Eddie Redmayne: ‘The Good Nurse’ ‘seemed almost genreless’ and ‘refused to be boxed’ [Complete Interview Transcript]

BAFTA and SAG Award nominee Eddie Redmayne (“The Good Nurse”) recently chatted with Gold Derby’s Denton Davidson about his process for portraying serial killer nurse Charles Cullen. Redmayne goes to truly dark depths for this role in the Netflix psychological drama. It’s a noticeable change of pace for the popular British actor who normally plays heroic figures on the big screen, including when he won the Best Actor Oscar for “The Theory of Everything” (2014).

Redmayne takes us behind the scenes on how the script for “The Good Nurse” first came to him, what it was like working with director Tobias Lindholm and co-star Jessica Chastain, and the film’s wild success on Netflix. As for what enticed him to do the project, he tells us, “It had this sort of label of true crime, but as it unraveled, it seemed almost genreless. It refused to be boxed.”

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Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.

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Denton Davidson: Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne stars in the Netflix thriller “The Good Nurse” as Charles Cullen, an ICU nurse, implicated in the deaths of hundreds of hospital patients. I’m Denton Davidson, Senior Editor for Gold Derby. And Eddie, you look through your film history, you’ve played so many heroes, so many nice guys. An inspiration in The Theory of Everything, your Oscar winning role as Stephen Hawking. What brought this sort of dark turn for you? What made you want to play this type of role at this point in your career?

Eddie Redmayne: Do you know, honestly, there’s no method to any of it. I’m someone that prefers to react to what’s in front of me than going out with an aspiration or an ambition of what I could play. And this script arrived in my hands six years ago and I knew Tobias’s work. And when I read the script, I mean it had this sort of label of true crime, but as it unraveled, it seemed almost genreless. It refused to be boxed. On the one hand, it was this sort of hero’s journey of Jessica’s character, Amy Loughren. On the other hand, it was an exposé of a broken system. But weirdly, at the core of it was also kind of a relationship, clearly. And I found that incredibly appealing. I suppose there was also something about the idea of the horrors that this guy did being ended through someone’s compassion that was intriguing to me.

DD: So was it Tobias that brought this to you or how did you?

ER: Yeah, yeah. So it arrived as a script. I think Tobias had spoken to Jessica. At the time, it was at another studio and Tobias came over and we had a very sort of drunken night in London in Burra. And I know it was six years ago ’cause I’ve moved home since then. It was just before… My daughter had just been born. And there’s something about Tobias Lindholm. His other work, if you’ve seen A War, A Hijacking, The Investigation, often he’s taking on real subject matter and dealing with it within in an extraordinary humility.

And when you see one of his films, you know are watching a Tobias Lindholm movie. And I think I was at a point in my career of really wanting to feel like I was in the hands of someone with a very specific vision on the world. And it was funny ’cause when we started shooting, the opening shot of the movie, we shot on my first day and it’s my character, Charlie, watching as someone codes. And Tobias shot it on a very long, with Jody Lee Lipes-type cinematography, on a very long lens. So I didn’t know what he was catching and he just let me play the moment for sort of eight minutes and then he sort of showed it back to me and instantly I could see I was in a Tobias Lindholm movie. That was a wonderful thing.

DD: And its first four weeks on Netflix, it remained in the global top 10. 93 countries, number one in, I think, 60 of them. Over 129 million hours streams. So this is a huge hit now that you have on your hands. What do you think struck a chord with viewers, not just in the US where this story took place, but all over the world, and then what does it feel to have a movie that receives that audience reception? Because as an actor with a lot of films, every actor has big hits and blunders. So what’s it feel like to have this sort of hit on your hands?

ER: So it’s very surreal. It’s the first… I did a film which was meant to come out at the cinema called The Trial of the Chicago 7, which was then bought by Netflix and came out during sort of COVID. But this was the first sort of Netflix-made movie that I’ve done. And what was extraordinary was those figures are astonishing and too much to get one’s head around. As in just lots of numbers. But the way that I suppose I gauge how something’s done is whether people talk about it. And the interesting thing about this film is, I think, when you watch it it forces a conversation. And I’ve noticed that out in the street basically, that sometimes you do movies and your mom watches it, your governor of buddies and sometimes you do movies that people stop you and feel an urgency to talk to you about.

And this was one of those. And so it was sort of pretty astonishing that sort of global reach that Netflix has. And why did it strike a chord? I mean, I know there’s definitely an intrigue in true crime and trying to get to the bottom of that. I think we’re all fascinated with the extremes of human behavior and those darknesses and, over the millennia, religions and various other sort of infrastructures have been created to civilize us. And when you see someone breaking that, and particularly this man using sort of empathy or almost to sort of weaponizing it, it’s a scary thing to observe. But I think we’re all somehow drawn to that, to those extremes somehow.

