“The first time I saw one of Angelyne’s billboards was around ’98,” Emmy Rossum explains. “I was like 12 or 13. I remember being absolutely hypnotized.”
A lot of us were. Angelyne rose to fame in the 1980s after large-scale prints of her hot-pink-clad likeness began appearing mysteriously all over Los Angeles. She’s worked as a singer and an actress, but more than anything, she’s a larger-than-life personality, and as someone who was born and raised in the City of Angels, I can attest to the fact that the city has been under her spell for decades. Growing up, I always found it comforting to catch sight of one of her busty billboards or her roaring pink Corvette. She exuded a kind of power that spoke to me. I love an unapologetic Hot Girl.
It’s clear that Rossum, the star and executive producer of Peacock’s new limited Angelyne series, feels the same way. An actress and activist with a fairly low-key celebrity persona, Rossum isn’t necessarily the first person you’d connect with someone as famously over-the-top. If there’s one thing that defines Rossum’s career, though, it’s her range. She’s starred in blockbusters like The Day After Tomorrow (2004), been personally cast by Andrew Lloyd Webber for the film adaptation of Phantom of the Opera (2004), and spent eight years playing Fiona Gallagher on the hit television series Shameless. She’s been acting on-screen since the age of 10; even before that, she sang onstage with the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus. But although her talents are more traditional, she possesses a deep appreciation for Angelyne’s unconventional approach to fame.
Asked about the appeal of the billboard queen, she immediately begins talking about agency. “I see somebody who’s a trailblazer, who’s powerful and strong, who will stop at nothing to get what she needs and wants, and is completely in control in almost every situation,” she explains. “She’s someone who is childlike and magical in a way that’s very disarming. I also see someone who knew that her physical package made people underestimate her, and she used that to her advantage.”
To achieve that physical package, Rossum was willing to endure full days on set ensconced in layers of artificial parts. “There were days, especially with the aging, when there was none of me that I could see—not nails, not earlobes, not neck, not body, not eyes, not eyelids, not eyebrows, not eyeballs. There was PVC piping inside and up in my nose to change the shape. It was very, very intense.”
She couldn’t stretch in the costume for fear of damaging it, and on breaks she would simply lie in her trailer, immobile. “It’s not a costume that you can take off at lunch,” she explains. “I can only equate it to being in the body of a superhero in that it feels superhuman. It does not feel real, and not just because it’s prosthetics but because of its proportions and how it feels to move within that.”
Angelyne’s “weaponization of her femininity,” as Rossum describes it, is empowering at its core. You could argue that Angelyne was an early influencer, meticulously marketing herself as a brand in a way so savvy that she couldn’t be ignored. She made a business out of buzz, carefully constructing her image and presenting herself to the world through eye-catching content. Her motives largely remain a mystery to this day, which is part of what makes her fascinating. But the series posits that she wanted to be idolized specifically for this image she’d made. She was so confident in her personal brand that she believed it deserved to be worshipped simply for existing. And in a way, she got her wish because we’re still talking about her.
“She knew the power of an image decades before social media,” adds Rossum. “And the curation and specificity with which she supervised the printing of her image was like, you know, Ansel Adams printing his sequoia trees.”
That razor-sharp sense of self deserves a carefully crafted performance. Rossum took every move and every “Ooh!” seriously. “I worked with a movement teacher, and we watched so many of her music videos and live performances,” Rossum reveals. “And I remember just days of rolling around on my living-room floor and pushing furniture to the side and rolling around on the garage floor.”
I tell Rossum that I had the chance to interview the real Angelyne once, and I noticed that she moved her voice and body as if she was dancing. “It’s funny you say dancing because one of my approaches to the character was that I would, in terms of my movement, always start from a vocal place,” says Rossum, who also met with the real Angelyne before starting the project. (“We exchanged gifts. I brought her pink macarons, and she brought me a positive energy crystal, of course.”)
But maybe, she muses, it’s as physical as it is vocal: “I would often say the movement that Angelyne does—or that I do as her—is like dancing to the sound of your own voice. I really love the way her voice moves and the modalities. Sometimes it’s childlike and playful and it’s punctuated by all these kind of bizarre squeals. We call them the ‘Ooh!’s.”
