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Stars Elle Fanning and Colton Ryan had their work cut out for them when they signed on to play Michelle Carter and Conrad "Coco" Roy III in The Girl From Plainville.

Based on the Esquire article of the same name by Jesse Barron, the Hulu limited series (now streaming) explores the duo's relationship and the events that led to Roy's death by suicide and, later, Carter's controversial conviction of involuntary manslaughter. Not only did the two actors have the unenviable task of bringing to life the teenagers at the center of what would become known as the "texting-suicide" case that ignited a media maelstrom and brought up issues of legality, morality, and mental health, but they had to cultivate a relationship between them that largely occurred over text messages.

Here, Fanning and Ryan break down the work they did to ensure their portrayals were done in a sensitive way, and what they learned about the characters — and themselves — along the way.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: There's a lot out there about the case. What did you find most instructive to bringing these characters to the small screen?

ELLE FANNING: We had access to all the text messages, so I did read through them. They're extremely haunting and difficult to get through, but they were helpful in getting to know their relationship — at least the relationship that they had over text, which is an extremely intimate one. It's very truthful and very honest. There's not much footage of her speaking. The court [footage] is on YouTube, so I did watch all of those. But obviously, our show spans seven years, so there's a whole portion that we kind of had to create, and a whole side of Michelle that wasn't on our TV screens, or it wasn't something that we saw, so we had to understand her in a different way. And also, we don't have all the answers, necessarily.

COLTON RYAN: Any and all of it. I mean, first things first, I was really just supported by the team in terms of them giving me the keys to the writers room's kingdom of research and stuff. And it was very lovely, but a lot of that has to do with the legal proceedings. And obviously, that doesn't actually help me as a character, because I'm not around for those legal proceedings. I had Jesse Barron, who had a little more on the ground intimacy with the community and the family, and he gave me a lot of tidbits that I don't think even he shared with the world. And I was really privileged and lucky to have all that stuff. We worked with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I also closely worked with a social worker on a more granular level. Because it was important to me in terms of the way I read these scripts and the way I wanted it to come across was like, when you carry around that kind of heaviness [that Roy felt], it doesn't show up in every moment of every day.

Were you concerned about handling this material with the right sensitivity?

FANNING: Yeah. That was a real top priority for me. Not that I had reservations on signing on, but it wasn't an automatic yes because I had to really think about the story that we were telling. It ultimately ends in such a tragedy, and these [families] are still alive, and we have to be sensitive to them. So it had to be told in the right way that could actually be helpful, and possibly help someone out there who's suffering, while not trying to sensationalize suicide, like a lot of shows do. At the end of the day, I think [Michelle] was extremely alone. And these two people connected, which is really ironic to say, over their aloneness, and over this darkness that they both had in their lives, and that kind of exploded in the worst way. I just didn't want to be a part of something that was going to harm the narrative. I wanted to kind of be able to destigmatize mental health, especially in young people with this technology. I think the false intimacy that [technology] creates, and bullying that goes online — it's so easy to bully behind a device when you're not standing in front of the person, and words really matter, and they hurt. It's cliche to say, but they do... I think our show explores that hopefully, in a very sensitive way. It's done with care, you know?

RYAN: That's one of the things I'm most proud of about the show, is on set, you could feel with every frame that we all had the same goal, which was, "This has already been sensationalized. We don't need to rehash that." We all felt very similarly about the topic, of course, of suicide, of mental health, and about how they intersect with this specific story, this specific case study into, I don't know, a bigger Shakespearean tragedy of a morality play of, "Hey, is it so important to value your life online? Is it so important to find yourself online?" When you're an actor and you're portraying a character, you feel like you're the one who needs to defend them the most. You're their champion, right? And with this particular project, the inherent things that are already there are there. You can't skirt around them. They happened. They're events. But I wanted personally to be the champion for him on set that said, "But how can we show this boy's heart, this boy's imaginativeness, his creativity, his impishness? How do we do that when we show his first romance or his first heartbreak or his first failed hookup or his first…?" I mean, just really relatable things, things that we've all gone through and things that all contribute, I think, to reminding people that this boy lived a very much full life, and to get people away from being so interested in just the ending. And a byproduct of that helps people investigate their own [question of], "Why am I so interested in the ending?"

Michelle and Conrad very famously only met in person a few times. Most of their relationship was carried out over text messages. In the show, this is depicted with the two of them reenacting the messages as if they were in person speaking those words to each other, but of course the audience knows that they were not. How did you guys read between the lines of that, so to speak, in order to create that bond between them?

RYAN: As an actor, those texts are bible. There's no subtext in texting, as I learned. There's only the way you receive it, because texting is a lot of id. It's impulsivity. It's like you expose yourself more because there's the actual communication you do and the meta communication that is, well, how long does it take to respond? There's three bubbles and there's delete. And what does that mean? And working with Elle on those, I think we both felt a similar thrill because this is a very grounded, naturalistic show that also has all these fantasy sequences that, quite honestly, I think the heightened parts, the fantasy, are the more honest insights into Michelle and Coco.

FANNING: That was another thing that I was like, "How are we going to depict this? It's just going to be two people sitting and texting? That's so uncinematic." We can't do that. And the device to use these moments, we call them "texting fantasies." I mean, they are playing out [on screen], but to have us face to face was also a real acting challenge because you're not having a real conversation. Even though it looks like we're doing a scene, I had to be aware that, well, for Michelle, she might not be interpreting his words in the same way. So sometimes Colton and I, we would play with this [idea] of being on emotionally different wavelengths in the scene. It's very [miscommunicated] sometimes, like often texts are. And you'll notice, in those scenes we don't touch. There were very certain rules in those scenes that we kind of followed, which was interesting.

Do you feel like you walked away with a different understanding of the case? How did you feel at the end of all this?

FANNING: I think I have a deeper understanding. I don't know if [my feelings] necessarily changed, but I think playing a character, you don't have to like a character you play, or you don't have to agree with their actions, but you do have to understand how they get there. And I think that's what intrigued me the most about playing her, is having someone that I can't judge. I can't judge her. I have to figure out how she did the things that she ultimately did. And I think now I do understand. I mean, you know, as much as I can.

RYAN: I didn't feel glad [at the end of the shoot]. That was not it. But I actually still feel the reverberations. I don't know what their lasting impact is on me, but I know that I dealt more with myself by getting to know Coco. I grew more, I think, in that six-month span as a person with my own relationship to my own mortality, that when I left it, I felt... Every day being on it, honestly, it might sound counterintuitive or unbelievable, but I felt light. I felt light as a feather. I felt affirmed in breathing and being here and looking at the absurdity of the world. That's what Coco did. And I don't know. I still think [the show is] a gift that I don't know what it's fully giving yet, but I'm still figuring it out.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The first three episodes of The Girl From Plainville are now streaming. The remaining five episodes will be released weekly on Hulu.

Check out our daily must-see picks — plus news, celeb interviews, trivia, and more — on EW's What to Watch podcast.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go tosuicidepreventionlifeline.org.

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