DD: And partly also ’cause it was like, “Who is this guy? How did we not hear about this person that led Moore?” That was the part that spoke to me.

ER: I mean, that’s a really good point. And when I read this script, I had no idea, I’d never heard of Charlie Cullen. And then I thought maybe it’s because I’m British, and then what was astonishing was talking to Jessica and she had never heard of Charlie. And this guy is probably the most prolific serial killer in American history. And one’s got to think that, I mean there were articles written about him, but you’ve got to somehow think that there was a system at play in that as well somehow, in the way that the hospital suppressed the information about him. Maybe it went to a more macro level. I don’t know.

DD: And you star alongside Jessica Chastain. She plays Amy Loughren. She’s the hero here. And one of the interesting things is that the real Amy Loughren was sort of along for the journey. What did you learn about Charlie, seeing him through her eyes? He wasn’t just a monster to her the whole time.

ER: No, and really the real Amy was the key into this for both Jess and I. And it was at the end of COVID when we started filming, so we met via Zoom to begin with and she described her friend and described him as two different people. She said it was a dissociative thing. There was this kind, very empathetic, gentle, sort of self-deprecating and quite a funny guy who saved her life, quite literally. And then she met this other human being, she would describe how one eye would wander off and it was like an empty vessel, this sort of arrogant truculent man.

But she only met him twice. And those two scenes in the movie, one when she’s wired, recording him, and one when she comes into this interrogation room. And those scenes were intriguing to play because we had a lot of the verbatim, we had video footage and the sound of the recordings of that. But her saying that about two different people was a big insight because it allowed Jess and I to really invest in the truth with the friendship. And it was up to Tobias to glean any moments or, I suppose, the suspense of Krysty Wilson-Cairns’ structure of the piece to allow audiences to observe other sides to him.

DD: And in the film, you mean, your face is the same, you look the same, but your voice is different. Your demeanor, your posture has changed. What source material did you have available to you to give you sort of that voice we hear and the posture we see?

ER: Well, from an actor’s point of view, this was one of those dream roles in the sense that the film is based on The Good Nurse, a book by a gentleman called Charles Graeber. And the last third of it is Charlie’s story with Amy. And the other two thirds are very intricate biography of Charlie. So you had psychological reports, you had all of these insights from Charles Graeber who had spent a lot of time with Charlie and he described him as looking like a question mark. And that was a major insight for me. Not just his kind of hunch, quite unique physicality, but also the power in the anonymous, I suppose. In being a blank. I had video footage, recordings. But what was important is you can find on YouTube recordings of him 10 years ago or five years ago, since he’s been in prison, and it’s almost like he’s playing into a character now. But the footage from that period and specifically, telephone calls when he was not in prison, when he wasn’t playing a role almost were the greatest insights.

DD: And you went to nursing school, correct? You and Jessica?

ER: Yeah.

DD: How did that go for you? Can you give yourself an IV?

ER: Absolutely not. In fact, the first take of this film I managed to pin myself with the needle and it was pretty much downhill all the way. We had a brilliant man called Joe who was an ICU pediatric nurse who just taught Jessica and I for two weeks. And I mean I had so much respect for nurses before this, but it was just exacerbated. Not only do you need the kind of mind, the science, the maths, but also the physical graft is kind of what blew Jess and I away. That of moving bodies, plus this extraordinary emotional intelligence that you need to be a conduit between doctors and people at their most vulnerable.

And it’s an astonishing thing. I was useless at nursing school. I regressed to being a kind of teenager again. I sort of instantly thought I would quit, but Tobias, is this is very much the way he works. A lot of the background artists came from the medical profession, sort of actor medics. And so he would populate the entire set with that. So, as Jess describes it, our feet were to the fire. But it was great also because you always had someone you could ask, but there were moments after each take when you’d go and you’d want to see Tobias’s thoughts on the take. But you’d also want to know Joe, the nurse’s take on whether you had failed that.

DD: And you’ve mentioned that you were sort of waiting to do something with Jessica Chastain and then this pops up. So what was that experience sort of playing this cat and mouse game with her?

ER: I don’t want to sort of over… It was extraordinary, honestly. I’d known Jess for years. I admire her hugely. I think she’s one of the greats. And I was excited, she was a friend and my expectations were high and she managed to completely supersede though. She’s a formidable talent, astonishingly hardworking. She would do this thing where, because she had this heart disease, she would run around the set, do these laps and laps of the set until the camera was rolling and then she’d come in to start seeing him and if there was a problem with the camera, she’d be off again running.

