Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon on “forward-thinking” female journalists in ‘The Boston Strangler’

The fifth episode of true-crime podcast Truth and Lies: The Boston Strangler just dropped, featuring a conversation with Keira Knightley and Carrie Coon, two of the stars of Hulu’s new film The Boston Strangler.

The podcast is the first collaboration between ABC Audio and 20th Century Studios, and is hosted by award-winning journalist and author Dick Lehr. It features ABC News archive material from the case and new interviews with relatives of those involved.

Knightley and Coon respectively play Record-American newspaper reporters Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole, the journalists who tracked the brutal murders that terrorized Boston in the 1960s. 

“I’d heard of it, but I didn’t know anything about it,” English actress Knightley tells ABC Audio of the case. “So the script was the first time that I’d actually really known anything. And then [I] went, ‘Wow, look at these two women. This is amazing.’ And then sort of did some Googling and went, ‘Oh, they … have been completely left out of most of the things written about it.'”

Fargo Emmy winner Coon adds, “And as women, we’ve all walked into rooms and been dismissed or underestimated. And that’s certainly the way these women were being treated in a newsroom in the 1960s when it was so rare for women to be journalists at all, let alone not be just on the lifestyle desk or the advice column, or covering society pages.”

Coon continues, “It was 10 years before they coined the term ‘serial killer.’ … Loretta was doing some really innovative stuff by psychologically profiling that killer, and I think some of the cops were involved in that, as well. But that was very forward-thinking work. So it’s really also a journalism movie.”

20th Century Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.

(A previous version of this story included a misspelling of Carrie Coon’s name. The text above has been updated to correct the error.)

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