Under the Bridge: Rebecca Godfrey, Racism & White Girlhood and the Kid Actors are So Good
‘Under the Bridge’ Dares to Look at a Different Side of White Girlhood https://t.co/1rNe1Eca7J
- IndieWire (@IndieWire) May 1, 2024
• In wanting to create a fleshed out show, and to pay respects to victim Reena Virk, Under the Bridge show runners Quinn Shephard and Samir Mehta used Godfrey’s book as a jumping off point. In order to expand the show and feel like they were telling as much of Virk’s story as they could, they reached out to the Virk family and also optioned her father Manjit Virk’s account of his daughter’s murder “Reena: A Father’s Story.”
• It was important for Mehta to contextualize Virk’s place in her community and school as a first-generation Western teenage girl. Her father was an Indian immigrant and her mother an Indo-Canadian Jeovoah’s Witness - they were already minorities within another minority group.
"It was important for Mehta to get the audience in the house with Reena, to see why the situation escalates to her living at Seven Oaks group home for a while."
• The show sets itself apart from other true crime shows by looking at the insidious nature of white girlhood and womanhood.
Trigger Warning
• Episode 4, which aired May 1, looks at the girls coming over for dinner at the Virk house while simultaneously telling the Virk family story. Suman, Reena’s mother, (Archie Panjabi) and her family just wanted to belong and the only people who didn’t show them racist vitriol were the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to their door.
• The show sought to show the jealousy that ruled the push and pull between Reena and Jo: "Reena wants to be Jo literally in many ways, but she also can never be because she’s an Indian girl. And so it’s like, well, if I can’t be you, close to you is a way to approximate that craving."
• The same dynamic is shown in a lesser way with the fictionalized Rebecca and Cam. Being young, pretty, and white allows Rebecca to both fit in with the teens and not be taken seriously (thus getting information that the police couldn’t because perhaps she was seen as someone who wouldn’t do anything with it). There’s a tension between Rebecca and Cam because despite Cam’s authority as a police officer, there are things that are easily accessible to Rebecca that Cam can’t do, like go have some cigarettes and gossip with the Seven Oaks girls.
• Shepherd says of Godfrey's book: "I think that Rebecca’s book is very beautiful, but it’s also written through the lens of white girlhood. And I think that it was very important that there was somebody else, who was a massive perspective in the show, who really did not feel seduced by the allure of the accused teens in the way that Rebecca was. I think it’s very interesting how fascinated she was by the kids who did this. I also think it’s a really valid perspective to be sort of put off by that and to not want to engage with that, because you’re so disturbed by the crime."
• The show runners also wanted Cam in some essence to be able to explore issues that they explore through Reena -generational trauma, the erotic aspects of the draw of white womanhood. Cam struggles with wanting to solve Reena’s murder and going behind her father and brother in order to do so. You can also see her repulsion of Rebecca’s fascination with the teenagers at the center of Reena’s murder, especially Jo who Rebecca seemingly sees herself in.
• Shepherd wanted to adapt Under the Bridge because of the insidiousness of white girlhood: "I don’t think that this crime would have happened, and I don’t think that Reena would have been brutalized in the way that she was during the murder had she looked like Josephine. Because I do think, especially in the late 90s, there was this immense pressure to achieve this white, thin, beautiful ideal. And I think that that’s really tragic. I think it’s a tragic story. And I also think that it was an important one to be able to explore on television."
Showrunner Quinn Shephard explains the beauty and grief of adapting Hulu’s ‘Under the Bridge’ with the book’s late author, Rebecca Godfrey. https://t.co/4GNHbLQh2h
- Vulture (@vulture) May 1, 2024
(Archive)
• Under the Bridge creator Quinn Shepherd first met author Rebecca Godfrey (played by Riley Keough in the series) in 2020 to start preparing for the series. At the time, she didn't know Godfrey had terminal cancer.
• Hulu wanted an adult perspective in the series and that was why Rebecca was inserted.
• While victim Reena Virk's story stays mostly accurate, Keough’s Rebecca is mostly fictionalized, from her romance with childhood friend and cop Cam, a character invented in the series and played by Lily Gladstone, to Rebecca’s decision to feed intel from her teen sources to law enforcement. Rebecca's characterization came from Godfrey's own investigative materials (which was spread out in nine file boxes), photos, and personal journals. Godfrey was open to the show taking her life and traumas and dramatizing it.
• Godfrey was perfectly fine with being made into a somewhat unlikable character. "She taught a course on anti-heroines, so when I was like, “Hey, sometimes she’s gonna be more of an anti-hero,” she was like, “I love that.”"
• Godfrey related to the teens and she was processing that as they outlined the show and she neared the end of her life: "In the first conversation we had about how directly the show was linked to her loss of her brother, she said that a lot of people in her life had suggested that Warren must have reminded her of her brother because she lost her brother when he was the exact same age. The final conversations I had with her right before she passed were about the fact that in the end, she realized that it was more about what she saw of herself in him than anything else. She felt that so much of his way of moving through the world would be shaped forever by guilt. I think her quest to make people understand how someone can do a bad thing came from a place of feeling like she had been capable of bad things when she was a kid."
• Though Godfrey's notes and her archival of newspaper articles at the time, Shepherd and her other writers realized that racism was brushed off as a motivation for the murder because some of Reena’s attackers weren't white. The show opted to bring that possibility up front.
• While the show shows the humanity in the attackers despite their crime, they leave killer Kelly Ellard as is. "She was the only person in real life who we couldn’t find any evidence of remorse from. With every single other character, you could trace a level of humanity to them. With her, you can’t find it. She’s very famous in Canada for a reason."
• As Godfrey entered hospice, it was a race against time. She read the scripts in hospice and called Shepard, then had her daughter read the scripts to her.
• Godfrey died on October 3, 2022, at the age of 54, little more than a week after Hulu announced it green-lit Under the Bridge to series. Shepherd got the call from Godfrey's husband as the team were building sets for the series.
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The Kids on ‘Under the Bridge’ Are So Damn Good https://t.co/UvIN1xJpuj
- IndieWire (@IndieWire) April 24, 2024
• The kids of Under the Bridge were all played by actors aged 12 to 16 at the time of filming (Vritika Gupta, who plays Reena Virk, was the youngest at 12).
• The actors had to be taught how to act "bad" since they were all close with their parents, didn't curse a lot and were professionals. Creator Quinn Shepherd had to teach the kids how to believably smoke.
• The show runners weren't interested in sanitizing Reena into a perfect victim: "I think it’s very, very important that we recognize that victims don’t need to earn sympathy from us. The real Reena Virk was very human, she had flaws, she made mistakes, like all people do; it was so essential to all of us that we make her feel like a real girl having real problems, who acts out, who curses, who makes mistakes, who smokes, who does all of the things that teenagers do, and that we realize that those are not justifications for not caring about what happened to her.”
/Trigger Warning
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