After six seasons at the front of This Is Us, Mandy Moore is embracing some darker fare with her new role in Peacock‘s Dr. Death.
In the second season of the anthology series — which follows up the Joshua Jackson-led first season with a new cast and new plot — Moore stars alongside Edgar Ramírez in the real-life story of Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a charming surgeon renowned for his innovative operations. She plays investigative journalist Benita Alexander, who approaches the doctor for a story, kicking off a whirlwind romance between the two as Macchiarini’s dark secrets begin to unfold.
Moore had given birth to her second child just a month before she got the pitch for the project, admitting she “was not thinking about work” and the ask to move from Los Angeles to New York for the shoot felt “like a heavy lift.”
“And then of course, I read the first two episodes and was like, ‘Dang it, I really like this,’” she told The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s L.A. premiere on Thursday. “So you make it work, and I feel incredibly lucky that I’m in a position where I was able to bring my baby with me, because I know that is a luxury that a lot of people don’t have. So I got to have him with me and work, it was the best of both worlds.”
Moore also explained that the move from This Is Us to Dr. Death marked “an intentional tone shift. It was like, ‘What am I going to do to really shake it up for me personally?’ You kind of couldn’t make more of a left turn than something like this, and I want to keep making left turns. It was a fun challenge and I think that’s what you’re sort of looking for as an actor — what can I do that’s just absolutely, wildly different?”
Season two from showrunner Ashley Michel Hoban is based on Wondery podcast Dr. Death: Miracle Man, which Moore used as research, and said she was excited to explore “the idea of destigmatizing what it means to be a victim and ultimately how empowering it is to find your autonomy, to reclaim your story.”
Ramírez said that on top of the medical component of the show, “the fact that there is a love story at the very core of the piece makes it very unexpected, very unique. It creates a different kind of tension, because you are falling in love and the audience is on a journey with these two characters who are falling in love, but it’s almost like falling in love on a train that you know is going to crash.”
And in playing a surgeon who experimented on his patients and ruined many lives in the process, Ramírez said that strangely the role was not hard to shake off after the shoot because of the doctor’s distorted mindset.
“There is never a moment where he admits of any wrongdoing, and that to me is terrifying,” he explained. “That mental space where I was completely positive, in the sense that he thought he was doing the best for humanity, doing the best for the woman he claimed to love, so I just have to put myself in this fantasy.”
The series also comes out just a few weeks after Netflix released its Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife docuseries on the same story, but showrunner Ashley Michel Hoban said there isn’t any competition.
“Any attention on the story is great for patient advocacy and for whistleblowing in general; across the board, anytime we can have more eyes on the story is a good thing,” she said, joking, “You get to meet our whistleblowers because those are just on Peacock. No one else has them, they are ours!”
Dr. Death starts streaming on Peacock Dec. 21.
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