HitFix First Look: 'Shameless' star Emmy Rossum on Fiona's day in court

Emmy Rossum is giving one of the best performances in all of television as fierce, wounded Fiona Gallagher on Showtime’s “Shameless.” She’s working for a network that has had a lot of success at promoting its actors for awards the last few years. Oh, and she has the word “Emmy” right there in her name. Yet despite this, Rossum and “Shameless” haven’t so much as sniffed any Emmy love as yet. Not even her two-time Emmy-winning co-star William H. Macy got a nomination for either of the series’ first two seasons.

 

Maybe it’s because it’s hard to categorize “Shameless,” which has both extremely serious elements (a family trying to cling to the poverty line, dealing — either personally or through friends — with substance abuse, violence, incest and more) and comic ones (many of these subjects are played for laughs at times). Maybe it’s because the low-class, dirty nature of the Gallaghers and their lives are a turn-off to awards voters. Maybe Emmy voters simply don’t like to give headline writers an easy task now and then.

 

But Rossum continues to be great on “Shameless,” playing the one Gallagher who holds the family together, and she’s been especially strong in what’s arguably been the show’s best season yet. A recent story arc involved Macy’s degenerate drunk Frank Gallagher calling social services on his own kids out of spite, resulting in the family being split up — some to dire circumstances, like Debbie (Emma Kenney) being sent to a foster home that seems more like a prison — while Fiona scrambles to reunite her siblings under one roof.

 

Sunday’s episode (it airs, as usual, at 9 p.m.) provides the sort of showcase that could win Rossum an award or three if anyone who gives out awards were to notice. (Some spoilers follow.) Fiona, having discovered that it was Frank who called social services, has finally had enough of this man having any say in the lives of her and her siblings, and decides to go to court to protect the family she’s been running for years. In the clip embedded at the top of this post, Fiona makes her plea to the judge for why Frank should be kept away from the kids.

 

It’s a superb scene in what’s been a terrific season, and I got on the phone recently to talk to Rossum about this year in the life of the Gallaghers.

 

 

 

 

Emmy Rossum: I don't think she has a choice at this point. She has to do this to get the kids back under one roof. Because you want them to get better, you want to be a family. I think there's a longing in that for her, in her and in all the kids for Frank to get better, to get clean, but at the end of the day, Fiona is a mother lion and she will do anything to protect these children and she knows that she is the only one who can protect them. And the fact that he has called Social Services on his own children is really a new low. He has jeopardized their safety, and she will do anything to get them back and to keep them safe. There's such nobility and strength in the female character, it's really amazing how they write her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And you so rarely get a juicy monologue where people writing for you that it feels it often times that our show is written like it could be anything. You know, if you want to find the funny in it, you can find the funny. If you want to find the catharsis in the same, you can find that. It's very varied and our actors are really smart and invested in playing the truth, and if that truth makes you laugh that's great. If that truth makes you cry, if it makes you horrified, that's great. I think people are sometimes a little scared of our show, to be honest, because they hear a lot about how graphic it is and I think that it definitely is. I think we try to show love and child services and alcoholism and sex in a graphic real way, and I think that when you're showing poverty like this, it gets graphic. So I don't shy away from that; I'm in fact proud of it and I think that it's an interesting thing and we're just different. So I'm glad that we're finding our audience and that that's growing because I think people are sometimes a little scared of the content. It's tough content.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a lot of reacting to this disgusting boss who's sexually harassing all the girls in the supermarket, and I guess I can imagine that that exists. So I just had to play that. And I try to play even the comic situations realistically. And if you get the laugh, you get the laugh, but I never try to play for the laugh.