Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne’s serial killer movie ‘Good Nurse’ examines U.S. health care system
The new film Good Nurse, opening on May 10 in theaters, is a compelling, thoughtful meditation on U.S. health care. The movie’s cast, led by Jessica Chastain as a nurse who becomes involved in a murder mystery, brings an honest approach to a topic that is politically fraught and has been the subject of many films and books. Director Ed Burns, the director of the 2006 Oscar-winning film I Remember When, tells NPR’s Robert O’Brien that it was Chastain’s willingness to give the film’s true motivation away during interviews — Chastain revealed that she was drawn to the story because she wanted to show the real consequences of U.S. health care and to try to make “a film that was true in a way [that] you can’t ever really find in films, because there’s only so many ways we know how to show [it].”
Chastain talks about the movie with Robert O’Brien and co-hosts Margaret Wappler and Peter Sagal. Chastain is pictured in the back row from left, right to center: Chastain, Redmayne, and Burns.
ROBERT O’BRIEN, HOST:
I’m going to start with Jessica Chastain in a scene from her new film Good Nurse. Her character, an intensive care nurse working in the ER of a small town in Iowa, becomes involved in an investigation of her own. And, like Chastain says, she wanted to show the true consequences of U.S. health care.
It’s all about this new kind of life for her at the beginning of the movie, a life that she had a long time ago. She had this dream she’d had all these years about doing something that would really make a difference in peoples’ lives.
And so she goes into the ER, and she suddenly thinks she knows what that life is, and that her career is all about finding that life. And