“The Patient” adds a horrific wrinkle to the patient/therapist trope, being parodied and parodyed in big-screen comedies (“Where’s Bob?”, “Analyzing This”) and TV series (“The Sopranos,” “In Therapy”) Analysis”).
This 10 part FX seriesExclusive premiere August 30 gourdAround Sam Fortner (Domhall Gleason), a patient with dad problems, and his therapist Dr. Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), he is mourning the recent death of his wife and his estrangement from his grown son.
On the surface, this all seems typical until Sam kidnaps Alan, locks him in his basement, reveals himself as the strangler known as the “John Doe Killer” – and asks Alan to heal his OCD…otherwise.
“It’s an interesting proposition,” Gleason, 39, told the Post. “[Series creators] Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg Their idea was to make Sam…not as relatable as possible, but as normal as possible. One big thing though – he wants to get better, but if he’s really empathetic and there’s a quick way to deal with it all, it’s to turn himself in, and he didn’t choose to do that.
“His selfishness is at the heart of what he’s doing, but he’s working on it,” he said. “I think it’s relevant to a lot of people; everyone is selfish, and most people are trying to be better people — but that pushes it to the extreme.”
That’s an understatement.Alan’s legcuffs confine him to a short stretch around the bed he sleeps in the spacious basement, decorated with ’70s decor, but it’s close enough to the chair he sits across from Sam, who drinks a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee during their mandatory treatment. The monster hiding beneath Sam’s kind-hearted veneer is quickly revealed, while Alan simultaneously analyzes his own mistakes – and his shattered family dynamics – while living in a perpetual nightmare that will kill him if he can’t complete the Twisted Killer’s plans. Will be Sam’s next victim. Both Gleason and Carell are engaging, tense, and adept in their respective roles.
“There’s a dramatic engine from start to finish, how much do you believe Sam does – obviously, he’s what he says he is, but it’s not an aspect of him that appears throughout the episode at once,” Gerry Sen said, alluding to scenes in Sam’s job as a county health inspector and several other outside scenes. “You see Sam has tempers, he has struggles, you see him screwing up in a lot of ways…but his lack of control, and the horror of what that is…it’s buried under the dialogue and covered up. “
Irish-born Gleason (Bill Weasley in the Harry Potter series“Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker”) – who adopted an American accent for Sam – was passionate about working with Carell.
“Steve was special. Anyone who met him [in his 2015 Oscar-nominated role] exist ‘Fox Catcher’ Will see the depth of what he can achieve,” he said. “Obviously he’s amazing as a comedian, but he’s also extraordinary as a theatre actor, and he makes it a pleasure. Those scenes are hard and you plan it hard, but he makes it easy in all the right ways. I could talk about him forever. ”
This isn’t the first time Gleason has played the killer. “I’m a cannibal with an interest in young people and I play the worst of the worst, but it’s just for a scene in a John Michael McDonald movie [2014’s ‘Calvary’] across from my father [Emmy-winning actor Brendan Gleeson]There was one trip where my dad was absolutely amazing,” he said. “I also played a killer in a movie called ‘The Kitchen,’ so I played the killer.
“It’s a weird place in your head,” he said. “There were serial killers in general, and then there was Sam. For me, he had an absolutely huge blind spot, and he didn’t understand there was an easy way to fix it. He never really thought about it because his ego was so huge , his selfishness is so great that he can’t imagine…there is a way to stop other people’s suffering.
“With serial killers, I mistakenly believed that there was a mystique built around them in the public consciousness,” he said. “They want to control people as much as possible, and in a way, it’s not fascinating, it’s just terrifying.
“That’s how they should be viewed.”
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