A murder mystery fan from a young age, Renée Zellweger became fascinated with the case of Pamela Hupp, whose life became the connecting thread in a story of murder, money and deception in a small Missouri town.
Last July a prosecutor finally charged Pam with Betsy’s murder.
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Driving on California’s 5 Freeway with her dog as a traveling companion, Zellweger binged the podcast with Pam as its central character. “Like millions of people who have been following this case, I didn’t understand how it might be possible, and I was curious, and I thought it would be a fascinating thing to explore,” Zellweger says in this week’s issue of PEOPLE.
The result is a six-episode NBC drama series,The Thing About Pam, from NBC News Studios, Blumhouse Television and Big Picture Co., with Zellweger serving as an executive producer. It premieres March 8 on NBC, and will be available for streaming on Peacock the next day. Zellwegger stars and plays Pam as “a person you feel like you know, because you recognize her, because she’s kind and she’s helpful and she’s part of the community,” she says.
Renée Zellweger, at left on stand, portrays Pam Hupp in the NBC miniseries The Thing About Pam, with Josh Duhamel, right.Skip Bolen/nbc
“When someone like that might actually not be who they present themselves to be, it’s shocking,” she says. “And it makes us renegotiate all the things we thought we knew.”
For both Zellweger and showrunner Jenny Klein, the project offered an opportunity to explore confirmation bias in the justice system, or “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirming one’s own existing beliefs,” says Klein, who grew up about five hours from Troy. “If you believe Russ Faria is guilty, any evidence that might point to someone else would be reinterpreted through the lens of, how does this prove Russ is guilty?”
“All of this became the perfect storm for Russ Faria’s worst nightmare,” Klein says. “And the scariest part is, it could happen to anyone.”
Pamela Hupp People Cover
She did not dwell on whether she was playing the bad guy.
“I never really thought about it as taking on a character,” Zellweger says. “It was more about finding my place within the telling of this story. When you’re coming from a particular perspective, you want to be able to justify in some way the decisions that are made. There’s research to be done to help you better understand what might motivate, and then you can draw your own conclusions and proceed from there. I never made a moral judgment about her.”
Renée Zellweger as Pam Hupp, far left, with The Thing About Pam castmates Judy Greer at Leah Askey, Josh Duhamel as Joel Schwartz, Katy Mixon as Betsy Faria, Glenn Fleshler as Russ Faria.Frank Ockenfels 3/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images
She was drawn to the project, she says, for many reasons.
“From a creative perspective, it seemed like a really interesting story to tell,” she says. “As an actress, [it was] a really interesting character to play, an unusual person, something, that I’d never done before. And as a storyteller, it just seemed like a great opportunity to explore the why and how around something like this, a case like this, and how it could happen. I was really curious to look more deeply at it, to better understand it.”
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But while she “might not have graduated to internet sleuth just yet,” Zellweger says, she also was driven “to explore this quest for justice for Betsy Faria and her family, and to somehow, with the juxtaposition of the dark comedy and the tragedy of the case, illuminate the bigger issues.”
“We strive to better understand the thing that seems inexplicable. It seems like it’s innate within us,” she says. “If we can better understand the bad thing that has happened, then we can better prevent it from happening to us. It opens your eyes.”
source: people.com
