Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne is New Jersey serial killer Charles Cullen in the upcoming Netflix thriller “The Good Nurse.”
Cullen killed 29 people while working at a series of hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania over a 16-year span.
Netflix released first-look images from the movie, which also stars Oscar winner Jessica Chastain.
Chastain plays Amy Loughren, the Somerset Medical Center nurse who brought her suspicions about Cullen to police and was asked to wear a wire to collect evidence against him.
“The Good Nurse,” directed by Tobias Lindholm (”Another Round”) and written by Krysty Wilson-Cairns (”1917”), is based on the bestselling 2013 book “The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder,” by Charles Graeber.
After his arrest in 2003, Cullen, who is from West Orange, admitted to killing patients at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, where he started his nursing career in 1987, and more patients at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg and Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington. He also admitted to injecting medicine into random bags of intravenous fluid. Cullen killed 13 people at Somerset Medical Center.
The nurse told police he murdered up to 40 people.
Cullen, who used overdoses of digoxin and insulin to kill patients, also worked at Morristown Memorial Hospital as well as Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was connected with deaths at Easton Hospital in Easton, Pennsylvania; Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown; and St. Luke’s Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Cullen, 62, who has made numerous suicide attempts throughout his life, is currently at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton after being sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences (six more were added for his Pennsylvania murders).
In 2008, the families of Cullen’s victims at Warren Hospital, Somerset Medical Center and Hunterdon Medical Center who filed wrongful-death lawsuits against the hospitals reached a confidential settlement. Those facilities, along with Saint Barnabas in Livingston and St. Luke’s in Pennsylvania, paid an undisclosed sum for claims in connection with the deaths of 22 of Cullen’s victims.
The cast of “The Good Nurse” also includes Nnamdi Asomugha, Kim Dickens, Malik Yoba, Alix West Lefler and Noah Emmerich.
Redmayne, 40, won an Oscar in 2015 for playing Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything.”
Chastain, 45, won an Oscar in March for playing televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”
“The Good Nurse” is slated for a fall release on Netflix. See more photos from the film below.
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.
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