Emmy Rossum as Fiona Gallagher, who’s reached 23 in the new season of “Shameless.
Prepping to play Fiona Gallagher in Showtime’s strange and fascinating “Shameless” really requires asking just one question, muses Emmy Rossum.
“What would a real-life person act like,” says Rossum, “in an insane situation?”
“Shameless,” which continues its fifth season Sunday at 9 p.m., has insane down to a science.
It tracks the lives of the impoverished Gallagher family, who are trying to make the best from a bad hand in the run-down Canaryville neighborhood of South Side Chicago.
There’s no Mom, just a Dad. That would be Frank (William H. Macy), a self-absorbed alcoholic who is often more of a drain than a help.
This leaves survival up to the six Gallagher kids, the oldest of whom is Rossum’s Fiona. She’s become the de facto head of the household, often sacrificing her own life to salvage some semblance of normalcy and purpose for the others.
After dropping out of high school so she could cobble together some dead-end jobs to put food on the family table, she’s now reached 23.
William H. Macy portrays the alcoholic dad Frank Gallagher in “Shameless.”
And yes, says Rossum, the strain is starting to show.
In Sunday’s episode, which incidentally marks Macy’s television directing debut, Fiona must edge closer to a decision about two men in her life. Jimmy (Justin Chatwin) has been after her forever and Gus (Steve Kazee), came along more recently.
Rossum isn’t completely confident that, either way, things will work out.
“Fiona’s gone a little off the rails,” says Rossum. “I’m a little disappointed in her journey.”
But, Rossum quickly adds, that’s part of what the show is about — just how hard it is to get anywhere when you start so far behind.
“I only feel that disappointment between seasons,” she says. “While we’re shooting, I’ll defend her.”
Dermot Mulroney as Sean, Brandon/Brenden Sims as Liam Gallagher and Emmy Rossum as Fiona Gallagher in "Shameless"
It’s that “insane situation” thing.
“There’s not always a linear progression for Fiona,” says Rossum. “At her age, you’re still putting yourself in the context of your parents, yourself, the world.
“She has love for her father. She wants to take care of him. But she’s starting to see parts of Frank in herself, and that’s part of trying to figure out who she is. Can she be someone else if she has these damaged parts? Can she change that about herself?”
Rossum herself didn’t grow up in exactly the same world as Fiona.
Born in New York to a single mother, she sang in the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus for five years and attended the Spence School and Columbia while developing a dual career as a singer and actress.
She had breakthrough roles as Sean Penn’s tragic daughter in “Mystic River” and the young opera singer in “Phantom of the Opera,” for which she became the youngest actress nominated for a Golden Globe in a musical or comedy.
Emmy Rossum as Fiona Gallagher and Justin Chatwin as Jimmy/Steve “Shameless.”
To play Fiona, she shifts a few gears. Where Rossum is tall and elegant, Fiona is, well, tall.
“I like her to look a little bit haggard,” says Rossum. “She doesn’t have time or interest in beauty and perfection. Her look is part of telling the story.”
Even the logistics of filming the show, she says, serve that end.
“It’s a bubble we live in while we’re shooting,” she says. “We don’t have car service. We drive ourselves to work.”
She laughs. “I don’t even have my own trailer. Only Macy has his own trailer.”
Yet for all that, she says, there’s more of her than you might think in Fiona, and she credits this to creator/showrunner John Wells.
William H. Macy finds himself in an unusual spot as Frank Gallagher in Showtime's "Shameless."
“Before we start every season,” she says, “he sits down with us and talks about what he wants to do with each character. He asks how I feel about it, what I think.
“He also knows a lot about me. He’ll write things that are so similar to something that happened to me when I was 20 that I’ll go, ‘Is this a joke? Have I told you that?’
“But that’s a writer’s job, to write for you, and I trust John Wells completely. He’ll say, ‘This is what I want,’ and we’ll talk about ways to show it.
"We’ll talk for 15 minutes. We propose changes. Probably 60% of it shows up in the script.”
She laughs again.
“It makes us feel more important than we really are.”
Steve Kazee as Gus and Emmy Rossum as Fiona Gallagher in Showtime’s “Shameless.”
In one part of “Shameless,” though, the actors do carry the load: making the Gallaghers engaging and not just tragic.
Toward that end, “Shameless” is one of the new-breed stories, beloved by Showtime, that stomps all over the traditional lines between dark drama and dark comedy.
Finding a way to laugh with the Gallaghers, not at them, involves threading a fine needle. Alcoholic fathers and rudderless children aren’t that inherently funny until “Shameless” finds the outlandish situations into which life tosses them.
“We never play for comedy,” says Rossum, because the Gallaghers don’t think of what they’re doing or saying as jokes. They’re trying to get through the day.
The humor lies more in the rest of us seeing the absurdity — helped along by the occasional exaggeration.
“It’s larger than life,” says Rossum. “The scripts throw all these things at us, and they’re always worse when you’re reading them. When you start shooting, it feels really natural for the characters.”
Emmy Rossum as Fiona Gallagher and Dichen Lachman as Angela in Showtime's "Shameless."
Still, she admits, there’s something surreal about “Shameless” becoming a multi-season hit in the first place.
“We’re in a much more competitive (TV) world these days,” she says. “Doing this show about a blue-collar family was a nice fantasy, but I didn’t think it would even get picked up.”
Now it’s been renewed for a sixth season, which means more conversations with Wells about where Fiona will be going.
“I couldn’t have imagined Fiona’s current situation when we started,” says Rossum, and she has no more idea where Fiona could end up.
“Fiona’s had chances” to improve her life without abandoning her family, Rossum says. “But she’s sabotaged it every time.”
Bad call for her, maybe. Good call for “Shameless.”
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