Elle Fanning (The Great) stars as Michelle Carter, the teenager at the center of the 2017 texting suicide case, in Hulu’s The Girl from Plainville premiering on March 29, 2022. Based on a true story, the limited series delves into the relationship between Michelle and Conrad “Coco” Roy III (played by Colton Ryan), a troubled young man who ultimately took his own life after receiving text messages from Michelle encouraging him to go through with it.
Michelle was ultimately convicted of involuntary manslaughter for her role in her 18-year-old boyfriend’s death. She began serving a 15-month sentence in early 2019 but was released in January 2020, earning three months off her sentence because of good behavior in jail.
During the 2022 Television Critics Association’s winter press tour, Elle Fanning described why she was interested in taking on the role.
“I think for me what attracted me to the project in the first place was I’m a young person living today and that relationship that I have with technology, and with my phone, and with kind of that false sense of intimacy, and false sense of reality that that creates. I grew up in high school with kind of that obsession and I’d look at my phone every morning. We all do. And, for me, it was diving deeper into how technology affected these two people. Especially with Michelle, she was very much alone. And meeting Conrad, that relationship sparked that kind of instant gratification that you feel. That can be a dark place to live in.
For me, research-wise…Jessie (Barron)’s article is what the show is based off of. We have the documentary as well (and) a lot of YouTube footage. So, I had a lot of research to pull from in creating Michelle, but, at the same time, we don’t know everything,” said Fanning. “And I think that’s what this show is hopefully going to do best is look deeper into those headlines and put ourselves in those characters’ positions. As an actor, I guess, it’s always what you try to do.”
Fanning continued: “It was definitely a big challenge to balance wanting to be sensitive and feeling a responsibility of playing real people, but at the same time having to create a character that is all of our own and feeling these emotions from a truthful place. You try to create that and there’s a lot involved.”
Co-showrunners and executive producers Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus aren’t attempting to relitigate the case with The Girl from Plainville. Instead, they wanted to dig deeper into Michelle, Conrad, and their families beyond what’s been shown in the media.
“I think the media has a tendency to vilify young women and that was something that absolutely happened with Michelle Carter, right or wrong. And so we felt that we had an opportunity to explore more than just the circus of that,” said Hannah.
“I’ll just add on top of that, that when Liz and I first got together to create this show and portray this story, we actually were very much in line from the very beginning about the idea that we didn’t want to present a specific point of view as to what the creatives would have thought was guilt or innocence across the board,” explained Macmanus. “One of the things – and again, to piggyback off of what Elle said quite eloquently is that there was a lot that was left out in the case that we were able to explore. And that from our perspective as creatives, we had no interest in either vilifying or in holding up any of these people, right? […] From the teenagers to the parents, our goal from the very beginning was to present a dramatization of this story and to use all the thousands of text messages, all the hundreds of pages of depositions, all the hundreds of pages of interviews as our guidepost to be able to present a full and true story.”
Asked if being involved with The Girl from Plainville has affected how he feels about social media and technology, Colton Ryan replied, “I think my own personal relationship with social media, and I think anyone’s, deserves a certain level of eyebrow-raising. And I think that’s what this story and the way we’re telling it kind of asks us to do. This whole thing upon watching it feels like a morality play, in terms of how it approaches the way we value our lives online versus in the real world, how we find ourselves, and the consequences that come with trying to find it online versus authentically.
And so, yeah, I think with that, you can imagine that the way I’m even approaching posting today, it always is everchanging. And I think that’s what I kind of hope other people have when they’re watching the show, as well.”
Chloe Sevigny, who stars as Conrad’s mother Lynn Roy, expanded on that and said, “Even more so than social media, I mean, how we communicate, how we text, this show is really an examination of that. I had a girlfriend over the other night who’s around my age in her 40s and she’s dating a new man. He didn’t text her back in an hour, and she was like having a breakdown. And I was like, ‘Listen, you’re a successful woman. He might be busy. He may be…’ It’s just like we’re so used to instantaneous response that we get triggered so easily. And I think that this show is really important to examine how we communicate now, be it texts, be it emails, this pressure to respond immediately, just how fast everything is moving.”
Fanning’s impressed with how the limited series also addresses bullying.
“Especially social media, texts, what not, it’s so much easier – and I think you’ll see this in the show – how much easier it is for people to say things behind a screen. And you can kind of create this world that isn’t real where you have no consequences for what you say. If it’s comments on Instagram or typing a nasty thing, texting nasty things to people, and that’s something…not that it’s necessarily a cautionary tale, but it’s like people really need to know that those words don’t go away. People are reading those words and reacting to them or taking them to heart or they’re being hurt from that, and tragedies can really come from it. So our weapon, honestly, in the show are two phones, which is really modern — it’s what we’re living in today. It’s interesting,” said Fanning.
Michelle Carter was a “Gleek” and including her love of Glee was important in telling the teenager’s story. Hannah went into every pitch for The Girl from Plainville making it clear they wanted to include Glee in the limited series.
“We all, I think, took from the article and then more so even through the texts and the case just how enamored she was by Glee and how much it affected her life,” explained Hannah. “So that was definitely something that we walked in with that before we wrote anything we wanted to make sure that we would be able to do it. Luckily, Hulu was very helpful in making that happen, so we were really lucky and fortunate that our team at Hulu and at Universal were able to happily be a part of the show.”
Fanning couldn’t wait to dig her teeth into that aspect of Michelle’s personality.
“In the pilot…like the last scene of the pilot when I read that, that was phew, that was the one scene that I was so excited to do. I think because it summarizes so much just in that moment about this character. […] I think the reason that she and probably so many of us young people loved Glee or love Fault in Our Stars or the YA world is because you can be the star of that show. You can put yourself in that fantasy and it’s such an escape for people who feel alone, or they get to be the popular girl. They get to be that girl for just a second while for those, you know, for how long the episode is, or how long the movie is. I think that our show also kind of incorporates like pop culture the way that it does, it shows so much about young people, and also sometimes like idolization and creating this false sense of reality for yourself to feel accepted in these worlds that you’re not in.
And so I’m so happy that Hulu helped us out there because for a while we’re like are we even going to be able to do this scene? Like, can I sing this song? I don’t know. But luckily it did work out because the whole Glee throughout is, I think, so essential. Reading Michelle’s texts in real life, you know, she was a big gleek,” said Fanning.
Hannah believes so much of Michelle and Coco’s story has to do with feeling isolated and lonely. Somehow, Glee was able to lessen that feeling of being an outsider.
“It was something that was really bittersweet to explore through Michelle’s character was this idea of inclusion through this show when she couldn’t do it in real life, or it wasn’t there in her connections with other people,” explained Hannah.
