Shameless star Emmy Rossum’s latest project is AppleTV+'s The Crowded Room, a thrilling miniseries that has her playing the mother of Tom Holland’s chilling character. Though her casting may look peculiar on the surface, due to the actress only being a decade older than Holland, the actress recently spoke fondly about her experience working on this character, and why it actually makes sense.
The 36-year-old is the mother to a 2-year-old daughter and a son who is just eight weeks old. That’s far removed from her The Crowded Room character being the mother of Holland’s Danny Sullivan, a young man who gets arrested for his involvement in a New York City shooting and becomes the subject of an investigation by Amanda Seyfried’s Rya Goodwin. Rossum spoke to the role and what attracted her to it with Entertainment Tonight saying:
It makes sense when I read the script. Candy's a super young mom, she's almost a child in her own right when she becomes pregnant at age 16. . . . [Despite the age gap, I] fell in love with the relationship between mother and son and the closeness and everything that they're grieving in later episodes.
Considering her character, Candy Sullivan, having her son when she is 16 and Holland perhaps playing a character younger than his 27-year-old self (he celebrated his birthday with a fun helmet pic of all things just last week) Rossum’s choice in the role actually makes a lot more sense. Not to mention the series tracks some of Danny Sullivan’s childhood, with Zachary Golinger playing the younger version of Tom Holland’s character. Rossum continued to speak about the role, and her relationship with Golinger, saying:
I was so taken with the series and really just loved all my scenes, especially with young Danny. Our relationship was so beautiful and so I knew everything that we had that I had lost in the scenes with Tom. [It] was really fun.
The Crowded Room
Series Premiere Date: June 9, 2023
Episodes: 10 (On Fridays)
Created By: Akiva Goldsman
Starring: Tom Holland, Amanda Seyfried, Emmy Rossum, Sasha Lane, Will Chase, Lior Raz, Laila Robins
Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some strong language and partial nudity.
Where To Stream: AppleTV+ subscription
While it would be pretty much impossible for Rossum to have a 27-year-old son in real life, seeing as she's 36, the circumstances of the series make it more palpable as to why the Shameless alum plays his parent in The Crowded Room. Plus, she was really taken with the role, especially when it comes to building the relationship between Candy and Danny. Along with falling in love with playing the part, Rossum also shared that playing Candy “brings up a lot” of feelings for her as well.
Emmy Rossum revealed that she actually found out she was pregnant with her two-month-old son while she was shooting the last couple of episodes of The Crowded Room. Playing the mother to a son before she had experienced that herself was special to her along with finding the series’ themes about “love and empathy and understanding” really powerful. The actress shared that she feels the AppleTV+ series has a lot to say about how we are all “really just a product of our own upbringings” along with having “imperfections” and “unrealistic expectations” about ourselves and one another. Audiences can look forward to that and "lots of twists and turns" in the new series.
You can check out Tom Holland and Emmy Rossum in The Crowded Room, premiering its first two episodes this Friday on the 2023 TV schedule. The series is a book-to-screen adaptation based on the 1981 non-fiction novel, The Minds of Billy Milligan.
