‘Dr. Death’ Stars Mandy Moore And Edgar Ramírez Dissect The New Season
First Published on Forbes.com
In a world that seems to grow more and more obsessed with true crime stories, the second season of Dr. Death will surely satisfy that craving for many.
Starring Mandy Moore and Edgar Ramírez, the new season of this anthology series revolves around the all-too-real story of Dr. Paolo Macchiarini (played by Ramírez), an Italian thoracic surgeon who was initially praised for his cutting-edge stem cell grown and implanted tracheas into his ailing patients. When a documentary team decides to do a story on the “miracle work” surrounding Macchiarini, he meets high-powered NBC television producer Benita Alexander (played by Moore), where their professional relationship quickly turns into a secret and rather intimate one. What transpires from there is quite hard to believe, real-life accounts that were first made famous on the Wondery podcast and are now being told in eight new Dr. Death episodes, premiering December 21 on Peacock.
With both Moore and Ramírez coming from already elaborate acting backgrounds, I wondered what intrigued them most about portraying these real people and taking on this unsettling true story as their next role.
Moore said, “For me, I think coming off a show like This Is Us, I was like, ‘I want to do something totally different!’ I just had a baby and the [Dr. Death] scripts came my way and the caveat being they’re about to start shooting and it’s in New York. I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll read it but it’s probably not going to be the thing for me.’ And then of course, I read the first two scripts and I was like, ‘Damn, I got to do this!’ Edgar was a part of it. It just was such juicy storytelling and something I’d never been a part of and felt so different.”
She added, “I loved just delving into how someone as smart and capable and together and at the top of her field like Benita could find herself in this particular situation and vulnerable enough that she could fall victim to someone as masterful as Paolo - and so, getting to tell that story to me was a really exciting prospect.”
Both on television and in films today, projects are often called true stories but enhanced for dramatic purposes and for greater entertainment value. So, I wondered how Hoban and her Dr. Death season two team effectively straddled the line between telling this story authentically and creating a somewhat heightened, dramatic world for good television.