successful people in their craft that did it in their summers and did it on their weekends and stayed in school,” she says.

Balenciaga dress and gloves; Graff bracelet and earrings.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

We start to wrap up and Rossum pulls out her phone to check our step count: 9,884. “Look at us, we crushed it,” she cheers, and we metaphorically pat our multitasking selves on the back for achieving a pretty solid workout during what was technically a business meeting.

As for what’s next for Rossum, she starts filming season two of Furious this winter. Then comes the release of the movie Rubber Hut, whose logline is “An entrepreneurial ex-Pan Am stewardess opens a drive-thru condom kiosk in her Italian Catholic town” and if you’re not sat for that, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Rossum says that, in prepping her character, she was “heavily influenced by The Real Housewives of Rhode Island,” if you need any more convincing. After that, well, it depends how those dozen-or-so projects Composition 8 has in the hopper shake out, but she rattles off a list of female auteurs—Kathryn Bigelow and Lena Dunham and Greta Gerwig and Alma Har’el—she’d love to work with. She’d like to direct her own feature film and is manifesting around it.

Louis Vuitton dress.Credit: Tiffany Nicholson

She has roles she would like to sink her teeth into, they just aren’t written yet. Ones that would be not only good for the audience but good for her as the vessel. “We all have those parts of ourselves that we find or judge [to be] conventionally unacceptable: to be very sexually provocative or liberated. To be free with our bodies. To free the nipple. To be angry. To be loud. To take up space in a room. To have big hair or bigger bodies or bigger ideas. The parts of myself that I feel like I want to make small, when I can dig those up and make them big in a character, that makes me feel like that’s a story worth being told,” she says. “When somebody shows me a character that shows me parts of myself that I find unlikable or unlovable or unacceptable, and they’re showing them to me warts and all, it makes me more comfortable with all the sticky parts of myself. I think that’s a real opportunity when you’re telling stories.”

It’s an opportunity she’s giving herself, personally, too. “That’s my project for my 40s: How do I practice more radical acceptance of myself? I don’t know if it’s feasible, but we’re gonna try.” Baby steps.

Credits -

Photographer

Tiffany Nicholson

Stylist

Carolina Orrico

Hair Stylist

Vernon Francois

Makeup Artist

Gita Bass

Manicurist

Sonya Meesh

Directors:

Eric Michael Roy + Ben South for Cutting Board TV

Photo Team:

Pierre Bonnet, Anne Marie Halovic, Sarah Schneider

Video Team:

Jake Deverian, Ryland Holeman, Robert Critchlow

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Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”