[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Season 2 of Dr. Death.]

The Big Picture

Mandy Moore deliberately chose a role different from “This Is Us” and found playing a capable woman who becomes vulnerable fascinating. Edgar Ramírez believes his character is a pathological narcissist who never admits responsibility for his actions. The surgery scenes in “Dr. Death” required technical advisors and doubles to execute the intricate procedures.

The second season of the Peacock series Dr. Death tells the story of Paolo Macchiarini (Edgar Ramírez), a charming Italian surgeon who garnered attention and fame for innovative operations that were meant to take regenerative medicine to a whole new level, but instead had shocking and tragic consequences. Praised for his groundbreaking synthetic trachea transplants performed at Sweden’s Karolinska University Hospital, Macchiarini used a plastic replica windpipe soaked in the patient’s own stem cells with the idea that it would help keep their body from rejecting it. The spotlight shone on him caught the interest of investigative journalist Benita Alexander (Mandy Moore) who wanted to do a story on him, but then found herself caught up in who Macchiarini presented himself to be.

During this interview with Collider, co-stars Ramírez and Moore talked about having been fans of the first season, the appeal of what Season 2 was trying to accomplish, what can make someone susceptible to charms and manipulation, the relationship dynamic between Paolo and Benita, why Macchiarini was like a kid playing within a fantasy, having technical advisors who also worked as doubles for the surgery scenes, and how cathartic it is to just let go and scream. They also revealed that they always get nervous at the start of a new project, and the beauty of trusting yourself and your co-star.

Dr. Death Release Date July 15, 2021 Creator Patrick Macmanus Rating TV-MA Seasons 2

After ‘This Is Us,’ Mandy Moore Wanted A Very Different Challenge
Image via Peacock

Collider: Mandy, this is pretty much the first project that people will be seeing you in since the end of This Is Us. Did the success of that show and the role that you became so well known for in that influence or change the next step you wanted to take? Was it very deliberate to choose a character like this, because she is so very different?

MANDY MOORE: Yeah. That’s the fun of being an actor, if you have the good fortune to be able to pick and choose the things you’re a part of. I was so anxious and excited to take on something that felt very different from This Is Us. So, yeah, it’s a deliberate choice in finding a challenge like that. We were both such fans of Season 1, so knowing the scale of what Season 2 was trying to accomplish, it felt very lux. It was very international, but it was also something I had never really dipped my toe in before. I loved being able to play this very capable, brilliant woman who was so adept at her job, and she was a single mom, and she was just really firing on all cylinders. How someone like that could find herself in a position to being so vulnerable and susceptible to Edgar’s character’s manipulation and ultimately betrayal was really fascinating to me.

Did you answer that question for yourself, as far as what it was that made her so susceptible to that?

MOORE: I could never imagine, other than as an actor. I had to find my own answers. I think a lot of it was that she found herself in this position of truly being a single parent, having just lost her partner and what that meant in her life. I don’t think she ever imagined that she would be entitled to this kind of fairy tale. These sorts of things didn’t happen to someone like her. She really had every other box checked in her life. Why should she also then get to win the lottery and have this world-renowned surgeon focus all his attention and his gaze on her? This is someone that had been in rooms with very impressive people before. But for some reason, this man and all of his charm offensive really worked on her. When it’s someone who is masterful at what they do, in terms of this degree of manipulation and con, as Paolo Macchiarini clearly was able to be, not just on the personal side, but on the professional side, as well, there’s no denying it. When someone like that sets their sights on you, you can’t escape that. It’s no one’s fault. You’re just in the cross-hairs. That’s just as much as there is to it.

Edgar, what did you think of this guy? How do you think he rationalized what he was doing? Do you think he had any feelings or empathy when it came to what he was doing to people?

