Joshua Jackson (‘Dr. Death’) on the impacts of playing a monster: ‘You’re leaving those scars on yourself and they stick with you’ [Exclusive Video Interview]
“I don’t think that I realized quite how heavy it was weighing on me until on my final day I woke up and I literally remember feeling a hundred pounds lighter,” Joshua Jackson reveals about the toll that playing the titular sociopath in “Dr. Death” had on him. “I was weary in my bones,” he shares.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that as much as I’ve tried to keep a conscious psychological separation, that’s a conscious choice. Your body doesn’t know the difference between an active emotion and an emotion. If you’re feeling it, you’re feeling it. So if, if you’re going through this emotional journey, some part of your subconscious being is actually experiencing that fear, that anger, all of those things. And in some ways it’s good because you’re getting it out of your system. But in some ways, you know, you’re leaving those scars on yourself and they stick with you.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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In “Dr. Death,” Jackson stars as Dr. Christopher Duntsch, a Texas neurosurgeon who gained notoriety after he was convicted of gross malpractice for permanently mutilating 31 of his patients and killing two of them during surgery. The crime drama was created by Patrick Macmanus, based on the first season of the podcast of the same name that focuses on egregious cases of medical malpractice. The limited series co-stars Christian Slater, Alec Baldwin, Grace Gummer, AnnaSophia Robb, Kelsey Grammer and Carrie Preston, and premiered on Peacock in July last year to critical acclaim and strong word-of-mouth, scoring an impressive “fresh” rating of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Jackson recently scoring a Critics Choice nomination for Best Limited Series/TV Movie Actor.
While Macmanus and his team of writers establish early on that Duntsch displays traits that are typical for malignant narcissists, the series endeavors to paint a more nuanced picture of the man, as Jackson portrays him with a charismatic and casual charm that is unexpectedly unsettling. “That’s exactly the intention,” Jackson explains. “I don’t think he’s a psychopath. I don’t think he was injuring without regard to the pain and suffering that he was causing. I think, in my unqualified opinion, he falls more into the description you would have of a sociopath,” he says.
For Jackson, it was more interesting and ultimately disturbing to have the audience almost weirdly relate to Duntsch until it eventually becomes clear that he is beyond redemption as he fails to come to terms with the pain and suffering he has wrought. “If I was able to do my job, the scarier version of him is the one where you don’t know, because he could be your friend or that guy that you met, or the guy you went to college with, or your brother or your boyfriend, or he should feel like somebody that is recognizable. And if that’s true and he’s also capable of doing these unspeakably terrible things,” he says, “and the psychological wherewithal to push through that in service of his own ego, then I think that is a much more terrifying character and human.”
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