Is The Good Nurse Based on a True Story?

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The Good Nurse, the new drama streaming now on Netflix, has all the makings of a classic thriller: There’s a seemingly unstoppable villain, a heroine forced to display incredible bravery, and stakes as high as they can possibly be. And while the story that’s told in the film—which stars Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne and is based on a book by Charles Graeber—might seem too incredible to have really happened, according to screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns, it’s a case of the truth being stranger than fiction.

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Graeber’s book tells the story of Charles Cullen, a New Jersey nurse who over the course of his career murdered at least 29 patients—though is suspected of having actually killed many more—and the health care system that helps hide his crimes in the interest of profits. In The Good Nurse, Redmayne takes a chilling turn as Cullen, while Chastain plays Amy Loughren, another hospital nurse who befriends Cullen before realizing that something is terribly wrong and sets out to stop it.

Here, Wilson-Cairns explains how real-life events inspired the film, where fiction comes into play, and why she’ll never look at a nurse the same way again.

It is a true story…

While Charles Cullen’s crimes weren’t entirely unknown, part of what made making The Good Nurse appealing was that they weren’t as embedded in pop-culture as those of other criminals. Still, Wilson-Cairns, who’d previously written Last Night in Soho and 1917, wasn’t looking to write another story about murder. “I was quite adamant,” she says. “I wanted to do something a bit different. I sat down to read the first chapter so I could say no with some authority, and I stayed up the whole night and read the entire book. I never knew about Charles Cullen, and the fact that America's most prolific serial killer happened in my lifetime and that I'd never heard of it really got under my skin.”

But not a documentary.

While Graeber’s book followed Cullen’s story for nearly 16 years, The Good Nurse didn’t have the same luxury. “The book had hundreds of pages,” Wilson-Cairns says. “I get about 120 before people start to lose interest.”

With that in mind, she decided to frame the film around Loughren. “She was the person who used her humanity to awaken his,” she says. “As I think to tell the story through anyone else’s point of view, it’d have to be Charlie and then you’d have to invent things. If you go through Amy, you can tell as much truth as possible, preserve what feel real, don’t invent, and don’t add elements of a thriller that aren’t there.”

There are no high-speed chases.

“My favorite thing to do is to adapt true stories or to draw on real life and real characters,” Wilson-Cairns says. “Don't get me wrong, every so often you're like, I really wish there was a car chase. But then you ask, well how do I actually engage people? And it's not about a car chase. How you actually engage people is you go into character, you go into what makes them feel safe, what makes them feel afraid. And you just keep digging into that.”

So, while there are no literal explosions in The Good Nurse, instead the drama comes from high stakes, incredible tension, and the push and pull of a relationship that’s hiding a terrible secret. “Because you're hamstrung by what actually happened, that makes you have to be more inventive, more creative, and it makes you have to really double down into the essential,” the screenwriter says. “And the essential is just character and connection. And ultimately I think it reaps really good rewards.”

But there are real-life consequences.

The Good Nurse is being released after an incredibly trying time for medical professionals, and Wilson-Cairns thinks it sheds a new light on what the profession entails. “As part of my research for this, I worked two weeks of night shifts at a burn unit,” she explains. “I shadowed nurses, I was in scrubs, I had to help them lift patients. And I realized how incredibly hard and manual and emotionally draining their job is—for just frankly not enough money.”

Her story’s hero agrees. “When we were about to go on stage at the Toronto International Film Festival, Amy and I were a bit nervous; it was the first time an audience had watched the film. We were walking out, and I said, ‘This is hard,’ and she was like, ‘This isn’t even the hardest things I’ve done this week.’ I said, ‘Well, you did catch a serial killer that one time,’ and she told me, ‘That’s not even the hardest thing I did. I’ve been a nurse for years.’ I thought that was a really good point.

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