How Riley Keough and Lily Gladstone brought humanity to true crime

Riley Keough wasn’t sure at first whether she wanted to star in a true-crime project. The genre relies on a grim fascination with horrific violence, and dramatizations risk doing the victims a disservice.

But in “Under the Bridge,” a new Hulu series about the 1997 murder of Indian Canadian teenager Reena Virk, Keough saw an opportunity to paint everyone involved as human beings — not just 14-year-old Reena and her family but, to an extent, the perpetrators as well. Why did a group of teenagers, some of whom had befriended Reena in previous months, beat her to the brink of death? And why did two of those teenagers, one of them a complete stranger to Reena, drown her in a river? Perhaps there was a societal benefit to trying to understand their motivations — and remorse, as became the case for that 16-year-old stranger.