‘The Good Nurse’ Star Eddie Redmayne & Director Tobias Lindholm On Bringing America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer To Life – Contenders LA3C
“I had never heard of this guy, and I would be the kind of person who would know about the most prolific serial killer in the U.S.,” The Good Nurse director Tobias Lindholm said of the real-life Charles Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne in the Netflix film.
“I realized this was not a story about necessarily a serial killer but about a whole system allowing him to continue to do what he was doing, and then I knew we had a story that would throw us back to the great ’70s thrillers that I love,” Lindholm added about Cullen and the for-profit American medical companies that shuffled the killer nurse around from hospital to hospital for years, resulting in hundreds of patient murders.
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Joined by The Theory of Everything Oscar winner Redmayne, Lindholm was speaking with me today at Deadline’s Contenders Film: LA3C event in downtown Los Angeles.
Also starring Jessica Chastain, The Good Nurse debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in September. The true-crime feature based on Charles Graeber’s 2013 book then launched October 22 on Netflix. In the film, 2021 Oscar winner Chastain portrays Amy Loughren, the fellow nurse who ultimately was instrumental in ensuring Cullen’s arrest in 2008. During the making of The Good Nurse, Loughren spoke extensively with both Chastain and Redmayne about their characters and what really went down in the effort to snare Cullen.
RELATED: ‘The Good Nurse’ Toronto Review: Jessica Chastain And Eddie Redmayne Superb In Real-Life Stunner
No stranger to playing real people, such as Stephen Hawking in 2014’s The Theory of Everything, Redmayne described how he climbed inside his character without even meeting or speaking to the now-incarcerated Cullen himself.
“Tobias and I had access to footage, to psychological reports and also to Charles Graeber, the man who wrote the book,” the actor said. “And, having played a few real people over the years, more and more I find that it is other artists’ insights that are helpful. You have to accept that it is not facsimile, that it’s not documentary.”
Check back Wednesday for the panel video.
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