Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne bonded over the ‘hokey pokey’ while filming dark Netflix film ‘The Good Nurse’

Oscar winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne “felt a great kinship” after working together on the Netflix thriller “The Good Nurse,” which streams Wednesday.

The two share a camaraderie that would make anyone believe they’ve been friends for years. However, they had only met socially before and appeared onscreen together for the first time in this film.

“When ‘The Danish Girl’ came out and he was wearing that darker red wig, so many people said that we looked alike. So I used to tease him a lot that he was stealing all of my parts,” Chastain laughed as she and Redmayne sat down for an interview ahead of “The Good Nurse” premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month.

Redmayne and Chastain both have young families and they all got together while filming in New York, where she lives with her husband, Gian Luca Passi de Preposulo, and children Giulietta, four, and Augustus, two. “Despite the darkness of the story, the making of this movie was one of the most enjoyable I’ve had,” said Redmayne, who is father to Iris, six, and Luke, four.

Chastain fondly shared her favourite memory of a playdate that involved doing the ‘Hokey Pokey’: “The amount of pleasure you got from doing the ‘Hokey Pokey’ …” she said. Redmayne agreed it’s his favourite thing in the world.

Based on true events, “The Good Nurse” follows Amy Loughren (Chastain), a nurse and single mother struggling with a life-threatening heart condition while working night shifts in the ICU. When Charlie Cullen (Redmayne), a quiet fellow nurse, starts at her unit, the two develop a strong friendship. However, after a series of mysterious patient deaths that point to Charlie as the prime suspect, Amy is forced to risk her life to uncover the truth.

With a screenplay by Oscar-nominated “1917” writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the movie is the first English-language film for Tobias Lindholm, who wrote and directed the Danish film “A War,” which nabbed a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nomination in 2016.

Chastain and Redmayne are actors of the highest calibre, with their performances often praised by critics and fans. Unsurprisingly, they have a similar approach to the craft. “We do a lot of research on our own before we show up. We did nursing school together for this and that was really interesting,” said Chastain.

“When I have the gift of working with an actor who’s able to be present and mindful and open, it’s a generous thing because they’re not pushing their performance on you that you’re like, ‘OK, let me try to calibrate what I’m receiving.’ It’s an ebb and flow and that’s how it works,” she added.

Redmayne said he was “astounded” by how Chastain would listen and respond in every scene such that no two takes were alike.

The California-born actor has a knack for delivering characters that move audiences and that she champions, like the titular role in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” which earned her a Best Actress Oscar, or a fictional CIA intelligence analyst in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” which also brought an Oscar nod.

With the role of Amy, Chastain wishes to acknowledge single mothers. She talked to the real Amy: “She told me that the only reason she was a night nurse at the time is because she was a single mom and didn’t want her kids to grow up without her. So she’d sleep for a few hours during the day, be with her kids and then go to work when they were asleep.

“That told me so much because, in addition to all the health difficulties she was having in needing the heart transplant and everything with Charlie that was happening, she put everything aside, always thinking about her daughters. I grew up in a home of a single mother. I think single moms are just the most incredible superheroes we have in our society that we don’t acknowledge enough because it is a great feat to not only raise children, but also provide for them and keep them safe and loved,” Chastain said.

Redmayne, who has played endearing characters like Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” and Lili Elbe in “The Danish Girl” — which earned him Oscar nominations and a win — goes against type in “The Good Nurse” as a sinister serial killer.

The London-born actor relished the opportunity to play a character that he found intriguing but for whom he didn’t have all the answers.

“I thought what was extraordinary about the story was I had no idea what I was reading as I read the script … I found him empathetic and self-deprecating and quiet, and then this reveal is unpeeled … In speaking to the real Amy, she describes it as being a dissociative quality that he had, that she only ever met the murderer Charlie once and that was at the diner, the moment when his eyes drifted.”

Chastain said it was beautiful to witness Redmayne gradually build Charlie to that dark place in the final act. “He was able to just switch and I wonder if it’s beautiful because of how he prepared the character, as he didn’t start from darkness. He started with Charlie as a human being.”

Chastain and Redmayne have been keeping busy with back-to-back projects, but they were adamant about working with Lindholm.

“It felt like we were lucky enough to be in a film directed by a man who has a vision,” Redmayne said. “He has such authority as a filmmaker that you feel like you are working for him, but then you get to dance with or improvise with one of the actors, and that feels very intimate and that’s why I got into acting, was to do that.”

Chastain said that, during the pandemic, she had time to watch a lot of foreign films, which provided the opportunity to ask herself questions: “What kind of actor do I want to be? What have I done so far? Where do I want to go now?”

“Definitely making this film was more in line with the films I like to watch but also, what I want to create and the experiences that I want to have. Sometimes the more fame you get, a director like Tobias gets nervous about pursuing you or they just assume you wouldn’t want to be part of a smaller budget film … That’s not true for either of us. We really love the collaboration.”

She added: “I’m a malleable person. I do all of my research, then I want to show up and I want to be moved. Working with an actor like Eddie and working with a director like Tobias does that … The experience I want is to be changed and to grow, and you can really only do that with other artists who are also bringing something.”

Redmayne was just as much in awe of Chastain, and her optimism and confidence. Her attitude, he said, is usually “this is going to be the best version of what it can be. In my life, like with scripted stuff, all I really hear in my head is the worst version of what it can be. So I come from a cynical point of view, and it’s disruptive and unhelpful.”

But Chastain said Redmayne has a gift for seeing people. “He cares about people and he really looks you in the eye and you feel like he sees you. I think if we all had a little bit of that, this world and society, everything we’re experiencing would be a lot different.”

Marriska Fernandes is a Toronto-based entertainment reporter and film critic. She is a freelance contributor for the Star’s Culture section. Follow her on Twitter: @marrs_fers

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