The Kids on ‘Under the Bridge’ Are So Damn Good

It’s a Hollywood cliche you have to hire the nicest actors to play the meanest people, and on “Under the Bridge” a group of struggling, lonely teens committing violent crimes certainly qualifies.

Unlike other shows about teens, where the cast is pushing 30 (Hi, “Riverdale”), the kids on Hulu’s miniseries all are played by actors aged 12 to 16. This created a few challenges during production, due to the dark true-life plot, which centers on small-town British Columbia and the kids who assault and kill their classmate Reena Virk one night, and then basically all cover for each other while the case unfolds.

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We wanted to “[give] them permission to explore the cruelty of their characters,” creator Quinn Shephard said to IndieWire. In Episode 2, “The John Gotti of Seven Oaks,” a few of the teen characters explain how their ultimate goal is to become girlfriends for NY gangsters like John Gotti, and viewers get to see their own wannabe gang, “CMC,” meaning “crypt mafia cartel,” begin to form.

An early standout in the series is Chloe Guidry, who plays Josephine. She’s perfectly vulnerable in a way in which it’s very easy for viewers to feel for her and her outsized tough talk. But then you’re stricken with her casual cruelty in the way only an actual teen girl could perfect.

“Young girls in Victoria were the ones we were suppose to protect, not be protected from,” Riley Keough says in one early chilling voiceover.

“It was wild, because our young cast is so sweet in real life,” Shephard said. “Chloe is so incredibly commanding as a mean girl in the show, and is such a truly kind person in real life. Geeta Vasant Patel, who directed the pilot, did a ton of rehearsals with the kids. And I think it was really about giving them permission to be bad, if that makes sense. These were kids who were very close with their parents who don’t curse a lot. They’re not partiers. I’d have to go outside and teach them how to smoke, which was pretty funny.”

Equally important was making sure the real-life Reena Virk (a hearbreaking Vritika Gupta on the show) who was murdered by her charismatic classmates, got to be shown as a Biggie-loving, fully fledged person, and not just a victim of a horrific crime.

“We were really aware that in the media in ’97, and even in ‘Under the Bridge,’ the book, Reena’s story was never really fully explored,” Shephard said. “Because we had something that no one else had had, which was the ability to fictionalize a bit, we had a freedom to explore what she might have been feeling outside of the facts that we had. That really allowed us to center her story much more in the show. … Hopefully, where we didn’t have fact [we] brought a universal truth about being a 14-year-old girl coming of age.”

Over the next several episodes, via heavy flashback, viewers will come to see and understand more of that backstory, and why Reena was so desperate for a group of cruel girls to accept her.

“We didn’t want to sanitize Reena,” Shephard said. “I think it’s very, very important that we recognize that victims don’t need to earn sympathy from us. … The real Reena Virk was very human, she had flaws, she made mistakes, like all people do; it was so essential to all of us that we make her feel like a real girl having real problems, who acts out, who curses, who makes mistakes, who smokes, who does all of the things that teenagers do, and that we realize that those are not justifications for not caring about what happened to her.”

“Under the Bridge” airs Wednesdays on Hulu through May 29.

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