Original-Cin Q&A: The Good Nurse’s Redmayne and Chastain on Art Imitating Life
By Bonnie Laufer
The Good Nurse, which had its world premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, opens in select theaters this week, then moves to Netflix October 26.
Based on Charles Graeber’s book of the same name, it tells the true story of the real-life crimes of Charles Cullen, who confessed to murdering up to 40 patients while working at various hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania during his 16-year nursing career. (It's estimated that he may have been responsible for several hundred more deaths.)
Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne gives a chilling performance as Cullen and Jessica Chastain plays real-life nurse Amy Loughren, who befriended Cullen before figuring out what was going on right under her nose.
Our Bonnie Laufer had a few minutes with Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain via Zoom to get the lowdown on The Good Nurse. Scroll down for links to interviews with the film’s director and co-stars, as well as a review.
ORIGINAL-CIN: Jessica, not only is there great pressure with playing a healthcare worker, but what is like for you to have the real Amy Loughren by your side throughout this whole process?
JESSICA CHASTAIN: It was intimidating, that's for sure. I’ve played a lot of real people over the years and I've had the opportunity to talk to them but this was quite different. I've never had them observe me on set playing a scene from their life, so that was daunting and intimidating. Eddie and I have a very similar process in terms of working on a film. We do a lot of research and there's the Charles Graeber book that The Good Nurse script was based on for our initial background. Then we both went to nursing school, but there's something about talking to Amy that really unlocked it for me and her humanity.
It was the way in that I didn't really understand fully until I got to know her. She said something at one point when I asked her why she worked as a night nurse, she said it was so her kids would think they had a stay-at-home mom and I was so moved by that. The single mom who worked all night taking care of others, who was awake for a few hours when her kids were home but didn't ever really take care of herself. She was so generous in that way; it was really important to have her there.
Click here to read our review of The Good Nurse
O-C: It blows my mind how you envelop the characters that you play. But playing Charles, a health care worker who is a serial killer. How do you get lost in these characters? After a day of shooting do you feel the need to take a few showers?
EDDIE REDMAYNE: (Laughs) Yeah, pretty much! The interesting thing about this film was that speaking to the real Amy, the thing that she was adamant about is that she felt she was dealing with two different human beings. On the one hand there was his kindness, the fact that he saved her life, his self-deprecating humour, his fastidiousness as a nurse and his brilliance as a nurse made him seem like the perfect guy. One of the things that (director) Tobias Lindholm and Jessica and I discussed was that we really leaned into that and not the serial killer side. Amy said that she met the serial killer twice, once in the moment when she was wired and once in the interrogation room.
Truthfully, physically I think Jess had it much harder. Watching Jess portray Amy’s debilitating heart condition, having to run around the set to get winded and tired. It was so physically overwhelming for her for a lot of the movie. For me, most of it was about playing into their friendship really. It was only about the latter third of the shoot when my family went back to London and left me to get into his mind and get into the zone so to speak.
O-C: You were friends before this shoot, so how did that play into your performances?
JC: It was nerve-wracking in the beginning because you can really like a person and end up on set and you're like, ‘Whoa, I don't like you anymore!’
O-C: Not Eddie. He’s one of the nicest guys on the planet!
JC: Well, you never know! Look, he's playing a very complicated character in this film and I didn’t know if he was going to go all method on me (laughs)! You just really don't know what you're going to get. But you’re right, Bonnie, he's just so lovely in real life and after each scene and cut, he just switched right back to Eddie. He's just incredible.
O-C: Well, so are you!
ER: True that!
JC: Depends on the day. Depends on the day (laughs).
ER: There’s no question this shoot was intense. Having our families around, we both have kids who are about the same age [and that] made it a little saner! You're still living your life and the people who you love around. One of the weird things about working on this film, despite the intensity and the darkness of the subject matter, it was actually a very wonderful experience to make.
Click here to watch Bonnie’s interview with co-Stars Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha
Click here to watch Bonnie’s interview with The Good Nurse director Tobias Lindholm