Playing Fiona Gallagher on Shameless meant Emmy Rossum sometimes met men who assumed her character’s sex life reflected her own. One date told her he wanted to become president someday, then asked whether dating someone who’d “been exposed in the way that you have” would be “tricky for me.”
“It’s definitely weird on first dates when guys have already seen your boobs.” — Emmy Rossum
Rossum returned to the subject on Maria Sharapova’s podcast on September 16, 2026, recalling dating in her twenties while appearing on the show. “All of the guys that I would go out with had preconceived notions of who I was or how I was sexually. It was totally bizarre.”
Rossum had met the man on a plane. He worked “in real estate or something.” When they went out, he told her about his presidential ambition.
She encouraged it. Then came the question about whether her exposure would be tricky for him.
“This is an insane conversation to have,” Rossum recalled responding. She said they “were not meant to be together.” She didn’t name him or give a date for their encounter.
The actress had described that confusion in March 2014, when she said Fiona’s sexual openness gave dates an impression of her that she didn’t recognize. Filming those scenes felt like playing pretend, she explained. In a February 2014 Complex interview she recalled dates telling her, “You know that people are going to jerk off to that scene, right?”
Rossum had agency over what she shot: her contract referenced things like partial side-boob and “two cheeks,” and she has said she only agreed to nudity when it served the story. The hardest scene she filmed was a season 4 prison strip-search in which she was completely naked without her usual modesty patch. She had a panic attack on set and told showrunner John Wells she hoped it was worth it.
Rossum played Fiona from Shameless’s January 2011 premiere through season 9. She met writer-director Sam Esmail around 2013 while working on Comet. They married in 2017 and welcomed a daughter in May 2021 and a son in April 2023.