Quinn Shephard & Samir Mehta On the Loss of Innocence and the Mission of Mercy for Hulu’s ‘Under the Bridge’

Hulu’s Under the Bridge digs beneath your skin as it depicts the tragic murder of Reena Virk. On the surface, this is a story about a senseless act of violence that tears a community apart, but it is also about how our youthful innocence gets stripped away from us when we are forced to grow up. For creator Quinn Shephard and showrunner Samir Mehta, reminding the viewer was vital in understanding how we learn the difference between being a child and an adult.

The title of ‘true crime’ doesn’t seem to fit Under the Bridge. There is too much care infused into this story and so many perspectives are explored, that I think the moniker should be reconsidered when it comes to classifying this story.

“We are the same way,” Mehta says. “It’s inevitable for it to be categorized in that way, but we took a lot of effort to distinguish it from others.”

“I remember speaking with Aiyana Goodfellow, who plays Dusty, and she told me that someone was talking to her about it, and she didn’t consider it part of that genre,” Shephard reveals. “She knows, obviously, that it’s based on a true story. It’s always been our goal to kind of avoid that.”

Assembling this cast was no easy feat. Mehta explains that the perpetrators being so young was something they wanted to focus on. I remember when I finished the series that I stumbled upon my high school year book, and I looked at the year when I was Reena’s age. When we are thirteen or fourteen years old, we haven’t even grown into our faces yet, that baby fat lingering and causing some of us strife. For the creators of this show, that was something they wanted to emphasize.

“Chloe, who plays Josephine, is someone who was pushing against her own natural, inherent kindness, so I think that’s how she brings different layers to her,” Shephard says. “The kids in our cast were all wonderful people, and they were asked to place themselves in the shoes of people who did terrible things. They brought a lot of empathy to how they portrayed their characters, but when you see a glimmer of who they are shine through, we get the true glimpses of humanity. We want them to feel observed, so they knew why these people were doing what they were doing. A lot of the famous photos of Kelly are from her trials when she was older. I remember when we started research, we found a photo of her when she was the age when this committed the crime. She looks so dramatically younger, so the public perception of her is of her in the courtroom when she’s older. It’s so striking to see her as a junior high kid.”

“Casting true to age was important to us,” Mehta adds. “There’s something about the actual age of the perpetrators that was vital for us, and the severity of the crime is more apparent when you see how young these kids are. When we were looking at the research, I came across the mugshots and their yearbook photos, and you sometimes forget how young fourteen or fifteen really is. You see their baby faces, and it hits you very hard. Discussing their characters with them, there is the sensationalized aspect of “teen killers,” but we wanted all of them, except perhaps Izzy as Kelly, to explore the dimension so it wasn’t surface-level. Izzy found her own path with her character, but we had a lot of conversations with the cast.”

Is innocence always taken from us, or do some us reach an age where we reject it? Josephine, for instance, must experience feelings of being unwanted, so she races to grow up to make herself feel important. Kelly Ellard, on the other hand, has the safety net of a warm, supportive family, so she can slide back and forth between independence and security. For Reena Virk, that innocence is violently taken.

“The first thing that comes to mind is that innocence is associated both with youth and also, in terms of a legal perspective, a verdict,” Mehta explains. “They don’t think the same thing until you think about it more deeply. Being young comes with that sense of innocence but it’s inevitably lost, and that doesn’t mean you have to experience a traumatic even to experience that loss. It’s the nature of growing up. You want to do it gradually where it’s healthy as you come into adulthood, and there should be people who guide you. These kids didn’t have that responsibility shown to them as it’s taken in one single night. That was a big part of our conversation. The root of the word is “not harm,” so it makes sense that we would use the word in both instances. Everybody possesses a level of innocence, and even adult killers were children who had that quality. Since these were kids when they committed this crimes, it doesn’t let you excuse it away.”

“It’s a tricky topic, because when you’re dealing with that age, there is an instinct to ask if a piece of art is about the tragic loss of innocence,” Shephard says. “In our show, there are characters who have had much harder lives because they had that sense taken from them too early. At the same time, it’s our job to put ourselves in the shoes of someone of that age who wants to shed that. We need to get in there and not judge it. I read Rebecca [Godfrey]’s first book when I was researching this, and it’s from the point of view of a thirteen year old girl who is determined to get rid of her innocence. It’s a burden for her, and I thought about Reena a lot. The girls who are targeting her are coming from a place of pain because their innocence was taken from them. It’s a cycle.”

Rebecca Godfrey gravitates towards Warren Glowatski, because of her guilt over her brother dying. Even though Warren is clearly involved with Reena’s murder, Rebecca continually expresses her concern over how Warren’s family abandoned him and she begs for empathy. It’s a complicated thing for the series to explore, especially when we are so used to talking about guilty versus innocent or good versus bad. It’s a bold thing for Under the Bridge to embrace.

“With a lot of time that I spent interviewing the real Rebecca Godfrey, and I feel like there was a lot to unpack with the relationship that she formed with Warren,” Shephard says. “She, herself, was going through a process of why she got so close to him when she and I did interviews. I think a lot of people in her life told her that she bonded with him because she was dealing with the loss of her brother, but, as she and I talked longer, it shifted. What she saw in Warren, I think, was that his life would forever be changed by guilt, and that was something she experienced after her brother’s death. There was a lot of internalized responsibility and she put pressure on herself that informed her adult life. She saw a mirror in herself, and her quest with the way she portrayed him in the book came from a place of helping people understand how it feels to do a terrible thing. Rebecca didn’t do anything, but that’s a pressure she put on herself. She challenged people to think about that and to feel empathy towards him. We wanted to objectively zoom out from that.”

“Reena didn’t have a chance to grow up, but it’s an interesting aspect of the story that’s left untold,” Mehta says. “Through the Rebecca and Cam characters, while they didn’t go through the same thing, but, through them, we get to see what it’s like to grow up as adults who have gone through shared trauma. On some level, we didn’t show the kids growing up, but we could show, thematically, how the events of a traumatic childhood could reverberate through time.”

When Reena’s mother, Suman, sits down with Warren, the scene does not go as expected. Suman’s relationship with her daughter was fraught with Reena resisting her parents’ rules and Suman not bending on her discipline. There are glimmers of warmth and love (like the scene with the earrings) where we realize these two women hold affection for each other. Suman tells Warren that she is forgiving him for the sake of her family and her other children. “I am too afraid to love them in case I lose them too,” she tells Warren. Mercy is the ultimate mission to stop another act of violence.

“This ties back to our conversation of not wanting to do a typical crime show,” Mehta says. “This active forgiveness on the part of Suman was one of the reasons why I wanted to do the show to begin with, and your typical crime story suggests you will get to the end with a Law & Order finish. You want to come back at that person with some level of vengeance, but that’s going to create a new path of pain and suffering. We wanted to tell a story where what happened to Reena was a cascade of suffering that came from different places that came from many places, and she was the unfortunate victim of that. The act of forgiveness isn’t about saying what happened was okay, but it’s about her, on some level, the wisdom to see beyond this one incident to stop a future Reena from suffering.”

Under the Bridge is streaming now on Hulu.