In 1997, 14-year-old Reena Virk went to what she thought was a party and never came home. As an outcast, she’d been bullied and teased about her weight and other things before, but this time was different. After being accused of spreading rumors, she was attacked by a group of her peers. They brought her to the Craigflower Bridge in Saanich, British Columbia and beat her violently, leading to her death. Her body was found eight days later. Seven girls and one boy were accused of the crime. Virk’s death would become national news in Canada, highlighting concerns about bullying.
While researching for her first book in Victoria, Canadian novelist and journalist Rebecca Godfrey became entangled with the crime. Because of her youthful, edgy look, the girls involved let her into their world, trusting her with their secrets. Godfrey spent years reporting on the ground and, in 2005, published Under the Bridge, an astonishing account of Virk’s death and those involved in it. The book was widely acclaimed; some even likened it to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Now, Godfrey’s celebrated work is headed for the small screen, two years after her passing in 2022 at age 54.
Hulu’s Under the Bridge, premiering April 17, offers a new perspective on Reena Virk’s story. While delving deeper into Virk’s personal and family life prior to the tragedy, the limited series includes Godfrey as a character (played by Riley Keough) as she reports on the crime. It also introduces the cop Cam Bentland (played by Lily Gladstone), a fictionalized character who offers an inside look at the systemic issues surrounding the incident, especially within the police force.
Godfrey once said in an interview, “I really wasn’t interested in crime—I was interested in that crime.” Under the Bridge creator Quinn Shephard (Not Okay) felt similarly. She was most drawn to the fact that “for a story about such a brutal act of violence, the actual storytelling had a lot of gentleness to it and it captured these very universal truths about adolescence that really spoke to me. It was a story that had such a startling empathy for everyone involved and everyone whose lives were touched by the crime and also for Reena herself.” It was also a chance to bring attention to Virk’s story, which isn’t as widely known in the U.S.
Showrunner Samir Mehta (Tell Me Lies) was motivated by “the opportunity to tell the story of an Indian child of an immigrant,” he says. Reena’s mother Suman was born in Canada and her father Manjit, who later wrote his own book about Reena, immigrated there from India. “And it’s an interesting opportunity to just dig into that dynamic, which I feel like we haven’t really seen a lot of on TV.”
Shephard worked with Godfrey, also an executive producer on the series, for almost three years to adapt the book for TV. “Right off the bat when we first started speaking, we felt like we had this almost spiritual tie,” Shephard says. “I had read a lot of interviews with her before I first started talking to her, so I had some scenes sketched out, and then she was telling me stories about herself and I had written things that were true but that I had never known.”
Godfrey shared the notes she took while writing Under the Bridge. She was involved in developing “TV Rebecca,” who was partly based on her real life but also fictionalized “to make her into a dynamic leading character,” Shephard says. She also offered new insight, looking back at her time reporting. Something she and Shephard discussed throughout the process was “the context for her relationship with one of the real people” from the case, Shephard says without spoiling the plot. “It was interesting; it felt like she was reframing her own life.”
Other parts that were altered for the screen: the timeline, since the actual story took place over seven years and the TV version was made more concise; and Reena’s inner life, as Godfrey never got to meet her. The writers had “a lot of conversations about responsible fictionalization,” Shephard says. “How could we tell a story that felt like it spoke to a universal truth about being a child when we were missing certain details? But we still wanted her to feel like a meaningful character in the series.”
Keough, who recently earned Golden Globe and Emmy nominations for her latest TV role in Daisy Jones & the Six, was a top choice to play Godfrey. The author herself thought it was “perfect casting.” It was also important to her that the actress had a connection to kids, given the bonds Godfrey created with the teens in her book. “[Keough has] done a lot of work with youth advocacy…and I think that meant a huge amount to Rebecca,” Shephard says. Keough also executive produces, along with Liz Tigelaar (Little Fires Everywhere), director Geeta Patel, Felix Culpa, Gina Gammell, and more.
