'Mad to Be Normal' trailer: David Tennant and Elisabeth Moss embrace the crazy (exclusive)
Doctor Who fans should prepare to see David Tennant as a different kind of doctor. The Scottish actor, best known his tenure on the beloved sci-fi series, plays controversial psychiatrist R.D. Laing in Robert Mullen’s drama Mad to Be Normal. The film dramatizes Laing’s life and work in the 1960s and 1970s, when he opened a “safe haven ” for severely mentally ill patients in London’s Kingsley Hall. Elisabeth Moss co-stars as his love interest, a flirty (and fictional) American Ph.D student. Watch Yahoo Entertainment‘s exclusive trailer premiere above.
Mad to Be Normal takes audiences inside Kingsley Hall, where Laing lived side by side with schizophrenic patients. His revolutionary idea was to forgo traditional treatments involving locked cells and anti-psychotic drugs, and instead to practice a kind of “anti-psychiatry” based on therapy and community. “There’s been no murders,” Laing boasts of his experiment in the trailer. This being the 1960s, he was also fond of treatment via LSD. As one skeptic puts it: “He lets people go mad, believing that they should heal themselves.” Gabriel Byrne and Michael Gambon co-star as two of Laing’s patients.
Mad to Be Normal will be available on digital on Feb. 16.
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