Spoilers for Season 2 of Dr. Death are ahead! If you haven’t streamed the true crime show on the 2023 TV schedule, you can watch all eight episodes now with a Peacock subscription.
Following the success of the Joshua Jackson-led Dr. Death Season 1, one of the best true crime series is back for another installment, this time telling the story of Dr. Paolo Macchiarini (Édgar Ramírez) and the lies surrounding him and his work on biosynthetic tracheas. The season stars Mandy Moore as Benita Alexander, the journalist who falls in love with him, along with Luke Kirby, Ashley Madekwe and Gustaf Hammarsten as the three doctors who exposed him. It takes all four to take down Dr. Death. However, they’re all only in the same room once. So, when I got the chance to chat with the cast and creatives, I had to ask about this one moment.
In the final episode of Dr. Death’s second season, Benita and the three doctors gather at a Swedish police station to hear the results of the investigation into Macchiarini. It’s a harrowing and climactic moment, and while the characters don’t directly interact, seeing them in the same room is quite powerful. And that’s exactly what showrunner Ashley Michel Hoban wanted, as she told CinemaBlend:
It was really important for us to have these two stories that without even really acknowledging it they would not have had an impact individually, they needed each other in order to bring down this guy and hold him accountable for what he had done. And so we’ve got all these people peppered in to show it's a little bit of a smaller world than we think.
She also explained that the greater theme of the show was to demonstrate how powerful individual voices can be. This scene was a way to illustrate how it took all four of them to get Macchiarini’s wrongdoings brought to light. It was a moving moment to watch, and it turns out, it was an emotional point to shoot too.
Up until this point Kirby, Madekwe and Hammarsten hadn’t had a scene with Moore yet. During our interview, Hammarsten, who plays Dr. Svensson, explained the power of being together just once while they were shooting:
We did that scene very late during the shooting. So it kind of felt logical, and we haven't met – you know, I had no scenes with Mandy. I had a couple of scenes with Edgar in the beginning. But then I kind of didn't have any scenes [with them] for a long time. It felt real. And for me, being a Swede, and we're in New York pretending to be in Sweden, with the Swedish police, it's a little bit absurd, but you know, but it felt like we had the story in us. There was like a mood of something important going on, and we all felt it even as actors.
Ashley Michel Hoban was also on set that day, and she told me what it was like to watch these four actors perform together in this short, yet mighty, scene. She said:
The whistleblowers have their own energy to them, the three of them together, and they're wonderful. And Mandy is such a force. And I think we really [only] did a couple of takes, because she just gives that look, and that's all you needed to know. They're acknowledging each other and acknowledging their own roles. And I don't know, it was a really beautiful moment. I actually get goosebumps thinking about it; they're so good those actors.
When you have powerhouse actors like Mandy Moore from the This Is Us cast and Luke Kirby from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, you know you’re in for a treat when they all work together. And that’s what this scene was. After a whole season of waiting to see Macchiarini’s personal and professional wrongdoings addressed, this was a subtle, yet perfect way to do it.
To see the scene in question as well as the lead-up to it, you can stream Dr. Death on Peacock.
