One Nightstand With Emmy Rossum

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

In many ways, Emmy Rossum had a completely exceptional childhood. She performed in the Metropolitan Opera’s children’s chorus from 7 years old, where she was directed by Franco Zeffirelli and sang with the late Luciano Pavarotti, and portrayed Christine in the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera when she was just 16.

Beyond that, however, her youth looked a lot like any other millennial’s.

“I had a huge Spice Girls obsession,” says the actor, 39. “I was Geri Halliwell. It was probably my first pop culture obsession — that, and Celine Dion concurrently. My best friend and I — Andrew, who sang in the children’s chorus with me — would hang at his Upper West Side apartment before or after we would sing at the opera. And we would do all things Celine Dion and all things the Spice Girls.”

They even got crafty with it. “We made a board game of the Spice Girls where it was their walk through Spice World with different tour stops and different songs,” she says. “I’m pretty sure Celine was somewhere in the board game as well. We were obsessed.”

Some 30 years later, Rossum has built a career playing equally obsess-worthy characters across film and television. Her nine-season stint as Fiona Gallagher on Shameless continues to capture the imagination, including hordes of young people on TikTok who didn’t watch it the first time around.

“It’s interesting how it’s found a new life,” she says. “The characters are also sexually liberated and free, and you’re able to get very close to them because of the intensity and vulnerability that comes with so many of those scenes and those character arcs. I think that for a lot of people who grew up in big, messy, chaotic households that may have had substance problems, or just emotional chaos or poverty, there are very few shows that resonate in that way.” (Seeing the clips brings back fond memories for Rossum, too. “It’s a lot of loving the dynamics and watching the dynamics and remembering just the tenderness and the fun that we had.”)

In recent years, Rossum has spent more time developing shows under her Composition 8 banner, including Angelyne — a 2022 co-production with her husband Sam Esmail, with whom she has two children — and 2024’s Three Women, starring Shailene Woodley. Her latest, Furious on Hulu, follows a former NYPD detective-turned-FBI agent (Rossum) who is tracking a female serial killer (Lola Petticrew) seeking retribution for being trafficked as a child.

“The two female leads here are two sides of the same coin,” says Rossum. “Both women have been victims of violence. Both are looking for justice, and you could argue one’s looking for vengeance in unorthodox ways. Both are very underestimated by society and therefore have to and are able to work outside the normal lines of morality in the gray area. It was funny reading the scripts, because I was like, ‘Am I really identifying with the serial killer now? Am I hoping she kills all these people?’”

Rossum is a self-admitted big believer in doing her homework, and trained for her turn on the show with former and current FBI agents and NYPD detectives to “really understand what it was like on a cellular level.” And her brand has remained strong since her teen years, even attending a seance to prep for her role in 2004’s Phantom.

“The character is haunted by who she thinks is her dead father,” she says. “I didn’t have a father growing up. So the yearning for something missing was certainly kind of adjacent to a sadness that I had inside and a yearning that I had inside. But I also went and had an experience at a spiritualist society, a kind of seance that I went to, to kind of see what that was like and had an experience there that was interesting and surprising and certainly helped give me a concrete memory of something as I was going into shooting that.”

Another part of her preparation involves getting closer to the words. “Reading is a huge part of my job, and being analytical, but most of what I read is in script or play form,” she says. “So much of my job is filling in the blanks on the big white piece of paper around the dialogue and around the stage direction. I love to read a book, because it fills in so much of the work that I have to do to create the edges and the girth of the character. I love to lose myself in a book.”

Keep reading to discover four of Rossum’s favorites.

Her first selection is Half His Age, Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel, which follows Waldo, a 17-year-old Alaskan high school student who begins an affair with her married creative writing teacher, Mr. Korgy. “I’m always interested in other creatives,” Rossum says. “Jennette is an actress, a director, and now a writer, and so I’m very interested in people who find their way into their voice in other ways.”

Because Rossum has been performing since childhood, the dynamic between the two characters particularly resonated with her. “I was really taken by the way that someone believing in you creatively can change your life,” she says. “It becomes very complicated for the two of them. But I was really taken by the way that the character seems confused as to whether she actually wants this or just wants to be wanted.”

Her second choice is Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many: A Memoir [Kind Of], a 2023 experimental account of discovering her husband, Patrick, was having an affair with her best friend, Trish. “I thought this book was laugh-out-loud funny, moving, very vulnerable,” she says. “I like the absurdity of life and I definitely got it from this book.”

Rossum has been watching The Real Housewives of Rhode Island recently to study for a role, and she found herself thinking of Trish by the time she made it to the season’s reunion. “One character [in the show] was accused of trying to mediate and help things, but was thought to be or perceived as — I don’t have a side in this, I promise — more of an instigator than she was a mediator. And so I think Trish is a little bit of that dynamic.”

Her third pick is Blood Test by Charles Baxter, a dark comedy about a man who discovers he’s genetically predisposed to becoming a killer. It was recommended by a bookseller at her favorite shop after offering the prompt, “I’m looking for something really funny but kind of dark and I like books grounded in absurdity.”

The novel’s questions about breaking out of one’s circumstances are similar to the ones Rossum thought about while filming Shameless. “We talked a lot about characters who were in an economically depressed environment, but who were not depressed, who had each other, who had loyalty, who had family, who had the kind of the comedy that can come from the absurdity of what it takes sometimes to survive,” she says.

She continues: “So as gentrification was pressing into their neighborhood, and Fiona ultimately does go into real estate and starts to fix up these buildings and become part of the problem in their minds, we are seeing how the world is changing and how she’s kind of trying to change with it — and how so many of them are not.”

Her final selection is her favorite children’s book, Margery Williams’ 1922 classic The Velveteen Rabbit, about a stuffed rabbit wanting to become real. “It’s a good comfort book for me whenever I’ve forgotten who I am or need to remember or want a good cry or want to feel connected in some way,” she says. “My therapist a couple of years ago said, ’I really need you when you’re feeling not great about yourself, down on yourself physically, to read this book because everyone deserves love — even if they have wrinkles and furry spots worn off.’”

Watch the full video below.