Body of work
CHASING A SERIAL KILLER LETS LUCY HALE EXPAND ON HER ACTING TALENTS
Lucy Hale may be best known for her teenfriendly fare such as Pretty Little Liars and Riverdale spin-off Katy Keene, but the US actor says she has a “very intense, dark side”.
It was that fascination – along with a determination to expand her horizons and disprove her doubters – that drew her to Ragdoll, a new BBC serial-killer thriller from the same producers as global hit Killing Eve.
“I appreciate the darker things,” she says over Zoom call from Los Angeles. “I love shows like this, I am the first to listen to a true crime podcast. And just from a career standpoint, I only want to do things that really excite me or are challenging or different. I want people to be like ‘oh, I am surprised that Lucy is in this’. I like that because it’s so easy to get stuck into a box and I always want to be pushing the limit a little bit.”
Having come from a reality TV singing background and after making such an impression as Aria Montgomery in her seven-year stint on Pretty Little Liars, Hale says she’s had to fight hard just to be considered for parts such as DC Lake Edmunds in Ragdoll. She says she’s grateful for the chance to show what she is capable of in playing an American with a troubled past who joins the UK police force as part of a team on the hunt for a revenge-fuelled killer.
“It’s taken a while,” she says of her ongoing career evolution. “I have been done with Pretty Little Liars for five years now and it’s a slow burn. It’s a blessing and a curse – it’s champagne problems, I mean, poor me.
“I could be fine doing roles like that forever but for me as a person I have to do different things or I don’t feel satisfied. I have to feed the beast.”
Life imitated art somewhat for Hale while making the sometimes gruesome and blackly funny
Ragdoll. Her straight-talking DC Edmunds is very much the outsider as a foreigner on the mean streets of London and Hale says not knowing the city, the locals or even the processes of a UK set held her in good stead. And then there was the “banter” both on and off set as Hale adjusted to the British sense of humour and her character struggles to understand how her colleagues could see anything to joke about from a corpse stitched together from body parts left behind by the killer to taunt his would-be captors.
“The banter is very real and it’s different from any of the work I have ever done here,” she says with a laugh. “I guess it’s a lot more dry. I feel like as Americans we over-explain – we will tell a joke and be like ‘THAT was the joke – funny, right?’. Whereas British people will say it and walk away and you’ll never hear from them again.”
To prepare for the role, Hale connected with a real female UK detective and bombarded her with questions ranging from what were the best and worst parts of the job to what she should do with her hands at a crime scene.
And while she knew that law enforcement worked differently across the Pond from her homeland, one key regulation completely blew her mind once she showed up for work.
“We got to the set and I said ‘are we going to get gun training?’ and they were like ‘well, we don’t have guns here’ and I was like … ‘amazing – because guess what, we have way too many in America’,” she laughs.
Hale considers herself lucky to have been able to work through much of the coronavirus-induced production shutdowns of the past 18 months. But despite shooting two films last year and Ragdoll earlier this year, she admits to having had an “existential crisis” like many of her peers when faced with such uncertainty in her chosen field. “I probably had about one a day,” she says. “But it was so humbling and good for me to recognise that I need to find things I love outside of my work because anything could happen at any moment and I am still Lucy. “I work all the time and I love being busy but like a lot of people over this last year, I am sure we all felt similar feelings of ‘where is my self-worth or identity if I am not working 12 hours a day?’.
“We did not give ourselves a chance to shut off until we were literally forced to and I think a lot of us, as cheesy as it sounds, all had to go inward and nitpick what we’d like to change about ourselves.”
Following hard on the heels of Ragdoll for Hale is the rom-com The Hating Game, based on the best-selling book of the same name, which opens in cinemas here in January. She made it with her friend Austin Stowell – the pair play rival publishing executives – and she says it’s “a really cute lovehate-love story” that reminded her of the rom-coms she grew up with.
She happily admits that it’s an abrupt U-turn from dismembered corpses to a breezy workplace romance, but she’s determined to keep mixing things up and being open to new experiences.
“I want to throw people for a loop,” she says. “I don’t really set rules for myself because I think when you do that you miss out on fun opportunities so I have always had the mindset that I should do jobs that seem fun and bring me a lot of joy. I try to keep all the doors open and I read everything that’s sent my way because you just never know what could be an amazing experience for you.”