ABC/John Medland(NEW YORK) — While her Agent Carter and Marvel movie character, Agent Peggy Carter, was no shrinking violet, Hayley Atwell fans will get to see a very different side of the actress in her new ABC drama Conviction.
In the show, which debuts Monday, she plays Hayes Morrison, a former “first daughter” who has a brilliant legal mind — and a head for getting into trouble.
At the show’s open, Hayes finds herself facing jail time for drug possession — until her nemesis, Eddie Cahill’s New York District Attorney Conner Wallace, offers her a job — he’ll make the charges go away if she heads up a unit that investigates legal convictions to make sure justice has been served.
In an effort to avoid damaging her mother’s Senate campaign, she reluctantly accepts, her rebellious streak very much intact.
“That was the appeal, when I first read the script,” Atwell tells ABC Radio, “having the chance to do something so different than what I’d done with Peggy for a few years. Hayes Morrison…says the things that many people want to say but don’t because of how high the stakes are.”
Atwell continues, “[S]ometimes she’s quite morally ambiguous about the choices that she makes, and…those blurred lines, for me, were so, so exciting and so different to what I’d done before.”
Atwell was last seen in theaters in photo form, during Captain America: Civil War at the (SPOILER ALERT) funeral for Peggy Carter. She told us Cap himself, Chris Evans got in touch during the event. “He texted me the day that he was filming the funeral for Civil War and he was like, ‘You got a really good turn-out!’ And I managed to get the pamphlet of her funeral…with all the Latin hymns and all the The Lord’s Prayer — it’s all in there!”
Hayley joked, “It would have been great if I could have been sat in the coffin…like on, I don’t know, my SEGA Mega Drive playing Ecco the Dolphin, or or just eating popcorn. That would’ve been great fun.”
Conviction airs at 10 p.m. Eastern time on ABC.
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