Casting Gladstone was also Godfrey’s idea. She had a friend who shot photos on the set of Killers of the Flower Moon and floated the now-Oscar nominee’s name. “So the actual Rebecca Godfrey was like, ‘What about Lily Gladstone?’” Shephard remembers. It was hard to disagree. “I mean, it’s Lily Gladstone,” Mehta laughs.
“She’s such a grounded and kind person,” Shephard adds. “I think with both her and Riley, it was such a joy to watch them working with the young cast because they were both such giving actors and they have so many scenes with our young actors, and a lot of the kids were really new to acting. And I think you could see each of them growing and learning and collaborating so much, and they just adored Lily and Riley.”
While Cam isn’t an actual person, “who she represents and what she represents is our attempt to excavate the spirit of the truth of this crime,” Mehta says. “Lily has a warmth that it was really important to us that we capture with the character that she plays,” Shephard adds. “We didn’t want to do a procedural cop story in any way, and her character is so much there to function as somebody who the crime becomes very personal for.”
They also lucked out in casting Archie Panjabi, of The Good Wife and Bend It Like Beckham fame, as Reena’s mother, a devout Jehovah’s Witness member. “There was only one name we spoke of in the writer’s room for Suman,” Mehta says. Ezra Faroque Khan (Doctor Strange) plays Reena’s father.
Reena, however, was the first role they began casting. After a six-month search among actors of all experience levels, they landed on relative newcomer Vritika Gupta, who was 12 at the time. “We were so happy to find her,” says Shephard.
For the young actors on the show, the team wanted to cast true to age “because I think one of the most disturbing elements of the actual story is just how young the kids really were,” says Mehta. With the help of casting director Julie Schubert, they cast: Chloe Guidry (The Park) as Josephine Bell, the vicious queen bee who’s been in and out of foster care; Izzy G. (AJ and the Queen) as Kelly Ellard, Josephine’s best friend; Aiyana Goodfellow (The Outlaws) as Dusty Pace, another friend who was close with Reena. Perhaps the most recognizable young face is Javon ’Wanna’ Walton, a.k.a. Ashtray on Euphoria, as Warren Glowatski.
After last year’s widespread celebrations of girlhood, Under the Bridge shows the shocking flip side. Any woman who’s survived middle school and high school knows that girls can be awful to one another. Even if things have improved today, toxicity persists on social media. The things Reena struggled with in the ’90s are still relevant—like cliques, peer pressure, and insecurities over body image, down to something as simple as not shaving your legs. But she was facing much harsher critics. Many of the girls she ran with lived in foster homes, would shoplift, knew Biggie’s lyrics by heart, and idolized John Gotti and mob wives. “Our shorthand in the room was that the show is Eighth Grade meets The Sopranos,” says Mehta. “And in some ways, the experience of being in middle school and how exclusive it can feel and how cruel being ostracized [is] can feel like you’re dealing with a gang.”
Shephard admits “horror stories from being in middle school” were exchanged in the writer’s room. But she notes that, amid the cruelty, “there is also a lot of love between young women in this story.” They wanted to leave space “to explore what is beautiful about adolescence and also what is tragic about it.” And it’s not just the kids. “Our adult women in the show are still grappling with their own girlhoods.”
Nearly three decades later, Under the Bridge is still as timely as ever. Not only because of the obsession with true crime, but also because of how missing young girls are treated and often ignored by the authorities, especially girls of color. In a startling detail on the show, reports of runaway girls are called “BIC girls,” which Godfrey used in her book The Torn Skirt. “In her research about the police and their interactions with those girls, she had found that they were calling these girls ‘BIC girls,’ like lighters,” Shephard says, “because they were so easy to lose and disposable.”
But the show’s other themes—about adolescence, a desire to feel included, and parent-child relationships—are also universal. Shephard adds, “It feels like a lot of the things are still very much a part of our culture now, every day.”