She had this ingenious idea of having an earpiece in her ear that she asked Tobias to play the heartbeat and he could then manipulate the heartbeat during scenes. So she had another obstacle. So there was this invention and playfulness. But ultimately, one of the reasons I love working with her is she’s an optimist. She sees the best in things. We would do all the research and work beforehand and then when we were on set we would just play. And getting to dance with her in some of these very delicately written scenes by Krysty Wilson-Cairns was just, there was an intimacy to it. After having done this sort of, I suppose, the kind of more macro-scale films of the Fantastic Beasts films. There was something so… It was different to me and it was wonderful.

DD: And just a spoiler alert for anyone watching, but I think everyone has seen this film almost at this point. But if anyone needs to pause, pause here, just because I want to talk about one of my favorite scenes. It’s the transformation that happens right in front of us during that interrogation scene. And I love the back and forth with you and Noah Emmerich and that. Was there improvising throughout that scene and what was that intense scene like to film?

ER: Thank you firstly. I mean that scene was extraordinarily written. We had worked a lot on Jess and I, we had Tobias and Krysty on elements of the film. We decided enough to touch that. Some of the words came verbatim from the interrogation. We had footage of that interrogation. He got very violent or very angry. There was a moment that happened months after when they were in court when Charlie was being handed out a predicament by a judge and there were some of the victim’s families there. And he started shouting this mantra about the judge’s ineptitude at him and he repeated it and screamed it so violently that he ended up being bound and gagged in court. And the extremity of that was important to find. The interesting thing about that scene was Tobias had kept Noah and Nnamdi, the two actors playing the detectives, away from me. So I hadn’t really met them.

And he put me in this quite enclosed space and, without telling me, he had decided that he was going to handcuff me. And all I knew in that scene is that Charlie, despite having lost all his power, was trying to retain power and he had the arrogance for that. And so what it became was this game between Noah and I of Noah being in charge and me trying to break his rhythm and the sort of sound, as it were, of the handcuffs became something that I found in the first take and was a way of messing with Noah a bit. And then Noah just suddenly turned with his line and floored me, screaming at me.

And it was interesting ’cause the reaction that it catalyzed was something… Charlie Cullen was abused when he was seven and had this pretty horrendous childhood. And, in a moment for me, you catch a glimpse of him as a kid. And so then it was just about Noah and I kind of going head-to-head and Tobias would allow long takes, 10, 15 minute takes. He wasn’t a director going, “You’ve got to find it quicker.” He let you find the build in rhythm and then he would put it together.

DD: I was able to see this at a theater, at a press screening and Andrew Garfield actually was hosting and he was throwing some jabs at you about when you were living together. You guys got very competitive before you both made it and you weren’t around to sort of punch back. I’m curious…

ER: I love that.

DD: What was life like for you two when you first moved to L.A.? Because I think people would be fascinated to know that you two sort of came up together and lived together that way.

ER: I mean we all look back on it as absolutely joyful. I’m actually off to see a couple of pals from that period this evening and we all now have families, all live in different countries and so it’s rare that we get to hang out and chew the fat and we look back on that time as bliss because it was sort of living in L.A., escaping the reigns of London. But the truth was, and we look back on it with rose-tinted spectacles, the truth was that we were, and my memory of that period was just endlessly driving around L.A. in a rental car with the floor next to me covered in sheets of sides of auditions. Each one with a different American accent and you’d turned up with a line of people, kind of a Lala Land, who all kind of looked identical. Normally, Jamie Dornan was there, Andrew was there, Charlie Cox was there, Tom Sturridge was there, Robert, we’d all be but, and really we didn’t get anything.

Our period in L.A. was definitely one of going to try and get work. But weirdly, then, what happened was it was work that we did in the UK. We had then come back with our tail between our legs and eventually, it was something that we did in the UK that got us, I suppose, a leg up in the industry. But there is something wonderful now ’cause that group we’ve been staggeringly lucky, firstly. Secondly, it’s a weird world. Being an actor it’s an odd, extraordinary and at times mind-boggling job. And to have friends who have gone through the weirdnesses and who are old mates like to your core and that you can talk about stuff that you really can’t really talk about to anyone else about. It’s a great thing. And Garf was competitive, but most fiercely competitive on the table tennis court, which he still is. He still is.

DD: Love that story. Eddie, congratulations on the film, The Good Nurse. Of course, it’s still streaming on Netflix, so people can continue to watch it there. Good luck throughout the award season to everyone involved in the film and maybe Oscar nomination number three. We’re certainly wishing you luck for that and people watching this interview, go to goldderby.com, make your awards predictions and check out so many other great interviews with contenders. Like to be Tobias Lindholm, Krysty Wilson-Cairns. We have those. Jessica I think is talking about George & Tammy, but she’s got a lot going on, so we always…

ER: She has so much going on.

DD: But we love talking to her. So Eddie, thanks again for taking some time to chat with Gold Derby today.

ER: Thanks mate. Bye-Bye.

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