Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne went to nursing school to prepare for The Good Nurse
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In a life-threatening medical situation, don't ever trust Eddie Redmayne to successfully give CPR. Despite going to nursing school to prepare for his role as a healthcare professional in The Good Nurse, the actor admits that he didn't exactly master the skill of cardiopulmonary resuscitation like his costar Jessica Chastain did.
"We spent about two weeks in the classroom — and there's no way of bonding with someone better than being reduced to being back in the classroom," Redmayne tells EW. "I was always useless at biology and Jessica had a mind that was incredibly capable. I would do these exercises with these dummies that they use to practice CPR, and it would transpire that no one would have survived under my watch. But Jess was quite brilliant. She would turn up to nurse school early, get busy putting these IV lines into these dummies, and it took me a lot more practice. She had more of a natural instinct for it."
Based on the book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse tells the shocking true story of Amy Loughren (Chastain), a single mother working night shifts as a nurse while struggling with a life-threatening heart condition, and the serial killer she helped catch. Already stretched to her physical and emotional limits by her demanding job, she soon becomes suspicious of her new coworker and friend, Charlie (Redmayne). after a series of mysterious patient deaths spark an investigation. Amy ultimately risks her life and the safety of her children to uncover the chilling truth about Charlie — as well as the unsettling reasons he was able to get away with his actions for so long.
Courtesy of TIFF 'The Good Nurse'
Chastain was attached to star in The Good Nurse long before Redmayne was cast, but as soon as he landed the role of Charlie, they immediately got on the phone to discuss how excited they were to finally work together. "It was a long journey to get it made — it was probably three years or four years from when we first spoke to when we were on set together," Chastain tells EW. "And Eddie and I talked about how hospitals are filled with incredible human beings, the surgeons and doctors and nurses and paramedics and technicians, everyone who works there. I believe they are there because you have to have a calling. So Eddie and I went to nurse school and learned all about it. We really got to work from the roots up in terms of learning how to be nurses, and that really helped bond us."
Long before they were allowed to get near any kind of IV needle, they first had to learn the history of nursing. "On day one, we had this incredible nurse named Joe who told us all about the history — it really was nursing school," Chastain says. "We went all throughout how nursing developed and Florence Nightingale, all of this stuff. And then he started talking about parts of the body and especially the heart. We spent a lot of time learning about the heart because I needed to know that in particular, what it meant, what happens to your body, and he spent a lot of time with us on IVs, what we do when we go into a room when we're changing an IV, when you're doing the saline, how you hold the bag, how you inject a patient, make sure there's no air in the tube because that could kill a patient. All of these things just had to become second nature for us."
Chastain laughs as she says the training was so thorough she felt like she could actually give medical advice to people. "That's probably a dangerous thing, but Joe was really the best consultant we could have had for that," she adds.
When Chastain and Redmayne finally moved on to practical skills like putting in an IV, they approached it very differently. "Eddie would always tease me because we were learning how to give IVs, and I was jumping in real quick to stab a mannequin arm and he was so nervous and so thoughtful and so meticulous," Chastain says. "And you see that same relationship in the film —Amy's very earthy in the way that she moves and Charlie's more removed, I guess, and more clinical. It was the same way with us in real life."
JoJo Whilden / Netflix
When it was time to put their newfound knowledge and skills to use, both actors discovered their prep work paid off, as they were able to focus on bringing Amy and Charlie's fraught, tense story to life without having to think twice about the actions they were performing as nurses in scenes. But Chastain had an extra layer of difficulty: portraying Amy's heart condition.
"I spoke to Amy and I met her, and that is really important when you're playing a real person," Chastain says. "I asked her about her heart condition because she needed a heart transplant during this time, and that to me was the thing that really helped me in playing the character is understanding what it meant when I went into Afib [a.k.a. atrial fibrillation], what it meant when my heart started beating at a certain level, what it would do to my breath, what it would do to the temperature of my skin, if I'd get clammy, all of these things were very important."
After her conversations with Loughren, Chastain got an idea that she brought straight to director Tobias Lindholm. "I asked to have a little speaker you put in your ear no one can see that would play a heartbeat, because in the scenes where the heart is getting out of control, I really wanted it to be dictating my performance," Chastain says. "I needed to try to calm it down, and the only way I thought that I could really do that is to hear it. When our heart beats fast, we're very present of our heart and trying to calm it down. And so that to me, talking to her about that was invaluable in learning the physicality of what she was going through."
Redmayne was impressed to learn after the fact some of the lengths that Chastain went to in making her portrayal of Loughren's heart condition authentic. "She had these extraordinary techniques that I wasn't even aware of," he says. "I'd see her running around the set for 10 minutes before a take in order to build up her heart rate. And then there would be this horrid moment when there'd be a problem with the camera and poor Jess had just ran half a marathon and now has to wait. But her commitment is unrivaled."
The Good Nurse premieres in select theaters Oct. 19 and on Netflix Oct. 26.
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