The actor, who stars opposite Jessica Chastain, so perfectly embodied Cullen in one particular scene that Loughren felt that he was “eerily accurate” to the “reptilian” killer, she told Newsweek.
‘Good Nurse’ Amy Loughren Shares Moment Eddie Redmayne Transformed into ‘Reptilian’ Killer
The scene that Loughren is referring to is the one in which Chastain’s iteration of her confronts Redmayne’s Cullen about his crimes in a diner, hoping to get him to confess while she wore a wire with police listening in.
When Chastain’s character asks Redmayne’s Cullen about the suspicious deaths, the latter slams his hands on the table and grows quiet, his face completely changing as he sits in silence and stares at her before leaving the diner.
Loughren told Newsweek that the diner scene “was very quick” in the film, but in reality she and Cullen were together “for hours” in that diner.
“What’s interesting is that the documentary that’s coming out [Catching the Killer Nurse], has the actual audio of the two of us speaking, and we were having just a regular afternoon beer with something to eat and just talking shop,” Loughren said of the real moment.
“And I just kept building up to making sure that he understood that I did care about him and that we were friends—and we were—and then when I did finally confront him it was the way that Eddie captures.
“The response from Charles Cullen is eerily accurate, my friend Charlie changed from being this underdog, sort of Mr. Rogers type, to… everything about him, his demeanor, his color, the way that his eyes move, he became very almost reptilian in the way that he moved as if there was an emptiness there, and it was terrifying. It was terrifying to watch him become the murderer.
“When Eddie became the murderer in that scene it was Charlie. It absolutely was Charlie, that scene made me… I was shaking. After seeing Eddie portray him [I was] just shaking.”
When asked if she felt Redmayne had captured the Cullen she once knew, Loughren said: “Oh he did, he absolutely did, and that switch… when Eddie and I talked on Zoom —because it was during a pandemic we couldn’t do a lot together—I described that scene to him, and he tried so hard [to capture it].
“He said that he worked with a movement coach, he took every single thing that I said about Charlie into account… Eddie really did that. He knocked it out of the park.”
Cullen is currently serving 18 consecutive life sentences for the killing of 29 patients, though authorities believe he was responsible for the deaths of at least 400 people.
Eddie Redmayne on How Amy Loughren Helped Him Play Charles Cullen
As well as working with Loughren, Redmayne told Newsweek that he relied 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,” The Theory of Everything star 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.”
Of the advice Loughren gave him, Redmayne said: “The other thing was Amy Loughren telling me that it was [about] two human beings… 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.”
The Good Nurse is out on Netflix now.
