The star of Netflix’s new true crime drama The Good Nurse sits down with Stylist’s entertainment editor Christobel Hastings to discuss the challenges of playing a real person, going to nursing school and how the film does true crime differently.
Jessica Chastain is telling me the number one bugbear nurses have with medical dramas. “Supposedly the biggest issue that nurses have with Hollywood is the way the compressions are done,” she explains. “Like, like you’re never supposed to bend your elbows.” She couldn’t have been happier, then, when she got the seal of approval from a nurse for her performance in Netflix’s new true crime drama The Good Nurse. “One of the best comments I got was after Toronto,” she says enthusiastically. “I had a nurse come up to me and say, ‘Your compressions were perfect!’”
You’d expect nothing less from the woman who scooped a best acting Oscar for her magnetic portrayal of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes Of Tammy Faye earlier this year. Based on the notorious case of Charles Cullen, an American nurse who quietly killed hospital patients by spiking IV bags with lethal overdoses, The Good Nurse focuses on the incredible bravery of a real-life nurse, Amy Loughren (played by Chastain), who befriended Cullen and worked alongside the police to help bring him to justice. Although he was convicted for the murder of 29 patients, it’s believed that Cullen may actually be responsible for up to 400 deaths in the New Jersey area between 1998 and 2003, making him one of America’s most prolific serial killers.
Although The Good Nurse finds a home among other more controversial offerings in Netflix’s true crime catalogue, the dramatisation isn’t your typical serial killer fare. Rather than examining what motivated one man to embark on a killing spree, Danish director Tobias Lindholm focuses on how Cullen was able to literally get away with murder for years, much like his TV series The Investigation, which explores the tragic death of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall without once mentioning the name of her killer.
“I talked to him, and I was so pleased with how he wanted to look at the story,” Chastain explains when we meet one early October morning at a London hotel. “It wasn’t fetishising violence and really giving us the full journey of this person who becomes this mass murderer. Instead, he wanted to focus on what stopped it, and celebrate and acknowledge what actually took it down.”
The preparation for the film was nothing if not thorough. Chastain attended nursing school, where she got to grips with mannequins before pulling on scrubs for the procedural scenes. “I mean, day one, it was history of nursing, like, let’s talk about Florence Nightingale,” Chastain says. “We really learned the history of it, we learned the hands-on: how do you give an IV? It made it second nature once I got on set.”
Read the full interview here.
CHRISTOBEL HASTINGS 
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