Lucy Hale ventures into darker territory with AMC+’s ‘Ragdoll’
If Lucy Hale’s fan base is shaken up by her latest project, she claims she won’t mind.
The “Pretty Little Liars” and “Katy
Keene” alum tackles a decidedly adult role in “Ragdoll,” a six-part melodrama that the streaming service AMC+ debuts Thursday, Nov. 11. The thriller casts Hale as the newest member of a London police unit faced with several murders in which the victims were dismembered, then reassembled into one body. The so-called “Ragdoll Killer” threatens to include one of the detectives (Henry LloydHughes, who also worked with executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle on “Killing Eve”) among his next targets, making a quick solution to the case even more imperative for the sleuths. Thalissa Teixeira also stars as their leader.
“I’ve been preparing my whole life for a show like this,” Hale maintains, “because
I’m the first girl to listen to any true-crime podcast or watch any of the crime shows. I think a lot of the people that support me have grown up with me, so I think that the people that are still watching everything that I do will hopefully know what they’re stepping into.
“The show is obviously very dark and there are gruesome elements, but what I loved was how Freddy (Syborn, who adapted Daniel Cole’s same-named novel in collaboration with Gentle) so brilliantly showed why people do certain things based on their trauma or their shame. For me, it was more about the friendships between these characters and the lengths they’ll go to protect each other.”
While noting the dark humor of “Ragdoll,” filmmaker Syborn explains that he wanted the adaptation to “focus on creating as much drama as possible from the kind of central trio ...how the police officers’ guilt, their shame, their internal lives drive this investigation. It’s really ultimately about the three of them.”
Lloyd-Hughes reports that in depicting his “Ragdoll” character’s struggle with PTSD, “I did spend time talking with therapists who deal specifically with people that have experienced that kind of thing. It was really revelatory in terms of working out what the human brain does. As human beings, we have weird and wonderful ways of processing the extraordinary things that we experience, and I tried to channel as much of that as I could into my performance.”