Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne Say 'The Good Nurse' Won't 'Fetishize' True Story

The Good Nurse does not approach the real-life story of Amy Loughren and Charles Cullen with "fetishistic intent," unlike other films and TV shows of its ilk, Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne told Newsweek.

The actors were not aware of the real-life story behind the true crime film before they signed on to the project, but when they did they appreciated how director Tobias Lindholm chose not to over-dramatize the truth or glamorize the crimes committed by focusing heavily on the act itself.

Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne Say 'The Good Nurse' Won't 'Fetishize' True Story

The Good Nurse follows Chastain's Loughren, a nurse who becomes friends with co-worker Cullen (Redmayne). He is helpful and kind to her, but she later learns he is suspected of being behind the deaths of hundreds of patients at multiple hospitals, and she works alongside the police to try to catch him after the system had failed to do so.

Cullen is currently serving 18 consecutive life sentences for the killing of 29 patients by injecting IV bags with drugs like digoxin and insulin, but authorities believe he is responsible for 400 deaths from 1988 to 2003.

Lindholm's drama retells the true story, with the real-life Loughren helping in the making of the film, and it makes a point of not showing Cullen in the act or making the killer the focus of the story.

This was something that appealed to the cast, as Chastain told Newsweek of the director's approach to the story: "I thought it was different in the way that the media often portrays true crime.

"Usually, we see violence defeating violence, and I really love that this is a film that shows that compassion and empathy stops this violent act and that by, I don't want to give too much away, but treating someone as a human being and seeing them as human, rather than treating them as a monster and 'the other,' separate from you, is what reminds someone that they are human. I thought that was a beautiful thing to put into the world."

"It's not, I don't want to say this word because I know it's gonna get me in trouble, but sexualized, sometimes I see true crime stuff and you see the close-ups of the act, of the murder. Fetishized, that's a more appropriate word, this removes any kind of fetishistic intent with any of that," she added.

Redmayne concurred with Chastain, saying: "There was something about that, I mean that was the truth of it. By the end, [Cullen] was injecting these things in the storeroom and they were unexploded bombs that were just going out into the world.

"It was interesting, we had this amazing nurse who taught us and he would describe that very occasionally on a ward you'd meet someone that's called a code freak, like a nurse that just really enjoys the thrill or the adrenaline of the moment when [an emergency alert] happens. But, often, Charlie wasn't the one there, there wasn't any sort of fetishized need, and that's what was so complex about it."

Redmayne said the film "felt less to me a true crime story and more, on the one hand, a hero's journey and, on the other hand, an exposure of crumbling systems or systems that couldn't support such extremes."

"I, weirdly, never thought of it as a true crime story," the actor added.

Lindholm also spoke to Newsweek, and he explained his reasoning for ensuring the film didn't make Cullen the focus: "We are in a time where this darkness we seem to be obsessed to look into is more and more hollow.

"I think that it's part of human life, to look into the darkness, our fears are part of the way we navigate life. Life is basically about what we hope and what we fear, and then we try to find our way through and this story was exactly about what we hoped for, that humanity could come instead of being a story about violence beating down violence, it's a story about how charity and kindness, and humanity stopped something that a whole system couldn't do.

"And that was a story I hadn't seen before and it kind of took what is a beaten genre, of serial killer movies, and it gave us an opportunity to tell a very different story, which was inspiring."

On Working With the Real Amy Loughren

Loughren was involved with the making of the film from its early stages, aiding Lindholm and writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns throughout the process of pre-production and giving advice to Chastain and Redmayne when filming began.

For Chastain this helped in her portrayal of her real-life counterpart particularly because it aided in her understanding of her life outside the hospital.

"She helped me a lot, especially in terms of the importance of her kids, and the physical ailments she had," Chastain said, referencing Loughren's cardiomyopathy. "Because when I first read the script I thought none of this can be true, like this has been played out for Hollywood.

"The last scene of the movie, one of the last scenes of the movie which I don't want to spoil, you think 'this has to be fake?' [But it's] absolutely true. That's what's insane, it's absolutely true. I don't know how to talk about it without giving it away, but [I was] talking to her about all those things.

"But I remember she said something to me and I thought, 'Oh, that's such an interesting character thing and I want to build the character around this,' she said she decided to work as a night nurse so her children would think they had a stay-at-home mom.

"It's extraordinary, that idea, because it means you're not sleeping all night and then when your children are with you during the day you're not sleeping. So, when are you taking care of yourself? Especially someone who has cardiomyopathy, and I thought that was such an interesting look into her."

Redmayne relied predominantly on Charles Graeber's non-fiction book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder to understand Cullen and get into the dark headspace required of the role.

"It's probably only the last quarter of the book that is our story [in the film], and the rest of it is almost Charlie's biography, and it's a kind of bible in some ways for an actor to have a lot of that research done for you, and all the different resources," Redmayne said.

"So that was a great place to start but the thing that really hit me was a lot of Charlie, as a character, is woven up of trauma, an extraordinary trauma that he went through in his youth.

"But, really, the sense of anonymity and the power of anonymity was important to me, and he's described [in the book as being] at one of the hospitals he was working at before that he would always fill the coffee pots, be the person that filters it, and he was so furious that no one else would do it, but he would silently do it. And then as he would watch people drinking the coffee, that no one knew that he had made, [it] made him feel a sense of power and accomplishment.

"There was a time when he sent a card to this girl, an equivalent of Amy, that he worked on a ward with who he got on very well with, and he sent this anonymous Valentine's card and everyone on the ward was talking about it and who was it from. Then, eventually, he said it was him and the woman found it very disconcerting and broke all ties, and so I think he learned the power of that anonymity, that strength in the silence.

"And so that's where I found that darkness, that you could play all the truth [...] and the other thing was Amy Loughren telling me that it was [about] two human beings, it was a dissociative thing, and she only saw that killer twice. Once was at the diner and once was in the [interrogation] room, and so that meant that when Jess and I were playing our scenes, our friendship, all that empathy is real and all that kindness is true, it's just a different thing."

Feeling Safe Even in the Film's Most Intense Scenes

The diner that Redmayne is referring to was the location where Loughren first called out Cullen for his crimes and tried to get him to confess, a scene that is recreated in the film and is incredibly intense because it shows the true danger that Loughren put herself in.

Despite Redmayne needing to show a darker side as Cullen in the scene, Chastain said she never felt "unsafe" or "unprotected" while shooting because they understood how important it was to look out for each other in such moments.

"I think it was for us what it was probably like for the people in the scenes, because that's our job, is to try to put ourselves in those positions, of course without it being the people's lives at stake," Chastain said. "But, really, it is our job to try to get as close as possible to that, but also at the same time taking care of each other.

"I mean, the wonderful thing about [how] I found that, working together, is that we were never putting the other in a position of feeling unsafe and unprotected, which I'm very grateful for."

Redmayne added: "One of the joys of this film is that when you meet someone whose process is similar and you look at the world and our job, and what we do, in a similar kind of way, that doesn't always happen on films, quite often on films when actors come in it's up to the director to shape shift to accommodate the actor.

"Whereas on this, we had a wonderful director and the two of us had similar processes so it meant that actually we would do all our research and then we would try and throw it all away and play, and it, for me, felt like jazz and it had an intimacy to it. And getting to dance with [Chastain] in that way was an extraordinary thing, a really extraordinary thing."

The Good Nurse is out in theaters now and it will be released on Netflix on Wednesday, October 26.