“I’d love to be like Barbie,” Emmy Rossum as Angelyne says in the Peacock series of the same name. “She lives a painless existence. You can stick her with things and she won’t cry, she doesn’t hurt. Wouldn’t that be nice, never to hurt?”
Angelyne, a mystery woman who in the 1980s turned herself into an icon by producing billboards with her own image all over Los Angeles, is the ultimate so-called “bimbo”—a bleach blonde babe who dresses like a Bratz doll, bargains like a lawyer, and self-promotes like an influencer. “Since I was a little girl I’ve known that fame is my destiny,” she coos. “Huge, gigantic fame.”
Rossum found Angelyne when she was a little girl, looking for her own destiny. “I was 13, in LA for the first time in a Hertz rental car with my mom, auditioning for pilot season, and I looked out the window of the rental car and I saw her billboard,” she tells Glamour. “I was so struck by her image. I saw a woman who was beautiful and provocative and empowered in her body, certainly in all of the ways that I did not understand my own feminine power at the time.
Rossum had questions. “I started asking people, ‘Who is Angelyne?’ and they would all light up and say, ‘Oh the billboard queen?’ And they would tell me a completely different story about her,” she laughs. “That’s what was so fascinating to me: the enigma. How could you be so known and yet so unknown at the same time?”
Angelyne, which drops its first of five episodes this week, is Rossum’s brainchild, a 13-year-old girl’s fantasy developed with an adult woman’s perspective on performance, self-presentation, and myth-making. With help from series creator Nancy Oliver, showrunner Allison Miller, and a robust hair and makeup team that included a “contact lens technician” and multiple prosthetics artists, Rossum transformed into Angelyne, a woman for whom fake is authentic. Rossum took off the Angelyne mask (or more specifically, wig, bodysuit, lenses, and breast-plate) and talked about the outfits she loved most, being a role model for her baby daughter, and that Tom Holland age controversy.
