While its title may be The Good Nurse, Netflix’s upcoming thriller is about someone who is anything but good. Set to premiere this October, the film is based on a real-life serial killer, Charles Cullen, and is an adaptation of Charles Graeber’s 2013 book The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder.
The film is from BAFTA-nominated director Tobias Lindholm (Mindhunter, The Hunt) and Oscar-nominated writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917) and stars Jessica Chastain (It Chapter Two) and Fantastic Beast’s Eddie Redmayne.
In The Good Nurse, based on a true story, an infamous caregiver is implicated in the deaths of hundreds of hospital patients. Jessica Chastain’s character, a fellow nurse, risks her life to stop him from killing again.
The true story: In reality, Charles Cullen has been implicated in around 300 -yes, you read that right, 300 – deaths and earned himself the title of “Angel of Death.”
Born in 1960, after leaving the Navy, the real Charles Cullen spent sixteen years killing while working as a nurse. He confessed to police that in 1988 he took his first victim at Saint Barnabas Medical Center. After murdering several patients by injecting medicines like Insulin into their IV bags, he took a job at Warren Hospital where he killed elderly patients by injecting digoxin, a heart medication, into their IVs. After hopping from job to job at nine hospitals rumors began to surface. In 2003, when a patient suddenly died of low blood sugar the police were contacted and an investigation ensued. On December 12, 2003, he was arrested and confessed to 40 murders, but police believe the number is actually much higher. On March 6, 2006, he was convicted and sentenced to 11 life sentences.
Watch The Good Nurse now on Netflix.
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