Emmy Rossum, 25, returns to Showtime for the second season of “Shameless” as Fiona, the eldest sister and mother figure of the scrappy, law-skirting, non-working-class Gallagher family. Already a performing vet at 25, Rossum’s latest gig follows a childhood launch as a member of the Metropolitan Opera’s Children’s Chorus and starring roles in the 2004 film “The Phantom of the Opera” and big-budget disaster movies including “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Poseidon.”
What will we learn about the Gallaghers this season?
We’re going to see the Gallaghers in summertime. It’s a different ambience; it’s hot, sticky, summer fun, and also when it’s hot, tempers flare. So there’s violence and sexuality in a way we’ve come to know only the Gallaghers do it. Fiona is working in a nightclub as a waitress, and the kids are running a day-care service that Fiona pretends to front, but the kids really run it. And Lip and our neighbor, Kev, are running an ice cream truck where they don’t sell ice cream as much as they sell weed and beer and cigarettes to kids who are over the age of 13.
Do they check IDs?
I think they raise their arms and see if they have hair under them.
Fiona got her heart broken at the end of the first season, and we see that as this season picks up four months later, she’s onto the rebound phase. So she’s a little boy-crazy and acting out, and she is going to make some mistakes because of it, and there’s a moment in Episode 4 where Fiona is being chased by a woman with a baseball bat, and she’s hiding under a table next to [her alcoholic father] Frank, and she realizes she is becoming Frank. It’s Frank Gallagher’s proudest moment and Fiona Gallagher’s worst nightmare.
One thing that’s interesting about Fiona is that except for a couple of nightclub scenes, she isn’t even remotely glamorous. And that’s unusual for a young female lead. Did that appeal to you about the character?
Yes, it did appeal to me to have a character who isn’t in the least vain. As an actor, your own personal vanity can be a massive pitfall in terms of making a character believable. I feel more in this character to have my shoulders hunched and be in tattered clothes and have my hair knotted than I do when I’m dolled up.
How minimal is the makeup?
There isn’t much – just a little mascara and pimple coverage, if there is any.
Is that part of your career strategy, not to get typecast as a young hottie starlet?
I actually don’t think I have a strategy. I think in terms of instinct, if in my gut it feels like the right character, if I feel it’s a story that needs to be told. Of course in retrospect it was an excellent idea to go do something that was not glamorous, because I think people did see me as princess-y after “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Poseidon” and big-budget movies. Looking back on it, if it was a strategy it would have been a really good one. It happened that I ended up emotionally attaching to a character that I was the right age for when they were casting it. This show had also been around for a couple of years. There was another incarnation of it at HBO with Woody Harrelson in the William H. Macy role, so I wouldn’t have been the right age for it at that time. So much of Hollywood is luck.
You’ve said that you relate to Fiona’s anxiety about her father. What did you mean?
I think Fiona has more deep-seated issues about her mother than her father. She feels a sense of abandonment and anger that her mother left her and her family and forced her to become an adult before she was really ready. So she’s underdeveloped in a lot of ways – intellectually, in terms of her education, and she’s overdeveloped in a lot of ways, sexually and in terms of paying bills and doing the everyday mundane tasks of staying alive. I can definitely relate to — I just realized I was completely avoiding answering your question, because I suppose it’s a sensitive issue. I have a difficult relationship with my father, so that’s something I can definitely draw on, but my father is nothing like Frank Gallagher. I get a lot of Fiona’s strength and her parenting style from my own mother, who was very strong and fierce but also incredibly loving and did things in a unique way and had a very close relationship with me that was playful, like Fiona has with her siblings.
You announced on MySpace in 2008 that you were working on your second album and still searching for your sound, so what’s going on with all of that?
Well, three years later I think I’ve figured it out. But it takes time. I was on a label for a while right after “Phantom of the Opera,” and then I released a record ["Inside Out" in 2007] that I loved, that I think lyrically was very representative of me, but sonically it was something that was not completely authentic to me, so I’m trying to be more authentic, and I’m going to start working on a new music project now. I think it’s going to be stylistically a little different, maybe a little closer to my roots.
I’m on a TV show, which I’m so lucky to be on. It pays my rent, so I don’t need to make a ton of money on music, and music has always been my first love. I’m not in this business for fame or money. That’s something I learned from being a kid at the Met. The kids weren’t unionized. We made 25 bucks a night and there were horses onstage — no joke — that were making $800. So when you’re valued, at least monetarily, less than a farm animal, you realize you’re there because you really love it.

