He’s taken on the 2000 presidential election and the rise and fall of Sarah Palin, but nothing could prepare Danny Strong for what he’d come up against with Dopesick.

The Emmy-winning screenwriter of HBO films Game Change and Recount is behind Hulu’s upcoming ambitious, enraging limited series about the origins and explosion of the opioid epidemic in the U.S. Told from various perspectives, the drama weaves different timelines together but begins with Purdue Pharma’s disingenuous marketing and production of OxyContin—the drug which transformed the treatment of pain globally and which, in its deceptively addictive nature, has ravaged communities across the country. 

It’s told from various perspectives: a doctor (Michael Keaton) being pushed to prescribe the drug; a young coal miner (Kaitlyn Dever) who starts taking it to deal with the pain of on-the-job injuries; the U.S. attorneys (Peter Sarsgaard and John Hoogenakker) and DEA agent (Rosario Dawson) investigating its effects; and even the Sacklers—whose family members own Purdue. Dopesick’s story begins in the mid-’90s and covers years. The real story is still ongoing, though: Within the past month, Purdue dissolved, with the Sacklers agreeing to pay $4.5 billion to settle. In other words, there’s been a lot of material for Strong to sift through—not least the book by Beth Macy on which his series is loosely based. Macy serves as a writer on the series as well. 

Also known for his steady acting career, having played key roles on everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Mad Men, Strong bolsters his behind-the-camera bona fides with Dopesick, premiering October 13. The project arrives at a fresh moment: He’s directing (alongside fellow E.P. Barry Levinson) as well as writing here, and is coming off of Fox’s Empire, his first TV-series producing gig. In confronting the story of Purdue and the epidemic it helped wrought, Strong tells Vanity Fair that he faced unprecedented intimidation tactics, employed a narrative structure unlike any he’s used before, and struggled to keep up with a rapidly evolving scandal. “The story never ends,” he laments. And he’s still in postproduction on Dopesick. He took a brief break from finishing the series for a conversation, over Zoom, about all that and more.

Vanity Fair: The series is quite different from the book, which I liked a lot. How did you encounter it and decide to adapt it?

Danny Strong: It didn’t start with the book for me. I was approached by John Goldwyn to write and direct a movie about the opioid crisis, and after researching it, I thought, Oh, this should be a limited series, this is way too big for just a movie. I came up with this whole pitch, which is what the show is. Then I went and I sold that pitch to 20th, my studio. Then the sister studio at the same company, Fox 21, not knowing that I had sold this pitch, went and bought the book Dopesick in a bidding war.

I read about it on Deadline! I was like, “What?” I read that they bought this book, and they were in a bad position—I had a pitch ready to go and they had a wonderful book, but it could take six months, a year, two years to find a writer and a take, to the point where you have a pitch ready to go. So they asked me if I’d team up with them. I read the book and I loved the book.

It all starts on Deadline, I guess.

That’s why none of the characters in the show are in the book. That’s why [Keaton’s] Dr. Finnix and even the Sacklers, the way that we’re with the Sacklers…didn’t come from the book. That was my take before I knew the book existed. Welcome to Hollywood.

So you go into this with a story you want to tell, and you get this book. How does that expand what you’re doing? How does it change your conception of what the story is?

It just deepened it. Beth came on board; she was in the writers room. She had interviewed so many people, and she was just a great ally contributor. For me, when I had done my initial research—Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker article, there was an Esquire article, and then there had already been two books, Painkiller and Dreamland—the more I read, the more I was shocked by the story. I found it not only incredibly disturbing, I thought that there was a bigger story here: the failure of government institutions to oversee and regulate the companies that they’re there to regulate. The fact that there were these two active investigations, that the U.S. attorney and his assistant U.S. attorney [were] putting a case together and that there was a DEA agent trying to stop them, made me think, Oh, this can be more than just a depressing opioid story. There’s quite an exciting investigation going on here.

That was what surprised me about it: the energy of the show, and particularly those story lines you mentioned. It’s also moving between many different timelines. Can you talk a little bit about navigating all that and how you found your narrative there?

That was risky, doing it like that. First and foremost, I was most interested in the origin story. I found [it] quite Machiavellian. Then there was this U.S. attorney and their case. Their investigation began in 2002; the case settled in 2007. 

So I had all these things that I wanted to do, but they were in different timelines. So what do you do? Do you do it linear, or do you do something that is going in and out of time? You’re investigating something in a present-day timeline, as you’re seeing the crime being committed in the past, and it’s all going back and forth. The biggest fear of it was that it was going to be confusing and not work…but then there are times where it’s quite compelling to all of a sudden jump ahead or jump behind based on a piece of information that we’ve just come to understand in a different timeline. It was a lot of me telling Hulu, “It’s going to be great.” Then I go back to my computer, like, “Oh, god. I hope that works.”

How did you work with Beth, specifically? I know you co-wrote a few episodes together.

