Netflix recently brought another pharmaceutical-inspired drama into its library with Chris Evans and Emily Blunt’s Pain Hustlers, a dark comedy that will definitely keep its viewers hooked from start to finish. It premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival, but it is now available to watch on the platform.
There are definitely a lot of questions brewing in the minds of viewers as to the plot of the film because, first and foremost, it is about a small company promoting fentanyl addiction. Secondly, it is based on a true-to-life story.
Netflix’s Pain Hustlers Bring Chris Evans And Emily Blunt Together
The idea came from a 2018 article by Evan Hughes for the New York Times Magazine about a company called Insys. It was founded by billionaire John Kapoor, who promoted the opioid product Subsys. It is usually given as a strong medication to treat cancer pain. The drug was a generic one, but Insys used a spray delivery system to make it look like a premium product.
Kapoor’s business became a success as he got doctors to recommend this unnecessary medication to helpless patients. He was later sentenced to imprisonment.
That was the basis for David Yates’ Pain Hustlers. He got intrigued by its story of corruption within the medical industry so he went to develop it into a small screen narrative. In his interview with Time:
“We always felt we wanted it to be as subversive and as naughty and as different as we could compared to those. Primarily we wanted to bring an audience into the issues and the opioid crisis overall. We wanted it to be crazy and anarchic and fun… By the end of the story, we wanted it to have a real heft emotionally.”
The movie is set in Florida, but in reality, the sales reps for Insys are spread all over the United States, and they perform in a much bigger operation. It focuses on Emily Blunt’s character, Liza Drake, a single mother who ends up working in the corporation. Yates described Blunt’s character:
“It was made up of young people who were often in over their head and they were hungry for success, and a lot of that is embodied in her.”
Meanwhile, Chris Evans’ character Pete Brenner meets Liza Drake at a strip club at the time she was about to lose her job.
David Yates Shares His Approach To Making Pain Hustlers
In his interview with Entertainment Weekly, David Yates revealed what made him want to tackle this issue in the pharmaceutical industry. He stated:
“I’ve always been fascinated by salespeople and what they do and the moral side of the pharma industry when they’re hustling to make money.”
He noted that many parts of the movie remain faithful to what the original article stated, and he only added Liza Drake to create a connection with the audience:
“Elements of the story are obviously consistent to what Evan Hughes documented in his book, but we created Liza Drake, we created the relationship she has with her daughter, Phoebe, just as a way of allowing the audience to connect with a single character and carry us through the story.”
He remarked that the movie is not the entire Insys narrative in detail. It was only inspired by the controversy to bring awareness to the people.