Source: LATimes

Actress Emmy Rossum sang for her supper when she was a youngster – butchers gave her free hot dogs if she showed off her opera skills. The Day After Tomorrow star was a member of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus, and her wide-ranging vocals were a hit with locals. She explains, “When I was training at the opera, I started when I was seven or eight for the children’s chorus, and they used to teach us all these arias… “My route when I would walk home from opera practice was past this butcher, so I would stop at the butchers and if I could sing them an aria they would give me a hot dog.”

Source: Contactmusic

Actress Emmy Rossum appeared on Chelsea Lately to promote her R-rated Showtime show Shameless recently and talked about working with her young co-star Emma Kenney. The actress had some sisterly advice for Kenney, who plays her younger sister on the show. She taught her how to shave her legs. “We have nude scenes so I was in the trailer, shaving my legs before a nude scene and she came in the trailer and I’m in like, you know, pasties and my robe, getting ready for my naked scene and she’s like, ‘Oh, that’s how you … shaving your legs? I’ve never done that before’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it,’” Rossum said. “So then, we’re lathering her up and she’s shaving and of course, when I called my mom when I went home, I was like, ‘Yeah, we shaved her legs.’ She was like, ‘You robbed her mother of that experience. She’s becoming a woman. You’re taking it away from her.’ So I felt terrible.”

Source: Zap2it.com

Actress Emmy Rossum was left outraged when a mountain lion trespassed on her Hollywood Hills property and started drinking from her pool during the holidays. Rather than feel fear or wonder as she watched the big cat slurp, the native New Yorker got angry and tried to shoo the creature away. The Phantom of the Opera star says, “I was sitting in my back yard… and there’s this clearing… and there was a mountain lion that came walking through the clearing and was drinking out of my pool. “I didn’t have the fear instinct; I had the New York ‘outraged’ instinct. I was like, ‘What the hell are you doing? Get off my property!’ Then I called Animal Control.” Rossum admits the encounter made her realise she’s a world away from New York: “We’re not in Manhattan any more!”

Source: Contactmusic.com

Emmy Rossum was apprehensive about taking a role in the U.S. adaptation of British TV show Shameless because she felt uncomfortable about the graphic sex scenes and gritty content. The Phantom of the Opera star appears opposite William H. MACy and Joan Cusack in the new series, which focuses on a dysfunctional family living in Chicago, Illinois. Rossum didn’t want to audition for the role of Fiona Gallagher initially, because she was put off by the nudity, swearing and shocking storylines, but her agent persuaded her to give it a go. She tells the New York Post, “I was loathe to do that (the sex scenes), but she’s a really interesting character and it’s rare for actresses to get good opportunities. My agent said, ‘People would never see you in that role… it’s a great part… you have to fight for it.’ “So, although I felt a little guilt, I got the script and auditioned four times. It’s not necessarily pretty writing. No time for sweet sayings. Mostly grip and grope – making love on the floor, the father’s drunk, cops come… He hits the kids.” Rossum also struggled to come to terms with her appearance on the show, adding, “I wear no make-up. None. My hair’s frizzed out. (But) I’m OK with not looking my best…”

Source: Contactmusic

Emmy Rossum has revealed how cast members on the US remake of Shameless pass the time between takes: making up rude songs. The 24-year-old, lauded for her angelic singing in The Phantom Of The Opera, said she and co-star William H Macy enjoyed composing naughty ditties during their downtime. “Bill Macy brings his ukulele to set and we make up funny songs – dirty songs,” Emmy laughed. The actress – who plays Fiona, the oldest daughter in the raucous Gallagher brood – said there was an opportunity to flex her vocal chords on the show. “There’s one scene later in the season where we discover that Bill’s character can play the piano, and we’re all singing ‘I Will Survive.’ But I was instructed to sing poorly,” she added. Emmy won high praise from William, who plays drunken dad Frank in the Showtime series, adapted from Paul Abbott’s original Channel 4 show. “Really, the heart and soul of the thing is Emmy Rossum,” he said. “She does the heavy lifting on our show.”