EDGAR RAMÍREZ: As Mandy pointed out, these are my answers, as an actor, and my theories. If my character ever rationalized something, it was within the framework of his own fantasy and beliefs, so there was no rationalization, in relation to the objective reality. In the objective reality, everything that he was doing was the work of a con artist and just a web of lies. The way I tried to approach this character, it was almost, in the most twisted way, a kid playing within a fantasy. Kids don’t lie, they fantasize, which is different. All the elements within that fantasy are fictional figments of their imagination, but their interaction with those elements is completely real, so the commitment to those elements is real. I think that’s what my character does. He commits in a very real way to those elements that are clearly fictional because he’s making them up all the time.

There’s no moment in our story, in our show, with introspection. There is no moment where there’s an admission of responsibility or any self-accountability. That doesn’t exist. From an acting standpoint, it was very interesting to me to play a character where, even at the very severity of the facts when all the house of cards is falling before his eyes, there’s never an admission of responsibility. That level of self-imposed blackness is something that, from a human point of view, is so interesting, to say the least. There was never an a-ha moment where he went, “I may have done something bad against others.” Everything that he was doing was positive. He was always operating in positives. That is very scary to me, and that’s my own theory, as well. This is just the doings of a total pathological narcissist, and there’s no way around narcissism. It is a pathology, so there’s no way to reason. There’s never a ration a rationalization when it comes down to narcissism.

Edgar Ramírez Wasn’t Caught Up in the Technicalities of the ‘Dr. Death’ Surgery Scenes

What was it like to shoot the surgery scenes? Was there a different level of technicality and staging to all of that?

RAMÍREZ: Not really, no. I had the experience of playing a surgeon in the past, in a movie (An Open Heart) that I made in France with Juliette Binoche, a few years ago. I remember I focused so much on the technicalities and I lost something in the process. In the end, we are recreating all those operations. In our show, the operation rooms and the surgeries are part of the dramatic journey of the character. They’re not technical. Whatever happens there pushes the conflict forward. So this time, I wanted to really focus on the acting work and the dramatic work and not get too caught up in the technicalities. We had the best advisors to help us and to double us. When you see those very skilled knots and manipulation of the technical tools and all that, that wasn’t me. That was doubles.

Mandy, there’s a moment after Benita discovers Paolo’s family that she screams underwater, which is a moment where the audience can really sympathize with her. Did you actually have to shoot that underwater?

MOORE: Yeah, we did. We shot that in a pool and in the ocean in Barcelona. Me walking into the ocean was real, and then we shot the actual underwater part in a pool.

What was it like to pull off that moment?

MOORE: It was so cathartic. I feel like I was screaming for Benita and for myself. It was just a combination of things. It felt really good.

Mandy Moore and Edgar Ramírez Are Always Nervous About Starting a New Project
Image via Peacock

When you guys do projects, do you get nervous on the first day that you start something? How do you work through that?

MOORE: It’s like the first day of school, always, every time. If you’re not nervous, then I think something wrong.

RAMÍREZ: Yeah, me too.

MOORE: I don’t know. I try to reframe it as, I’m just excited. Nerves are a good thing. They move things forward.

RAMÍREZ: They keep you on your toes.

MOORE: It means you care. And then, you sink into a groove. You’re never not thinking about what you’re doing. You’re never so relaxed and calm that you would completely forget about where you are and what you’re doing. You can be involved and invested and engaged in a scene, but I’m never so out to lunch that I don’t recognize, “Oh, yeah, okay, this is the first take of the day. Let’s go for it.”

I’m sure it helps when you actually trust yourselves.

MOORE: Yeah, you trust yourself and you trust each other.

RAMÍREZ: Which was something that, for us, was so beautiful and miraculous. Mandy and I clicked right away, and we were in each other’s trust right away. That made the navigation of these very bumpy, choppy waters so easy. Once we got the rhythm of it, I was never nervous about shooting a scene with her. I was excited. It was like, “What are we going to discover today? How are we going to get in there?” But I wasn’t nervous anymore because we trusted each other so much.

Dr. Death is available to stream at Peacock. Check out the trailer for Season 2:

Watch on Peacock