‘Furious’: Lola Petticrew Teases What’s Behind the Serial Killer’s Motives in Hulu Thriller

Meet Catherine (Lola Petticrew). Or is it Jeanie? Wait, is it Vanessa? The femme fatale at the center of Hulu’s Furious goes by several names, hiding her true identity as she hunts down the scoundrels on her list and makes them pay for the sins of their past.

At first glance, she is the veritable manic pixie dream girl: charming, quirky, flirtatious, and seemingly harmless. That is, until she reaches into her bag of tricks and pulls out a full cocktail of poisons. She uses them to incapacitate her victims, giving her plenty of time to toy with her prey, play her twisted games, and savor their fear before finally delivering the killing blow.

But Catherine isn’t the only one doing the hunting.

Hot on her trail is FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum), an equally broken investigator who begins connecting a string of seemingly unrelated deaths to the mysterious woman. As Alice gets closer to uncovering who Catherine really is and why these particular men have landed on her kill list.

Speaking to TV Insider, Lola Petticrew explained that Catherine’s ability to constantly reinvent herself is more than a tool for luring in her victims. Her uncanny talent for reading a room, becoming exactly who someone wants her to be, and keeping everyone guessing is rooted in her past.

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“I think she has a great ability to understand people and to know what she needs to be in any room to manipulate people,” said Petticrew. “I think that is a trauma response, that’s learned, that’s quite sad. But I think that her superpower is her being able to turn a lot of that trauma into strength to achieve what she needs to achieve.”

“I think it was really important that we understood that these things happened to her when she was a child, so there was a sense of her sort of being in a trauma-response way, ‘stuck there,’ And we wanted to make sure that happened without teetering on Lolita. And that was really important to me, and so we were really detailed in that,” explained Petticrew. “What sort of counterbalances that is that you don’t really know how she is going to respond to things in any given moment.”

Furious, Mondays, Hulu