Scoot McNairy Finds the Humanity Beneath the Darkness In Furious

Hulu’s dark, twist-filled crime thriller Furious, created by Elizabeth Meriwether, just ended its first season and has been renewed for a second. The series has been hailed as compelling and topical, and actor Scoot McNairy (Argo, Fairyland) sees it as a story about the moral complexities of knowing what’s right and wrong in an upside-down world.

“I think there are dark powers that be that lurk in the shadows of our society and all societies, and it has been that way for a really long time,” McNairy says. The series is interested in the gray areas between justice and injustice, particularly as its women attempt to reclaim control over their own lives, and for McNairy, that ambiguity is central to the show’s appeal. “You can do something really, really wrong for the right reasons, and you can do something really, really right for all the wrong reasons.” Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum, The Phantom of the Opera, Shameless) on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating female serial killer played by Lola Petticrew (Tuesday). McNairy plays Danny Kelly, an NYPD homicide detective who was Alice’s partner before she quit the force to work for the FBI. 

For McNairy, finding the character of Danny Kelly meant looking beyond the hard-edged exterior of a New York homicide detective and examining the crushing weight underneath it. “I spent a lot of time talking with Liz about a lot of things with this character, but I think that one thing that sort of jumped out at me is that he is bombarded and piled upon with financial burdens,” McNairy explains. Danny is dealing with divorce, unemployment, a son with a disability who is in an expensive care facility and a workplace where he feels increasingly alienated. “He uses comedy to keep people at arm’s length, and he pretends he doesn’t care about things, to hide his vulnerability on how much he does care about things,” McNairy says.

Even Danny’s distinctive New York accent contributes to the character’s defensive swagger. McNairy admits accents don’t come naturally to him and required considerable work, including fixing some dropped R’s in postproduction. “I couldn’t see this character without the accent,” McNairy explains, as the cadence communicated Danny’s attitude before he even had to say anything.

In episode seven, “Some Days It Don’t Come Easy,” Danny is given a flash drive of evidence containing pornographic videos of teenaged girls and is horrified to discover that one of those girls is Alice. Danny, who is secretly in love with Alice, is protective and filled with guilt over his inability to protect Alice from retaliation in the police department after she accused her ex-boyfriend, Detective Marshall Connelly (Jake Lacy), of domestic violence. The discovery of the video is the last straw for Danny’s ability to live with the ugliness that he sees in his job. “There’s a lot of humanity and empathy for her, and discovering that my partner and friend is really really struggling, and she’s struggling so much more than I even knew,” McNairy says. “So I think it leads him to think, to give her that hard drive and say, ‘I’m not gonna control what you do with this. I’m giving it, that’s in your control, but I can control what I’m gonna do, and I’m quitting. I’m done. I’m out. I don’t wanna do this anymore.’” 

McNairy’s chemistry with Rossum is another crucial element. Rather than manufacturing a relationship between their characters, he says the connection developed naturally from working with another strong actor. “You’re playing baseball or tennis with somebody who can hit the ball back,” McNairy says. “And it’s really good and challenges you and makes you chase the ball to the corner and then hit it to another side.”

For McNairy, that kind of creative partnership is ultimately what makes Furious work. Beneath its twists, violence and questions of justice, the series is driven by damaged people trying to navigate a world where the lines between right and wrong have become increasingly difficult to see. Danny may be exhausted by that world, but his decision to finally walk away from it suggests that there are still choices worth making — and that sometimes, doing the right thing begins with simply refusing to accept the unacceptable.

Read more film interviews by Patrick Gibbs:
Malynda Hale on Bringing Humanity To The Screen in Bull StreetJohn D’Aquino on Sugar Season Two and the Craft of Acting
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