‘Pure Genius’ surgeon lives on the (cutting) edge

IN 1989, Dermot Mulroney played a terminally ill AIDS patient in the landmark movie “Longtime Companion,” about a young man who died within days of being admitted to the hospital.

Mulroney remembers one scene from the movie in which he timed his breathing to a ventilator, and how it influenced his newest character — Dr. Walter Wallace, a brilliant surgeon with a checkered past in “Pure Genius.”

“It is probably the most emotionally impactful scene I’ve ever appeared in,” Mulroney says. “I can’t talk about [‘Longtime Companion’] without getting a lump in my throat.”

In “Pure Genius,” Wallace is not only on the other side of the hospital bed, but is also on the cutting-edge of modern medicine, leading the technological revolution as chief of staff at Bunker Hill, a hospital in Silicon Valley founded by James Bell (Augustus Prew), a Mark Zuckerberg-type billionaire.

Mulroney, 53, describes an upcoming episode where an Afghan war veteran has his sight restored through technology. “We are reconnecting the optic nerve and circumventing the damaged eye,” he says. “It would have been impossible to make this show even last year. It’s only now that the things we’re putting into the show are less than a year old. That’s what’s cool about it.”

“Pure Genius” is the brainchild of Emmy-winning executive producer Jason Katims, better known for gritty emotional dramas such as “Parenthood” and “Friday Night Lights” than ventures into speculative medicine. Katims met with doctors from the CedarsSinai digital health department in Beverly Hills to develop the show’s technology.

In “Pure Genius,” Bell endows the hospital with gadgets, gizmos and other technological wonders — including an ingestible fetal monitor — that can diagnose medical emergencies from afar and even help families communicate with patients in a coma.

“There are people who are developing that brain-to-brain communication. It’s not gotten to the point of sophistication that you see on the show,” says Katims who allows that “Pure Genius” does have elements of fantasy. “Everything that we do is real, or is about to be real. A lot of [the medicine] exists only in theory or in clinical trials. We’re using that as fodder for our storytelling.

“We’re speculating what will happen in a decade or two from now.”

In Thursday’s premiere, Bell invites Wallace to Bunker Hill and pulls out all the bells and whistles, introducing him to a team of telegenic millennials who bring him up to speed on how lives are saved when their medical crystal balls can show ways to repair what seems irreparable to the naked eye. Through technology, Wallace is able to perform life-saving surgeries once thought impossible.

Mulroney is hoping for a similar revival with his career, a hodgepodge of hit films including “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” more recent efforts such as “August: Osage County” and a three-episode arc on “Friends.”

“I’ve been chasing [work], job-by-job, for 30 years,” he says. “Nobody ever put me in a sequel or a franchise. Nobody ever hired me twice or advocated for me. I’ve had to steal, fight and beat out other people to get every single one of those parts.

“So now I’m mid-career, mid-life and I get to do something different. So it means a lot to me that I have this opportunity where I can develop a character, week by week, while exploring innovative ways of helping people through a dramatic narrative.

“I’d be crazy not to cherish this opportunity.”