‘Painkiller’ star Matthew Broderick gives his take as ‘a Bond villain:’ producer

The Netflix sequence “Painkiller” tracks the origins of the opioid epidemic with Matthew Broderick as its foremost villain: billionaire Purdue Pharma chief Richard Sackler.

“One of many issues we all the time attempt to do once we’re telling any story is to humanize the characters,” govt producer Eric Newman informed The Submit. 

“What Matthew gave us was an immediate likeability. While you’re taking part in a personality who has some repulsive qualities, to have somebody entering into that conjures Ferris Bueller is helpful.

“I prefer to assume that it’s Matthew’s tackle a Bond villain.’ 

Newman was a producer on “Narcos” and mentioned that his time “learning and chronicling drug traffickers,” let him to see “similarities” between the 2 sequence.

“Within the case of this story, the betrayal of public belief is absolutely the worst sin,” he mentioned. “These weren’t individuals who would describe themselves as drug sellers. They might describe themselves as docs. And that was a obvious distinction that made the insidiousness —  the evil — of this much more pronounced than the South American drug commerce.” 

“Painkiller” is predicated on Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article, “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” and Barry Meier’s ebook, “Ache Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic.” 

It retells the opioid disaster from a number of totally different views, together with billionaire Richard Sackler (Broderick) and his crew at Purdue Pharma (Sackler has denied accountability for the disaster); Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), a lawyer working for the US legal professional’s workplace in Roanoke who’s investigating the drug OxyContin; Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), a household man with a small enterprise who will get hooked on OxyContin after he’s injured at work; and Shannon Shaeffer (West Duchovony), a brand new recruit to the Purdue gross sales crew who begins having doubts. 

“Again in 2003, I used to be working on the New York Instances and we bought a tip that there was this new drug known as OxyContin that was operating wild on the streets of all these small cities,” Meier, a consulting producer on the present, informed The Submit. 

“I began reporting on it, and I discovered myself on the daybreak of this prescription drug catastrophe that we now know because the opioid epidemic. I wrote a ebook about it. The story… sat and sat, and fortunately 20 years later, Eric [Newman] and different individuals got here alongside and turned it right into a incredible present.”

Director/govt producer Peter Berg informed The Submit that this matter is private for him. 

“I do know individuals who have died from OxyContin … And I do know some massive well-known names who died from OxyContin — individuals like Prince, who was one in every of my heroes, Tom Petty, Chris Cornell,” he mentioned. “The lack of human life to dependancy is one thing that I’m very cognizant of. When Eric [Newman] got here to me a few present concerning the delivery and recognition and mass-marketing of what’s primarily heroin, it was very interesting to me.

“The results of all of this protection is that individuals perceive who the Sacklers are,” Berg mentioned. “While you hear Sacklers or OxyContin, individuals cringe. For those who’re informed by a physician to take an OxyContin, you’ll assume twice. For those who go to the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork to the temple of Dendur, it’s not ‘The Sackler Wing.’ These names have come off. Folks know who they’re and perceive what they’ve completed.

“That is perhaps essentially the most justice that anybody goes to get — the truth that the legacy of this household has been eviscerated.”