Eddie Redmayne on portraying a serial killer in 'The Good Nurse'

LOS ANGELES —When award-winning actor Eddie Redmayne accepted the role of portraying Charles Cullen, a convicted serial killer who murdered possibly hundreds of patients during his 16-year career as a nurse, in the drama, "The Good Nurse," the English actor admitted he never heard of him.

"What I found astonishing was that this man may have been the most prolific serial killer in American history, and I'd never heard of him. Many of my American friends and colleagues also hadn't heard of him," the 40-year-old actor said.

"When I read the script, what I found extraordinary was that it unfolded in a way that refused to be boxed," he added. "On the one hand, it was about this man and what he did, but actually it was about this heroic woman who succeeded in stopping him where systems had failed to do that. But it was also a sort of relationship drama. It seemed to refuse to be bracketed, and I found that really unique and compelling."

Photo: Netflix

The movie, helmed by Tobias Lindholm and written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is based on the 2013 true-crime book of the same name by Charles Graeber. The film also stars Jessica Chastain as nurse Amy Loughren who became Cullen's friend and who later was the one who alerted police after she became alarmed about Cullen's records of accessing drugs and his links to patient deaths.

Cullen admitted to the murder of 40 patients and was sentenced to 18 consecutive life sentences and is not eligible for parole until June 10, 2388.

We were able to interview Redmayne by Zoom.

How did you prepare for the role? I saw an interview with Jessica Chastain that you guys went to "nursing school" and you learned how to compress and sing "Stayin' Alive" while compressing.

Yeah. We went to "nursing school," Jess and me. And we started with the history of nursing and then as you say, CPR and that very specific thing of doing compressions to the rhythm of "Stayin' Alive."

But it transpired that I'm a pretty useless nurse. In the first take of the movie, I had to inject something, and I managed to stick a pin into my thumb. So, it started bad and didn't get much worse.

Photo: Netflix

We had this amazing guy, Joe, a real-life nurse. A lot of the background artists were real medical professionals. They were all on set, so you constantly felt like your work was being watched by the real people and you didn't want to screw it up.

How would you characterize Charlie Cullen? Because he transformed from a soft-spoken wonderful guy to this monster. What do you think triggered him to do this stuff?

The film doesn't answer what triggered him. We have a thing as human beings that we want to know why, and I wanted to know why and what is the reason. Because if we know the reason, then we can other that person and go, "Well, he did it because of this, and I would never do that, and therefore I feel safe." But the reality is it's more complex than that.

Charlie, he had a very traumatic upbringing. He was abused age seven and tried to kill his abuser, age seven, and then tried to kill himself with lighter fluid, age seven. His mother, who he was very close to, died when he was 15. He was the first one to the hospital, and the hospital had lost her body.

He then trained years later back at that same hospital. So, I always wondered if there was an element that was a fury at the system having failed him and his family and wanting to expose that.

But there is no one reason. For me, it was about trying to take as many of those things as I could and embed them in me and then see what came out in the moment.

Photo: Netflix

Have you ever met Amy Loughren, the character that was portrayed by Jessica Chastain? Did she give you any advice about the character?

Yeah, we were lucky enough to spend quite a lot of time with Amy. She's just an amazing human being. It's actually one of the great gifts of making this movie, was getting to spend time with her.

She was absolutely essential into insight of playing Charlie because she described how he was two different people. She said it was a sort of dissociative thing.

He, on the one hand, was this kind, gentle, quite funny, self-deprecating and very fastidious nurse. Then she met this other human being twice, who was, she describes it as being an empty vessel, as being sort of staggeringly arrogant. This eye would drift off. But she said it was two different people.

She retains a complicated relationship with that. That was perhaps the most important thing — their love on the one hand because it meant that Jessica and I could really engage in the truth of that friendship.

And do you think you would make a good nurse?

No. I'm a useless nurse. Absolutely horrendous nurse. No. Lots of people would be dying on my watch. Absolutely not. Yeah. Useless nurse.

—MGP, GMA Integrated News