Dr. Death is a monstrous character
Canadian actor Jackson says playing surgeon was difficult but rewarding
Of the many roles Joshua Jackson has played over a prolific TV and movie career, you’d be hard pressed to think of one that could be described as monstrous.
Maybe you remember him as the plucky Charlie in the “Mighty Ducks” movie franchise or charmer Pacey in “Dawson’s Creek.” Or you saw him as Peter Bishop in “Fringe,” the wronged husband in “The Affair,” a devoted family man in “Little Fires Everywhere” or a lawyer for one of the Central Park Five in “When They See Us.”
But the Vancouver-born actor readily agrees that Christopher Duntsch, the real-life American surgeon known as Dr. Death for maiming or killing 33 of his patients, is a monstrous character.
“He’s a terrible human being. He’s just an awful, awful human being who was allowed to, over and over again, radically alter people’s lives who had entrusted him to help make them better,” Jackson said in a Zoom interview about the man he plays in the Peacock miniseries “Dr. Death,” making its Canadian debut on Showcase on Sunday.
Jackson, 43, knew nothing about Duntsch before series creator Patrick Macmanus (“Marco Polo,” “Homecoming”) approached him about the show. So he listened to the 2018 true crime podcast that inspired the series and “I just could not wrap my head around how this happened and how this man had happened.”
Viewers will likely find themselves wondering the same thing.
The drama shows how Duntsch, who turned to medicine when his desire to be a football player didn’t pan out, was allowed to graduate from the University of Tennessee with an MD and PhD, despite not having completed the requisite number of surgical hours.
And how, after moving to Dallas, Texas, he hopscotched from one hospital or clinic to another with a clean record, despite the trail of botched spinal surgeries he left behind: sliced arteries; screws inserted into soft tissue instead of bone; operating on the wrong vertebra; mistaking a piece of muscle for a tumour; patients losing massive amounts of blood; leaving a sponge inside a patient.
He left his best friend, Jerry Summers, a quadriplegic after what should have been a simple neck surgery. Summers died this year of an infection related to his paralysis. Two other patients died shortly after their operations.
Duntsch, who is portrayed as having an ego so gargantuan that he compared himself to a god, blamed others for the mistakes: nurses, anesthesiologists, other doctors who were in the OR.
He eventually lost his licence to practise medicine in Texas. But the drama shows him applying to practise in Colorado shortly before he’s arrested and charged with aggravated assault and causing serious bodily injury to an elderly person. He was convicted in 2017 and is serving a life sentence.
For Jackson, Duntsch is more than just a villain.
“I found this man awful but compelling in his awfulness … the outcome of what he did is so outlandishly bad that my initial instinct was to want him to be a simple villain, for him to be a psychopath and, because he’s not, he’s much more compelling and much more scary.
“If he was just some lunatic who liked hurting people it would be much less scary, because then you just think to yourself, ‘Well, if we just weed out the psychopath then we’ll be OK’ … but he is a human and that to me makes him much, much scarier and much more compelling because there’s no simple fix for him not happening again.”
That flawed humanity was key to Jackson accepting the role.
“I’ve had opportunities to play villains before that were not really all that compelling, because just a straight bad guy to me is not all that interesting,” he said. Playing Duntsch “was at times very difficult, but ultimately it was a very rewarding experience because it gave me an opportunity to get into something that I just haven’t had the opportunity to do before.”
I ask if he had any trepidation about playing someone so unlikeable.
Not about how people will receive the role, he said. “I try not to concern myself too much while I’m doing it with sort of the end of it all. But it took me some time to get past my own judgment, frankly, to wrap my head around being inside of his psychology or his emotional framework.”
He did eventually find some sympathy for Duntsch. “When I look at the tragedy that is his life and the missed opportunity that is his existence, I feel empathy for any human that is a life gone wrong.”
Jackson figures if Duntsch had stuck to the research side of medicine, “it’s very possible we’d be talking about him today like we talked about Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. He is a brilliant mind, and he did have a radical and revolutionary insight into the use of stem cells.”
But once he made the “critical error” of believing he was also brilliant at surgery, he was aided and abetted by a system “for whom he was a very potentially valuable cog in that system and so they also wanted to believe that fiction about him, even when the evidence to the contrary started to pile up.”
Beyond being a cautionary tale about systemic failure, Jackson said the series also sends a message about misplaced trust.
“Why do we trust the Christopher Duntsches of the world? Why are we so culturally acclimated to seeing, you know, a tall white man with a degree and assuming that he must be a decent person?” he said.
“We have traditionally had a very limited view of the people who are deserving of the benefit of the doubt. So what I would hope people would take out of it is to just examine our cultural biases.”