The Double Loss of Under the Bridge
Showrunner Quinn Shephard on the beauty and grief of adapting the Hulu series with the book’s late author, Rebecca Godfrey.
When filmmaker Quinn Shephard met author Rebecca Godfrey for the first time, she didn’t know Godfrey was running out of time. It was 2020, and Tara Duncan, the head of Disney’s Onyx Collective, had asked Shephard to pitch a limited-series adaptation of Godfrey’s 2005 book, Under the Bridge, a blunt, revealing look at the 1997 murder of teenager Reena Virk by seven of her peers, after Duncan read an unmade pilot Shephard wrote for FX. Not long after COVID lockdown began, Shephard moved near Godfrey’s Red Hook home in upstate New York so the two could meet regularly in person.
Godfrey soon revealed her stage-four lung-cancer diagnosis to Shephard, and for the next two and a half years, the pair operated under the unspoken mantra, “Get as far as we can while we can,” Shephard says. Building a creative alliance rooted in exploring the heightened emotions and complicated rivalries that often boil over during adolescence, Shephard and Godfrey discussed the horrible circumstances surrounding the death of Virk, a 14-year-old desperate to fit in with her peers and whose death came to symbolize the pervasiveness of teen bullying in Canada, especially among young girls.
Shephard knew she wanted to make Godfrey a character in the show (played by Riley Keough), and the two unpacked the particulars of Godfrey’s rebellious childhood growing up in Victoria and how that perspective informed her exhaustive interviews with the suspects in the Virk case that would form the backbone of Godfrey’s book. 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 and the real-life Godfrey do share one tragedy, however: Godfrey’s older brother drowned when they were just teenagers, a trauma Godfrey and her onscreen counterpart carry with them while reporting on the case.
Despite the raw subject matter, there was a levity to their work, Shephard says. “When there was a new Chanel runway show, we’d be like, ‘We should wear this one to the Emmys,’” she says with a laugh. She recalls sneaking Champagne into a theater to see a movie made by one of Godfrey’s friends: “We were always doing a little bit of mischief.” 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. Even though she didn’t live to see production begin, as Shephard tells it, Godfrey’s influence and spirit are all over it.
Do you remember when you met Rebecca?
I read the book in December of 2019 and started talking to Rebecca on the phone in March 2020. It was really a crazy time. I stayed at my parents’ house for a couple weeks, and I remember sitting in my childhood bedroom, being on the phone with her for four hours.
I moved to upstate New York, 15 minutes away from her, and we spent a tremendous amount of time together over the next three years. Because it was the pandemic, I really only saw my partner at the time, my friend who moved upstate, and her. We would do these long picnics with farmers’-market food and sit outside talking for hours. She read a lot of drafts of the pilot. She showed me all this research and her old family photos. She gave me all her diaries. She had everything from when she researched the crime — the entire police file, all the recordings, transcripts of every interview she did — in eight or nine file boxes.
What kinds of things did you ask her?
We talked about who she was in high school and middle school and her childhood. Obviously she had a very traumatic loss. That’s a big part of the show. I didn’t ask her about that in our first interview. I wanted to give her at least one conversation before I went right for the hardest stuff.
I think who she was as a kid was so influential in how she wrote the story. She was really involved in the punk scene in Victoria from the time she was 13 and really acted out as a kid and got into a lot of trouble. The music she listened to, the way she dressed — I liked how that echoed through her as a woman in her 20s when she was writing the book.
The ending scene of the pilot is based on the first moment she met the kids in real life. She had gone to the juvie center for research for her first novel. She was walking down the hallway, and there were all these girls in cells banging on the glass and yelling at her. One of the girls was crying as she looked through the window. The guard was like, “Yeah, we just arrested all these girls for murder.” Rebecca was so struck by how young they were. She felt they were almost calling her, like they wanted her to tell their story.
Did you go into your conversations with Rebecca knowing she would be a character in the show, or was that something you were still trying to figure out?
I really wanted to make her a character. She had done a few interviews where she talked about the way she dove into the world of these teenagers to write this. This woman in her 20s went and did what no journalist, no cop, and no lawyer was able to do, which is get the real truth of what happened. It was a big priority for Hulu that the show have an adult perspective, and she felt like an obvious place to start. Then we would have an opportunity to comment on the nature of true crime and what it does to somebody who immerses themselves in that.
Was she onboard with being a character in the series?
I was so scared because the ask was quite personal. In an interview I read before I met her, she talked about her trauma from childhood. I knew we were going to need to delve into that if she was going to be a character in the show. She was really open to it.