Source: The Press Association

Some actors pick up postcards as souvenirs from their location shoots. Emmy Rossum scooped up an alley cat. “Gosh, she was so gross,” Rossum says of Fiona Kitty. The cat made herself at home last fall on the Chicago set of Shameless, Showtime’s gritty new drama about the Gallaghers, a highly unconventional family of grifters getting by. Fiona Kitty had to be rid of worms and fleas before Rossum flew her back to Los Angeles. Still, she hasn’t completely shed the streets of her native West Side. She’s known to whack Rossum’s Yorkie, Cinnamon, in the head — “they’re sequestered right now” — and has clawed her new owner’s face “a little bit.” “She is definitely channeling my character,” Rossum says, and her namesake, Fiona Gallagher, the de facto matriarch in a household of five younger siblings and a drunken single father (William H. Macy) who works thankless jobs (at a concession stand, as a motel maid) and dates a charismatic car thief. Rossum, 24, knows that playing a mostly makeup-free, often braless anti-heroine is a stretch from the “corset-y, period drama” roles she’s used to. “I’m not obviously imagined as a kind of feral girl from Chicago,” she says. Fiona is “very aggressive. She has to have her defenses up, but at the same time, she has this innate sensitivity. You don’t know if she’s going to claw your eyes out or kiss you.” The challenge of diving into such a complicated character has made Shameless “definitely the most exciting job I’ve ever had,” Rossum says. Acting the part has even spilled over into Rossum’s off-screen life — to a point. It’s “definitely made me more ballsy and more confident, but I’m definitely not beating anyone up.” Indeed, she has been expressing Fiona’s more maternal side. Aside from adopting a stray cat, Rossum, who’s single (she and Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz broke up in September), took the young cast into her L.A. home on Thanksgiving. (The show is partly filmed on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif.). Christmas meant playing Secret Santa. Rossum pulled Ethan Cutkosky, 12, who plays her brother Carl on the show. He asked for a BB gun; Rossum gave him a spy kit. “He’s been a Gallagher too long,” she says. Macy encouraged the off-camera closeness, which has helped when it comes time to shoot. “We have a shorthand now in communicating,” Rossum says. “Even the way we’re physically comfortable roughhousing and moving around, it just comes more naturally.” Including the unvarnished sex scenes, like the one in the pilot between Fiona and her new, sketchy boyfriend, Steve (Justin Chatwin), which involves kitchen appliances and brief toplessness. “It’s not hard for me because I feel so comfortable with Justin” (she co-starred with him in the 2009 movie Dragonball Evolution). Besides, “if you’re going to try to show a character in a realistic way, sex is a realistic part of life. Nudity is a realistic part of life.” To edit it out “seems odd.” Chatwin injects rawness into these intimate moments in another way. “He likes to eat tuna sandwiches before we have love scenes,” Rossum reports. “I just shove an Altoid in his mouth and call it a day.”

Source: UsaToday.com

Emmy Rossum has revealed that she is not worried about the controversial side of Shameless. Rossum, who plays Fiona in the US remake of the show, told the New York Post that she has no problem with the sex scenes. “People will either love this or be horribly offended, and I think all of those things are good challenges,” she said. “I definitely embrace [the sex scenes]. So much of people’s inner workings and who you really are can be shown through a sexual experience. Apparently I didn’t like wearing clothes until I was, like, seven, when I realised it was proper to wear clothes. I used to just take them off and run around naked. So clearly I’m comfortable that way.” Rossum also acknowledged that she was not an obvious choice to play Fiona. “I don’t think that given my past history of big budget movies and corset period dramas I was the logical choice for this kind of rough-around-the-edges character,” she said. “So [in my audition] I went in jeans and a ripped tank top, no make-up and a Chicago accent. And I kind of convinced them that I could cuss with the best of them.” Shameless premieres on Sunday at 10pm on Showtime.

Source: Digital Spy

Emmy Rossum has reportedly settled her divorce from former partner Justin Siegel by paying him $57,000 (£36,000). The Phantom of the Opera actress secretly married Siegel in February 2008. According to TMZ, Rossum is to keep their home, her jewellery and other personal items. Siegel will retain an $11,200 (£7,259) security deposit, a Mercedes and jewellery. The divorce papers, which were filed on December 29 in LA County Superior Court, state that no spousal support will be awarded to either party.

Source: Digital Spy

Emmy Rossum has revealed she has been banned from watching the British version of Shameless, despite starring in the American adaptation. The Phantom Of The Opera star plays oldest Gallagher sister Fiona in the US version, the part played by Ann Marie Duff in the award-winning comedy drama about a chaotic family on a Manchester council estate. Emmy revealed: “I’ve never seen it. Paul Abbott, the creator, has asked that I not see it just so I take a fresh take on the story and the character. “There’s a lot of pressure to live up to and also do something different than the British series because it is so great and has such a loyal fanbase that we’re not trying to copy – we’re just trying to do our own version of it. I think the stories will be somewhat similar – similar-ish. “I play Fiona – she’s kind of the pseudo-mother of the brood. She is feisty and loyal and outspoken and I really dig her a lot. She’s awesome.” The 24-year-old actress said she was really enjoying the show’s British sense of humour. She said: “I like how ballsy it is, how fresh and it’s got a lot of punk, rock and roll energy to it, so it should be good. “Just getting to deal with the material is so fun and exciting and it’s raw, it’s challenging and I get to be funny, hopefully, which is fun.”

Source: The Press Association