Here's Who 'Pain Hustlers' Liza Drake Is Based On In Real Life
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Netflix’s newest hit movie, Pain Hustlers, dives into the story of a pharmaceutical company, Zanna Pharmaceuticals, that produces a highly addictive opioid drug called Lonafen.
As the movie explains, the drug is initially developed to treat breakthrough pain in cancer patients. The plot shows how the company bribed doctors to buy the drug, and how the doctors then went on to prescribe the drug to patients. However, once it hits the market, Lonafen leads to a lot of addiction and even some overdoses, which eventually catches the attention of federal investigators.
If the plot feels like it could have really happened, that's because the movie is actually based on a true story. In real life, a man named John Kapoor founded a company called Insys Therapeutics, which developed a fentanyl spray called Subsys that helped with breakthrough pain. While the drug was approved to help cancer patients in serious pain, Kapoor created a team of sales reps who bribed doctors into prescribing the medication to patients, even if it wasn’t medically necessary.
Naturally, Pain Hustlers has also raised a lot of questions about what’s real and what’s just been made up for movie-watchers. But who is Liza Drake and is she a real person? Here’s the deal.
Who is Liza Drake?
Liza Drake is a pharmaceutical rep for the fictional Zanna Pharmaceuticals (based on Kapoor's Insys).
When viewers meet Liza, they learn that she's a high school dropout and single mom who has lost her job. She eventually meets Zanna sales rep Pete Brenner (played by Chris Evans) who recruits her to work for the company.
Liza’s daughter has a serious medical condition, and she has to balance her demanding job and caring for her sick daughter while trying to figure out what the heck is going on at her workplace.
Who plays Liza in Pain Hustlers?
Liza is played by actress Emily Blunt. She's had a pretty big presence on the big screen over the past decade. You might recognize from A Quiet Place, The Young Victoria, The Devil Wears Prada, Oppenheimer, and a slew of other hits. She's married to The Office's John Krasinski and the two share two daughters together.
Is Liza based on a real person?
Nope. She's not based on a real person.
However, while Liza isn’t technically inspired by a singular individual, she’s actually a composite character meant to represent a slew of people who got caught up in the pharma world.
The pharmaceutical world "was made up of young people who were often in over their head and they were hungry for success and a lot of that is embodied in her. Even if the details come from hither and yon, they're real," journalist Evan Hughes, who wrote the book, Pain Hustlers, which inspired the movie, told Time.
“Liza was our invention—a single mum with a daughter struggling with health issues, a dreamer, undervalued but incredibly capable,” he said.
What happens to Liza at the end of Pain Hustlers?
Liza—along with pretty much everyone else in the movie—ends up going to jail. Even though she tries to help take down the people she worked for, she is sentenced to 15 months behind bars.
In real life, Insys exec Kapoor and six other senior company execs were eventually charged with bribery and fraud in 2018, but pled not guilty, per the NYT. And in 2019, Kapoor and four other execs were convicted by a federal jury of racketeering conspiracy along. The next year, Kapoor received a prison sentence of 5.5 years for “orchestrating a scheme to bribe practitioners to prescribe Subsys…often when medically unnecessary,” per the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
At the very end, the movie shows Liza selling her mother's skincare products at a farmer's market and she seems happy, so who knows what's next for her fictional character...
You can catch Pain Hustlers, streaming now on Netflix.
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