Who is Marshall in Furious? TV's go-to nice guy plays his scariest creep yet
Somewhere around episode two of Hulu's Furious, I caught myself doing the thing. You know the thing. Marshall apologizes, his eyes go soft, and some traitorous part of my brain whispered: maybe he means it this time.
He does not mean it this time. He has never once meant it. And the fact that I fell for it anyway is the entire point of casting Jake Lacy.
The nicest face in the business, doing the worst things
Marshall Connolly is an NYPD detective, the childhood sweetheart and long-term ex of Emmy Rossum's FBI agent Alice Black — and her abuser, a man who hides behind his badge and his charm in roughly equal measure. The show doesn't tease this out as a twist. We know what he is from the jump; the suspense is watching how good he is at making everyone, Alice included, doubt what they know.
And who better for that job than the man who spent a decade playing television's most huggable boyfriends? The résumé reads like a setup for the punchline:
- Pete in The Office — harmless.
- Fran in Girls — aggressively harmless.
- The good guy in Obvious Child and How to Be Single — a golden retriever in a henley.
- Then The White Lotus happened, and Shane Patton taught us all what that jawline was hiding.
Marshall is the logical endpoint of that heel turn: the smile is the same, only now it's a weapon.
Read more: Why 500 years in Silo? Season 3 slipped the answer into one flashback line
"A good guy who's done bad things" — his words, not mine
Lacy has clearly thought hard about why this man is so unsettling. Discussing the role, he explained how creator Elizabeth Meriwether pitched the character to him:
"Marshall is a good guy who's done bad things, or at least that's his point of view."
That "his point of view" is doing Olympic-level lifting. Marshall feels shame, guilt, remorse — and then justifies everything anyway, which is precisely what makes him scarier than any cackling villain. He's fluent in apology. Nobody gets that fluent without practice.
Mild spoiler zone: how far it goes
Skip ahead if you're not caught up. As the season barrels toward its finale, Marshall stops pretending: stalking Alice with department equipment, drinking, fuming, circling. The confrontation the show has been promising arrives, and it does not go the way he planned. Lacy, for his part, sounds like he had a blast shooting Alice's revenge — his verdict on filming his own comeuppance:
"Waterboarding was awesome."
Actors are not like us. Anyway: Furious streams on Hulu, and Marshall Connolly is the best worst thing on it.
Previously we wrote: How did the crew die in Project Hail Mary? Andy Weir knows — and he's saving the answer
