Alison Pill delights in darkness of female-led TV thriller ‘The Family’

TORONTO – When Canadian actress Alison Pill first read the script for her new TV thriller series “The Family,” she couldn’t put it down.

“Any time you think you understand who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, it flips on you,” she says.

And then she met the creator, Jenna Bans, and she couldn’t believe she was behind such a deliciously dark story of a son who returns home to his family 10 years after he was abducted and presumed dead.

“She’s this little mini redhead from Minnesota, which means she’s basically an honorary Canadian, and she comes up with this dark, sinister, creepy stuff and you’re just sort of shocked that that’s who it is,” says Pill with a laugh.

“She’s like, ‘Hello!’” added Pill in a sweet-sounding voice, “and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re messed up!’ But it’s a really exciting darkness to be working in.”

Looking at Bans’s background, it’s not hard to see where she gets her sinister influence from.

She’s written for several plot-twist-filled series, including “Desperate Housewives,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Scandal.”

And she’s worked several times with Shonda Rhimes, who created the latter two series and served as an executive producer on Bans’s medical drama “Off the Map.”

“The rules for Shonda Rhimes are: Plot first, you figure out the solution later,” says Pill, a Toronto native who was recently in the film “Hail, Caesar” and starred in HBO’s “The Newsroom.”

“Like, create the problems and let them snowball and that’s where exciting drama heads.”

Pill plays Willa, a political adviser and daughter of Red Pines Mayor Claire Warren, played by three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen.

Zach Gilford plays the eldest son while Liam James of Vancouver plays the abducted youngest son. Rupert Graves co-stars as the family patriarch, Margot Bingham plays the lead detective and Andrew McCarthy plays the accused abductor.

Pill was thrilled to see so many women at the helm of the show.

“The level of complication that you can add to your lead female characters as a female showrunner with female exec producers is really exciting and Joan Allen just goes for it in every way,” she says.

Bans also goes for it, pushing the envelope in a way that Pill loves.

“There are constantly times when I’ll get an email from Jenna or we’ll be talking and I’ll be like, ‘Do they, like, know what we’re doing?’” Pill says with a laugh.

“Of course ABC reads all the scripts, there’s not a question. But we’re like, ‘Do they know about this?’ It’s really deeply, dark stuff a lot of the time.

“This expectation that everything must be squeaky clean (on network TV), the audience expectations just aren’t there anymore when the proliferation of all these other outlets has happened,” adds Pill.

“Everybody’s had to step up their game in really interesting, dramatic ways and it’s made the whole landscape different and better.”

Pill’s upcoming projects include “Goon: Last of the Enforcers,” the sequel to the 2011 hockey comedy “Goon.”

It’s directed and co-written by Jay Baruchel, to whom Pill was engaged from 2011 to 2013.

“Oh my God, we got to swear like nobody’s business. So many F-words,” says Pill. “It’s more swears, more hits, more opera.”

“The Family” premieres Wednesday on CTV and then moves to its regular Sunday night timeslot beginning March 6.