The first thing Colton Ryan did when he was cast as the male lead in Hulu's “The Girl From Plainville” was to Google his real-life character’s name. In bold text at the top of the results screen was the Wikipedia entry that told him everything he needed to know: “Death of Conrad Roy.”
Ryan, best known for playing Connor Murphy in the film adaptation of “Dear Evan Hansen,” knew the headlines of the story he was telling. In 2014, 18-year-old Roy died by suicide, egged on in thousands of text messages by girlfriend Michelle Carter. Carter, who was 17 at the time, was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 15 months in prison. The story was national news, with Carter and her piercing dark eyebrows splashed across front pages as the salacious tale played out.
Prosecutors argued — and the judge agreed — that Carter held responsibility for Roy’s death, particularly with one final text that demanded he get back inside his truck, filled with carbon monoxide. Her conviction was the first of its kind, but not the last.
But Conrad was barely part of the story; as Ryan discovered in his Google search, he was nothing more than his death. The cast and showrunners of “The Girl From Plainville” knew there was more.
“We didn’t feel like we had to do a courtroom drama where it’s ‘is she or isn’t she going to be convicted,’ ” Liz Hannah told the Daily News. “She was. She went to court, she went on trial, she was convicted, she served her time. That was inevitable. It’s more about what are the things we didn’t know.”
Instead, showrunners Hannah and Patrick Macmanus and Elle Fanning, who stars as Carter and serves as an executive producer on the show, dug through tens of thousands of text messages between the couple, who saw each other fewer than five times after meeting in Florida despite living barely 35 miles away from each other outside of Boston. The balance was in finding the humanity without letting Carter off the hook.
To do that, the showrunners showed Conrad and Michelle’s relationship on camera, rather than through pop-up screens of text messages; their conversations play out as if they are in each other’s bedrooms and next to each other at parties rather than an hour down the road. Rather than, as Hannah put it, the boy who died, they showed him as he was.
That, to Ryan, was his most important job.
“I saw so many signs of love and light. Those were a big part of who he was,” he said. “How do we also remind people that he very much was alive and lived a very full life?”
“The Girl From Plainville” also wanted to show who Michelle was, not just a girl who told her boyfriend to kill himself but a lonely teenager, struggling with depression and an eating disorder. She is not blameless by any means, but there is more to her story as well.
“They’re both trying to find themselves and they see a kindred spirit in both being lonely wanderers,” Ryan told The News. “They just end up walking together alongside the road.”
Their relationship, and Conrad’s death in particular, wasn’t just about them though. It broke two families, his and hers, and shook two communities.
Chloe Sevigny, who plays Conrad’s mother, Lynn, studied hours of footage from the trial and after, as she pushed for Conrad’s Law, which would make coerced suicide a crime. As the circus grew, Lynn stopped showing up to the courthouse but she never stopped fighting for her son.
“She found some way of healing and forgiving, forgiving herself, her husband, Conrad and ultimately Michelle,” Sevigny told The News. “She’s come to some sort of peace.”
Forgiving Michelle, Sevigny said, was for her, not for Michelle, but it was also a measure of empathy for a girl suffering with her mental health, just as Conrad was.
“At the end of the day, we want to ensure that we are presenting these characters as three-dimensional,” Mcmanus told The News.
“There’s a lot of gray. This is not a black and white story. There are no winners and there are no losers and there are no heroes and there are no villains. This was a tragedy from start to finish.”
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