She was a first-time person in the writer’s room. She had never done this before. It was not dissimilar [for me] to the process of running a TV show. Now in the case of Beth, because she was a real expert on the issue and she’s a fantastic journalist, it would go to this other place where we kept uncovering stuff throughout the process and new information would come to Beth, and then sometimes Beth and I would go do interviews together with sources—information or documents would get leaked to her or leaked to me. There was a little bit of a journalistic quality to it, where Beth went from one of my writers to a partner on that. I called us Woodward and Bernstein, except she’s Woodward and I’m Bernstein’s incompetent cousin, Sid, who’s just running around trying to help. [Laughs]

You’ve dramatized plenty of high-profile, fairly recent true stories in your career. What’s the balance, for you, between getting things right and dramatic license?

Aaron Sorkin has this phrase that I think is so perfect, where he says, “It’s not a photograph, it’s a painting.” That’s what we’re up to here. This isn’t a documentary, it’s definitely a work of art—which I hope doesn’t sound too pretentious, but that’s what it is. At the same time, it’s one that is quite accurate and one that even in dramatization, there is a universal truth to what you’re doing so that it’s fair, it’s appropriate. It may not be exactly what happened, but oftentimes it doesn’t matter exactly what happened. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to capture the universal truth of the event that you’re dramatizing. 

Sometimes in dramatization, it ends up more truthful than if you were to actually have portrayed the scene exactly as it was. I’ve had a number of real-life people on different projects tell me that. Like, “God, your script for Recount was more accurate than any of the books that were written about the recount, except those books are 100% truthful and you’re making stuff up.” But that dramatization captures the spirit and the energy of what was going on more so than these nonfiction books.

What kind of pushback did you receive from the types of people depicted in this, and how does it compare to what you’d experienced with stuff like Game Change and Recount?

There were intimidation tactics early.

What’s early? 

Well, normally any blowback I’ve received on a project is when it comes out. Or the week before it comes out. That’s when, in the case of Game Change, Sarah Palin’s aides held a big press conference a week before the movie came out and attacked it. They were attacking something they hadn’t seen. That happened with Recount, too, where Warren Christopher attacked it in The New York Times before it came out and before he’d seen it. In both cases, I thought they were big unforced errors. But regardless, that’s been the norm…. For [Dopesick], I saw posters of me, Beth Macy, and Barry Levinson with devil horns, and it was like a fake advertisement for a movie in which we’re villains. Then they took me out and they put Michael Keaton in. I’m like, “Whoa, I’m not big enough to get attacked?” [Laughs]

Where did you see these?

On Twitter. They felt coordinated and like they were trying to look like they were grassroots, but that they weren’t. I found out there’s a term for it, astroturf, which I had never heard before. Fake grassroots campaigns. So then I reached out to Andrew Kolodny, who is one of the foremost experts on the opioid crisis and on opioid abuse disorder. I sent him the ad with me in it and he’s like, “Oh, I’ll one-up you.” He sent me an ad right back with him in it that was identical.

I was told not to use the word bullying, but that’s what it feels like to me. But I’m not using it. But that’s what it felt like, these tactics. I found them all very clumsy. The points that they were always trying to make were ridiculous…. The statement of facts that they plead guilty to are outrageous. They just keep acting as if they did nothing wrong, even though they keep pleading. 

Right, the other element to this that’s interesting is this news cycle is still unfolding. You must be, I imagine, paying attention to that to some extent as well.

The story never ends, and it feels like they always get away with it. They just always get away. They have been publicly shamed in a way that is staggering. I don’t know any family or individual in corporate America that has gotten the publicity and the backlash [they’ve gotten].

I wanted to ask about your depiction of the Sacklers. This is one of the most hated families in the country, and you allocate Richard, played by Michael Stuhlbarg, some real narrative space. Having written about real people in the past in a way that has gotten attention, something like Game Change—does having gone through this before inform the way you approach these people?

Yeah, definitely. With everything I write, I learn more, and I hopefully make less mistakes than I did the time before. It’s always a learning process. With Sarah Palin, I was able to interview a whole bunch of people that had a lot of positive things to say about her and about being with her during that experience of that campaign. I also was able to interview a whole bunch of people that were with her during that campaign that hated her—to get this wide swath of anecdotes and information. Then Sarah Palin wrote her own book about it, so I got her point of view, more in-depth than probably if I’d interviewed her. There was so much there that I could draw from to try to do the best I could to portray what really happened, when simultaneously telling the larger story of this larger Pygmalion story, and what else I wanted to say about elections.

This was very different, because Richard Sackler is so loathed by so many people, by the people I interviewed…. One person I interviewed talked about his dog and said it was the only time you ever saw that he even had a heart. That was someone that spent years with him. So the challenge for me was, how do I go beyond that? What’s really going on? What’s motivating him? People are not villains in their own story, they’re the heroes of their story—and often people that others perceive as villains usually see themselves as victims. 

You did mention, so I’m curious: Are there any past mistakes that you particularly look back on now?

All I do is think about them. Not obsessively, but if Game Change pops into my head, or Recount, or any of them, I’ll think about what I did wrong. It’s so sad. Because they turned out great, but all that I do is go to, “Oh, I fucked that up and I fucked that up.” But I don’t really want to share.

Fair enough.

We’ll keep that between me and my internal Iago.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity

CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect the Sacklers agreed to pay $4.5 billion under the settlement, they were not ordered to. 

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