Breathing life into haunting 1997 murder
Keough and Gladstone bring humanity to Reena Virk's tale in the series Under the Bridge
Under the Bridge Debuts May 8, Disney+
Riley Keough wasn't sure at first whether she wanted to star in a true-crime project. The genre relies on a grim fascination with horrific violence, and dramatizations risk doing the victims a disservice. But in Under the Bridge, a new series about the 1997 murder of Canadian teenager Reena Virk, Keough saw an opportunity to paint everyone involved as human beings — not just 14-year-old Reena and her family but, to an extent, the perpetrators as well.
Why did a group of teenagers, some of whom had befriended Reena in previous months, beat her to the brink of death? And why did two of those teenagers, one of them a complete stranger to Reena, drown her in a river?
“I'm always asking why . ... What am I putting out in the world?” Keough said in a recent interview.
Under the Bridge draws from the 2005 non-fiction book by Rebecca Godfrey, a writer who investigated the crime that rocked her idyllic hometown of Victoria. Though Godfrey doesn't figure much into her own narrative, the series uses her investigation as a framing device. She is played by Keough, who also produced the show.
Reena (Vritika Gupta) appears in flashbacks, depicted as a passionate and caring but lonely girl who rebels against her Jehovah's Witness upbringing in a desperate effort to fit in.
Through these flashbacks and Rebecca's research, viewers encounter the girls Reena tried to befriend: Josephine Bell (Chloe Guidry), a tempestuous teenager living at a group home who starts her own gang; Dusty Pace (Aiyana Goodfellow), a kinder kid with a troubled past who also lives at the group home; and Kelly Ellard (Izzy G.), Josephine's cruel, well-to-do friend. After the incident, Rebecca also strikes up an acquaintance with Warren Glowatski (Javon Walton), a boy who runs in similar circles and lives alone in his estranged father's trailer.
Keough's involvement in the series piqued the interest of another true-crime skeptic: Lily Gladstone, who was fresh off shooting Killers of the Flower Moon and hesitated to embark on another foray into the genre. Gladstone had befriended Keough on social media years before she was pitched the fictional role of Cam Bentland, a police officer who pushes the local precinct to investigate Reena's sudden disappearance.
“(Keough) was amplifying some of the posts I would be making about missing murdered Indigenous relatives or Savanna's Act,” said Gladstone, who has Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage.
“She cared about a lot of the same things I did, ... so knowing that she was coming on both as an actor and as a producer, I was like: `OK, she believes in the character, and she believes in the project. I'll take the meeting.'”
In a way, Cam mirrors Reena. Her experience as the sole Indigenous member of the police department recalls some of the discrimination the Virks face in their very white town, where Reena is bullied by peers who pretend to be her friends. (Virk's father was an immigrant from India, while her mother came from an Indo-canadian family.)
Cam frequently argues with her white father, the police chief who adopted her as a child, just as Reena clashes with her parents over cultural differences.
In real life, after the group of teenagers beat and abandoned Reena, Ellard and Glowatski followed her. They continued the assault and drowned her, and they both were convicted of second-degree murder. Reena's parents, Manjit and Suman Virk, eventually forgave Glowatski, who had been a stranger to their daughter. Cam and Rebecca, old friends in this fictional rendering of events, come to blows over Rebecca's desire to humanize the teenage suspects through her writing — particularly Warren, who seems to remind Rebecca of her brother, who accidentally drowned when he was 16.
“A lot of her journey is a personal exploration of her own feelings and emotions ... and I think sometimes that can come across as a bit selfish,” Keough said. It was a challenging role, but one the actress considered to be “about honouring (Rebecca) and her grief.”
Keough never spoke to Godfrey, who died of lung cancer in 2022, before Under the Bridge began filming. (The author is listed as an executive producer for the three years she spent developing the series with Quinn Shephard.) The series paints the fictional Rebecca as conflicted — determined to understand why the teens committed such brutality, while grappling with “a sense of guilt,” per Keough, over her desire to do so. The actress theorized it might be easier to extend grace to children.
“Two things can be true: Something can be horrific, and also a mistake,” Keough said. “It's a grey area that I'm always thinking about ... and I like putting that out there for others to consider.”