Emmy Rossum turned down 'life-changing money' for 'Shameless.' Now she's building something bigger.

Taryn RyderMon, July 27, 2026 at 12:30 PM UTC

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Emmy Rossum opens up about walking away from "life-changing money" onShameless, finding creative fulfillment inFuriousand what she wants from her next decade.

Emmy Rossum was offered "very life-changing money" to remain on Shameless. She walked away anyway.

After nine seasons playing Fiona Gallagher on the Showtime series, Rossum knew there was "no number" that could persuade her to abandon the next chapter she had already begun crafting behind the scenes.

"I really felt that my desire to make something that I had built was very strong," Rossum tells Yahoo. "It was very bittersweet when I left, but I really felt galvanized to make things."

Rossum had begun preparing for a future beyond Shameless long before her final episode aired in 2019. She never expected the pilot to be picked up, much less for the series to become a long-running hit. Each time another contract extension arrived, she says, she was "amazed."

There was no number that was going to make me want to stray from my goal.

Around the show's ninth season, Rossum was ready to wrap things up. She began developing projects through her production company, Composition 8, and set up a deal at Universal to make Angelyne, the Peacock limited series in which she later starred.

When Shameless offered her another contract extension for Season 10, Rossum faced a choice.

"I really felt like, when they came and asked for the last contract extension, that I couldn't do it," she says. "There was no number that was going to make me want to stray from my goal. I've never really been motivated by money."

Saying goodbye to the cast and crew was difficult. Rossum felt "sad to leave behind people that I had grown up with and loved and had so much history with." But she had also spent years watching executive producer John Wells and her husband, Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, build projects from the ground up. She was ready to do the same.

Rossum has pushed back on the misconception that she left Shameless to start a family. She wasn't retreating from her career; she was trying to create greater ownership over it.

That gamble has brought her here: starring in and executive producing Furious, Hulu's new crime thriller from New Girl creator Liz Meriwether.

Loosely inspired by the 1987 film Black Widow, the series stars Rossum as Alice, an FBI agent pursuing a female serial killer. After spending so many years with Shameless's Fiona, Rossum wanted another character who could inspire that same level of investment — someone just as complicated, with the potential for a similarly expansive journey, but also "so different than a lot of the things that I've done in the past."

Alice is emotionally disconnected, deliberately off-putting and still carrying the effects of past trauma. Rossum found complexity in even the character's most unglamorous qualities.

"You know that she smells," she says. "She has this trauma and doesn't want to take a shower, but also is using the fact that she smells as an actual repellent to keep people away from her."

Rossum in Hulu'sFurious.

The project began when Rossum tasked her team with combing through the back catalogs of older films in search of overlooked intellectual property. They couldn't afford what she calls the "hot, fancy IP," so they had to be resourceful.

"As a producer, you have to be scrappy," she says. "You have to look for clues in other places that other people aren't looking. That's how I put this show together."

In Furious, Alice is routinely doubted by her male colleagues and forced to look for answers in places they have dismissed. It's an experience Rossum understands, not only as an actor, but also as a producer trying to get unconventional projects made.

Being underestimated doesn't bother her. In fact, Rossum prefers it.

"Then people aren't looking at what you're doing, and you get to carve your own path and be surprising — and surprise yourself," she says.

She laughs at the alternative.

"I think it would be way harder to be overestimated and then underdeliver," she says. "I thrive being the underdog. I feel like I've been the underdog since kindergarten. That's really my happy place and where I feel the most creative."

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My biggest takeaway from having gotten secretly, impulsively married ... was that if there's something you're keeping secret from your parents, it's probably not the right thing to do.

Motherhood did eventually become part of the life Rossum built after Shameless. She and Esmail now share two young children, a 5-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son. Becoming a parent hasn't diminished Rossum's creative drive, but it has changed the calculation involved in accepting a project.

"I think it is a juggling act," she says.

Whenever possible, Rossum has prioritized working in New York, where her family is based. Shooting Furious across all five boroughs allowed her to remain present for school drop-offs, pickups and daily family life. Meriwether, a mother of three, understood that balance.

Rossum initially describes herself and Meriwether as "working moms," then immediately reconsiders. "I don't even like that because, by the way, being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job," she points out.

For a recent film shoot in Rhode Island, Rossum brought her children along while they were out of school and Esmail was working in Budapest. Rossum, the children and their nanny stayed in two adjacent hotel rooms. Their nanny bought a pop-up camping tent, filled it with toys and declared it the children's new playroom.

That kind of improvisation has become part of making her two worlds coexist.

"My mom was a single mom, and I remember her being gone a lot and traveling a lot when I was little," Rossum says. "Now she tells me that actually wasn't the case, but I felt a profound absence when she wasn't there. Even though those trips were maybe sporadic, I certainly felt that."

That childhood memory has made being physically present for her own children especially important. Still, Rossum is determined not to let motherhood consume the creative identity she has had for as long as she can remember — or allow it to disappear "somewhere between a wet sock and a crushed Goldfish."

"It is so easy to give so much of yourself to your children that you lose yourself," she says.

Creating remains one of the ways Rossum recognizes who she is — and who she still wants to become.

"For me, my creative self is where I recognize myself, recognize my own self and my future self," she says. "And that person deserves time too."

That willingness to preserve and advocate for herself is something Rossum has gained with age. She recently spoke about marrying her ex at 21. Rossum described her interview on Alex Cooper's Call Her Daddy as "the most openly" she has ever spoken about herself.

"My biggest takeaway from having gotten secretly, impulsively married — probably in response to heartbreak when I was so young — was that if there's something you're keeping secret from your parents, it's probably not the right thing to do," she says. "I think that was the barometer for me."

Her reflection on the secrets she kept from her mother led Rossum back to the vulnerable situations she navigated as a young actor. She points to the film Songcatcher, in which her character shares a kiss with actor Gregory Cook. He was in his early 20s when they filmed the scene, but Rossum was only 12 or 13. A few years later, Rossum turned 17 just days before production began on The Phantom of the Opera, in which her romantic costars Gerard Butler and Patrick Wilson were 33 and 30, respectively.

Looking back, Rossum believes that if she had told her mother she felt uncomfortable, she would have intervened.

"I think my mom was very protective over me," she says.

Those experiences underscore something Rossum is only now able to fully articulate: She grew up quickly, sometimes before she was ready.

"I certainly felt like I grew up really fast, or had to pretend like I was grown up really fast," she says.

Now, as she prepares to turn 40 in September, Rossum is looking ahead. Motherhood, she says, has helped her rediscover a lighter side of herself.

"My kids are so playful," she says. "It's really let me reconnect with my silly side."

For all her professional ambition, what Rossum wants from the next decade has little to do with career milestones. "I want more game nights, candy, sisterhood," she says. "More laughter. More and more connectedness."

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”