All this effort for something that comes to Angelyne so effortlessly. Just imagine, for one second, what it would be like to be that sure of yourself—that decisive in how loud and proud you are, that capable of representing your image without a blueprint, without a Pinterest mood board, without an Instagram Saved folder, without a TikTok in sight. To be that strong in your own skin that you’re fully unbothered watching people do a double-take when they see you walk by.
“I actually found the body to be overwhelming for most people. They weren’t sure how to react,” says Rossum of presenting herself in character on set. “And with the styling and all the hot pink and the bows and the hair and the bangles and the shoes and the bag and the car keys and the fan and the glasses and the whole look—it’s almost like you’re overdosing them.”
Angelyne is a walking sensory overload experience. What you feel when scrolling Instagram, Angelyne embodies when entering a room. And while she gives us her all visually and vocally, the biggest difference between her and today’s influencers is her protection of privacy. “I think what’s so fascinating about Angelyne is that there is that preservation of mystery,” explains Rossum. “We’re never going to be in the doctor’s office with her. We’re never going to be in her pantry. We don’t know what her apartment looks like. In the same way, we were kept at arm’s length from Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe. That element of separation allowed for mystery, for us to fill in the blanks in whatever way we want. I think that that’s the difference between her and social-media influencers of today.”
So, no Angelyne vlog coming anytime soon—although she is very much still alive and active on Instagram, and she even ran for governor of California last year.
Rossum has mixed feelings about social media herself: “My relationship with Instagram is ever evolving. I see its great benefits in terms of connection and discussion and offering a platform for the voiceless. I also like that it allows people to be able to speak out and create their own brand and monetize it without having to go through gatekeepers. But I also see the way in which the disproportionate amount of filtered images—let’s just say most—creates within us a kind of inherent compare-and-despair mentality. Where you can’t help but compare your life, your car, your abs, your vacation to what somebody else has. Or what it looks like they have at that moment. I think something that can connect us can also make us feel so alone.”
Rossum’s natural empathy was helpful when approaching Angelyne. The actress is also a mother and a passionate activist who uses her platform to fight for human rights, from equal pay to voting to a woman’s choice. “I usually take action so that I can feel less helpless, whether that’s rolling up my sleeves and trying to get involved in an organization that I think can make a difference or raising money for something or helping a friend that needs it. I like getting involved, and I like helping.”
I like to think of Angelyne as an activist in her own right, advocating for everyone who needs an aspirational outlet in dark times—including herself. Rossum echoes this notion: “I think what Angelyne is doing, through having created herself this way and becoming this beacon of positivity, is giving us an escape. She may be escaping as well, but I believe that she has fiercely protected this image and the mystery that surrounds it—almost like she’s doing us a service. Although she wishes to live the role of an icon, somebody who is that fantasy, she does say that [the character of] Angelyne was born out of sorrow and pain and trauma and that this is survival for her.” (More on that trauma: A 2017 story in The Hollywood Reporter says that Angelyne was allegedly the daughter of Holocaust survivors.)
Now that Rossum has made it through Angelyne, she’s giving herself permission to recognize the accomplishment. “This project felt like Mount Everest. It was a long climb, and it took a lot of people to get on board and try to explain why the story was important. There was a little bit of Angelyne’s magic in my head. She tells people to achieve what they really desire; I think I used that energy as my guiding light.”
Angelyne’s showrunner and EP, Allison Miller, agrees that Rossum gave her all in this performance: “Her commitment to the role and her vision for what she wanted to do with the character and, more important, what she wanted to specifically not do with the character were a large part of me wanting to take it on.”
She adds, “Ultimately, there reached a point when we had to step away from the research, and the woman herself, and we had to make a new person—a person crafted from the feeling of what all that research gave us. And that’s what I found so startling about Emmy’s performance. People often call a performance ‘crafted,’ but that is exactly what Emmy did with Angelyne. She crafted herself like an art object.”
We’re calling it: Emmy’s name suits her very well. I left our conversation feeling hopeful that people as classically accomplished as Emmy Rossum and as creatively impactful as Angelyne can coexist and respect each other’s hustle. Instead of casting judgment on someone with a strong visual or vocal point of view, perhaps it’s worth admiring the strength in their certainty. After all, most of us spend a lifetime trying to figure out who we are.
