Image Source: Everett Collection
It’s laborious to think about a serial-killer drama inflicting meals cravings, however as Steve Carell and Domhnall Gleeson tuck into chocolate cake doughnuts or Vietnamese pho in “The Patient,” your mouth may begin to water. The desk the pair are sharing is not at some fine-dining institution, although. There’s no fancy flatware or white tablecloths. Rather, Carell’s Dr. Alan Strauss is a chained-up prisoner in his affected person Sam Fortner’s basement. See, Sam has kidnapped his therapist in a clearly misguided try and curb his penchant for homicide. He’s simply retaining Alan well-fed whereas committing a number of felonies.
In a time when serial-killer content material appears to be dominating a lot of the popular culture zeitgeist, “The Patient” seeks to unpack each the psyche of a man committing unthinkable crimes — and the one in every of a man grappling along with his personal fears and disappointments whereas attempting to finish a crime spree (all amid essentially the most harmful of circumstances).
But the meals — why all of the meals? “We’re always hesitant to talk about what our intent is in terms of meaning. But in building any characters . . . you want there to be dimensions, and you want it to feel real. And part of what’s fun about real people is they have these specific passions,” Joel Fields tells POPSUGAR whereas discussing the hit FX sequence, which he cocreated along with his “The Americans” inventive companion Joe Weisberg.
Unlike a lot of tv’s most vicious fictional antagonists, Sam is absolutely fleshed: viewers be taught rapidly about his household dynamic, his obsession with Kenny Chesney, and his profession as a well being and security inspector. “Which came first? Foodie or health and safety inspector?” Weisberg teases.
“Sam Fortner didn’t leap into our heads fully formed,” Fields elaborates. “It took a lot of conversation and trial and error and different things. But I don’t remember whether it was foodie first and restaurant inspector second, or restaurant inspector first and foodie second. I think that’s because they became so wrapped up with each other that it’s not as if he became a food inspector because he was a fastidious guy and then happened to get into food. He clearly has a passion for this, and it was the right choice for him.”
The duo say they sorted by means of quite a few concepts for Sam’s background, targeted on discovering not solely that aforementioned dimension but in addition avoiding “falling into all the cliché traps.” Explains Weisberg, “Food inspector — I don’t remember ever seeing that on TV. . . . We had to learn. We had to do some research on food inspectors. How long it takes to get a reinspection is — a lot of people put a lot of hours into researching that. I can now tell you it’s different in different counties.”
There was, admittedly, some analysis into Sam’s day job that Weisberg and Fields have been trying ahead to however unable to see by means of attributable to COVID-19 restraints: the consuming. “There was one instance where we actually sent our script coordinator out to get a very specific elaborate Vietnamese meal that he then photographed for us and told us about and then he got to eat because COVID and Zoom,” Fields recounts, laughing. “So that was painful, but we were very happy for him.”
Weisberg says general, the showrunners hope Sam’s affinity for delicacies (which was lovingly crafted for the display by some actual, gifted cooks) provides some depth to the character and permits viewers to “connect” with somebody who, at face worth, is seemingly unconnectable. He tells POPSUGAR, “Anything we could do to get him out of the trope of the, as he says himself, robot is good for us. So I think it’s really intended as a point of connection.”
“You go to people who are into horses, for example, and part of what’s cool is they’re all wildly different people in their other life, but then they come into this one place and they have this common passion,” Fields provides. “You could say that for just about anything. And that’s something that’s very human.”
Image Source: Getty
The meals additionally helps Alan join with “the outside world” throughout his pressured imprisonment, Fields notes. In reality, it is the one touchpoint he has with the fact past what Sam has pressured him into. And Alan’s personal story includes meals, in some methods. His challenged relationship along with his son Ezra (Andrew Leeds) because of the latter’s later-in-life flip to Orthodox Judaism is proven by means of flashback moments, together with minor interactions like Ezra’s circle of relatives retaining kosher.
“We wanted to explore both the specifics of the Orthodox religion and also the specifics of reform Judaism and how that’s a meaningful pursuit, and how even what from the outside may appear to be small differences within a religion can be chasms within families,” Fields says of portray the image, as soon as once more, with delicacies. “The kosher food, it seemed like a great expression of that in this family because those choices and how they’re made became so important to them.”
With seven of “The Patient”‘s 10 episodes presently streaming, followers are simply weeks away from the conclusion of Alan and Sam’s story. The present’s optimistic reception has been, partly, because of the actors’ nuanced performances. It helps, Weisberg and Fields say, that Carell was who they’d in thoughts for Alan early within the writing course of. “He’s the first actor we thought of for the part and can’t imagine anybody else bringing this character to life,” Fields tells POPSUGAR.
Finding their Sam was a bit more difficult: He “was a hard part to cast,” Weisberg admits. “It’s like the idea of a serial killer who wants to get better, and who you therefore have some sympathy for, but is still believable as a serial killer. Man, that’s tough. And not only that, but because nobody’s exactly done that, it’s hard to even know exactly what it looks like. So it was not easy.”
A casting director acknowledged Star Wars alum Gleeson’s “incredible talent” and “wide range,” the Emmy Award winner says. “When he came in and read, it was just literally from the first scene he did, you were like, ‘That’s the guy.’ And that when you’re really, really, really lucky, that happens in casting. But when you have such a complicated and odd part, it really was a stroke of great fortune. I think there’s a real world in which we might have never been able to cast that part.”
New episodes of “The Patient” stream on Hulu on Tuesdays.
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