She knew she was terminally ill from the time that I met her; she told me a handful of months into knowing her. I think there was an element of knowing she was at the end of her life. She was very ready to allow me to go to her most personal places and put that on the screen. Every time I turned in an episode outline to her, I’d be spinning out on the other side, like, Oh God, this is so fucking personal, and then she would send back her notes and they would just be about a line Josephine says. She never seemed to feel a real pressure to want the character to be hyper-lovable or sanitized. 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.”
The character Rebecca’s feelings about her brother are an important part of the show and one of the reasons she’s able to relate to these kids so much, especially Warren, the only boy accused in the crime. Was that something Rebecca was feeling at the time and just didn’t put it in the book because she wasn’t a character herself?
I think Rebecca was processing some of that during our development. 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.
Cam was written as a completely new character. Was she a composite of any cops Rebecca dealt with or a complete invention?
There was only one female cop in the real case, so a lot of stuff in Cam was largely based on men. It was quite a white-male-dominated perspective, and in the show, we wanted to have an in-depth counterpoint to Rebecca, somebody who was going to see the crime from a different personal nature than she did. Cam’s backstory, her adoption, being an Indigenous woman — those were elements added for the show.
There’s a scene in episode three when Reena’s mom identifies her body and sees a cigarette burn that looks like a bindi. That happened in real life, and it seems like that would open the door for Reena’s death to be charged as a hate crime. But it never was. Were their conversations about whether her murder was racially motivated in the actual case?
It’s really strange that she was burned with a cigarette at the center of her forehead. I think it would be impossible to deny that indicates, if not racial motivation in her murder, a racial mocking of her. But a lot of reports and even the way it’s described in the book Under the Bridge just said she was burned with a cigarette on her forehead. There aren’t any references to a bindi. It was something that almost went overlooked. But because we had access to all the research files in the writers’ room, you sometimes stumble upon one out of 30 articles where a reporter says, “This is obviously referencing a bindi.” The more we dug into the case, the more it was clear that there had been a conversation within the police of, “Hey, do we think the crime is racially motivated?” The reason it was dismissed as a potential motive was that not all of the kids who attacked Reena were white. In the late ’90s, there was a lack of understanding of the nuance. That was all stuff we wanted to see play out in the show. To ignore racial motivation in the attack would be to ignore a massive part of the story.
Well, as we start to see in the third episode, her death is mostly the fault of Kelly, the most aggressive girl within that friend group.
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.
In episode three, we learn there are romantic feelings between Cam and Rebecca. How did that evolve as you worked on this?
We kept the idea of a romance between them because they are such polar opposites. They’re often really at odds. We knew the most interesting conversations about the morals of the crime would come out of those perspectives being forced to be together, so it gave us an opportunity to have these very personal discussions about the crime.
Can you remember the conversation you had with Rebecca after finding out the series got picked up?
Our relationship always had a lot of beauty and a lot of sadness in it. A lot of those conversations had both. I knew she wanted it to get made more than anything, and I wanted it to get made for her sake more than anything. I also know that when we would have conversations about milestones, there was sometimes a fear from her that she wouldn’t be around to see it happen. We would celebrate together, but there would also be this thing in the air: “Get as far as we can while we can.” That was hard. She was literally reading the scripts in hospice and calling me and having her daughter read the scripts to her.
How did you get the news that she had died?
We were in prep in Vancouver building sets, but we hadn’t started filming yet. Her husband texted me.
Was it difficult to go forward without her?
It was weird processing such an immense loss while I was in production meetings talking about what her bedroom should look like. There would be questions I realized I should have asked: “Fuck, I don’t know what color her bedroom walls were when she was a kid.” That would make me spin out. But it was also really sweet sometimes. I would be really sad that I couldn’t show her the set, but I would also feel spiritually close to her because something we talked about in such detail was now coming to life.
It was constantly a conversation of, “Is this honoring the things she said she was okay with before she passed?” It’s a question we always had to ask about the whole show with everyone in the show: Are we staying true to who they were? When we’re fictionalizing, is it responsible? Is it something that could be upsetting? Is this honoring who this person really was?
Now that the show is finished, do you still wrestle with those feelings of “I should have asked Rebecca this”?
It’s not gone yet. I don’t know when it goes away. At some point I made peace with the fact that it might never go away. I had to accept that the relationship I had with her and the process of telling the story of this particular crime will always be a part of me. There was so much beauty and there was a lot of grief, and I try to hold both. Probably it’ll have some echo in a script I write one day.