Inside Mandy Moore and Edgar Ramírez’s Dangerous Romance in ‘Dr. Death’
First Published on VanityFair.com
The two Emmy-nominated actors take us inside Peacock’s harrowing tale of medical malpractice—and the twisted love affair at its center.
For a few days while filming Dr. Death’s second season, Edgar Ramírez showed up to set visibly emotional. Production had reached the scenes in which Hannah Warren, a two-year-old girl born without a windpipe and nearing death, prepares to receive a synthetic-trachea transplant performed by Ramírez’s Dr. Paolo Macchiarini. A thoracic surgeon developing what the medical world began hyping as a groundbreaking procedure, Dr. Macchiarini was not, in truth, a miracle worker. His procedure worked off research that would later lead to a disgraced reputation and a conviction for gross assault against three of his patients. (He was sentenced to more than two years in prison.) His work proved the exact opposite of lifesaving.
“Edgar came onto set those days really upset, inhabiting a character that he knew had a life in his hands,” says showrunner Ashley Michel Hoban. Ramírez remembers that period too: “That was hard. It was hard to imagine that someone would go that far.”
Based on the Wondery podcast, the anthologized Dr. Death broke out as a critical hit in 2021 with the story of neurosurgeon Christopher Duntsch (Joshua Jackson). Both seasons of the series confront that gruesome question head-on: How can a doctor so dangerously deceive their own patients, and how can the medical system surrounding them let them get away with it? The first season, overseen by series creator Patrick Macmanus (who remains an EP on season two), introduced that question on a more intimate scale. The second, premiering on Peacock on December 21, thrillingly expands the inquiry, examining Dr. Macchiarini’s rise within the global medical world. We meet him in Stockholm circa 2011, where he’s a visiting professor at the Karolinska Institute; his first procedure in the show is completed in Illinois. He’s depicted less as a “mustache-twisty villain,” as Hoban puts it, and more as a nuanced antihero.
This comes through chiefly in the season’s unexpected anchor, the troubled new romance between Dr. Macchiarini and broadcast journalist Benita Alexander (Mandy Moore), which was previously documented in a 2016 Vanity Fair feature. Portrayed on the series as a divorced single mother thriving in her producing post at NBC, Alexander begins work on a story about Dr. Macchiarini and specifically his impending operation on Hannah Warren. In Ramírez’s canny portrayal, the doctor says all the right things and charms his way into the reporter’s heart, convincing her to break ethical codes and launch into an affair. The relationship’s undercurrents, of course, are darker than she could have imagined, and the series finds riveting momentum as she becomes determined to figure the man out—and realizes she’s being conned.
“The miracle—this is where we start off: This guy is doing things that no one else can do,” Hoban says. “Why wouldn’t you want that to be true?”
If Mandy Moore reintroduced herself as an actor with her devastating, Emmy-nominated turn in This Is Us, then she again charts new territory in Dr. Death, which marks her first onscreen role since saying goodbye to Rebecca Pearson. “This was just such a departure and a step in a different direction for me,” she says. She had a one-month-old baby when the offer came her way, and was told production needed to get going fast. “I remember thinking, I don’t know. I literally have a newborn, probably not going to be the thing to move my whole family to New York,” she says. “And of course I read the first two scripts and immediately was like, Yes, I have to do this.”
“She has this natural warmth, and there’s a trust to her and a vulnerability to her,” Hoban says of Moore. “[What’s new] is this sharp wit and cleverness to her, this cunning as she’s unraveling this mystery of this guy that she’s fallen in love with.”