Most actors are attached to their jobs. Steve Carell was padlocked to his.
In FX’s new tête-à-tête thriller “The Patient,” Carell’s character, Dr. Alan Strauss, spends most of the show restrained by a serial killer — the titular patient — with a chain bolted to the floor. Every day, the prop master came in with a real manacle and shackled the actor with a real lock.
Carell had not quite pictured the full impact of his request for verisimilitude.
“The physicality of it was more than I expected,” he said recently on the phone from Los Angeles. “It was instantly claustrophobic to know that I had a span of about 10 feet to move for about three months of work. You couldn’t move too fast or you’d cut your ankle — I found that out pretty quickly. ”
As his co-star Domhnall Gleeson, who plays the killer, Sam, dryly commented: “Steve, I noticed early, had decided, basically, once he was in, he was in.”
As elevator pitches go, the one for “The Patient,” which debuts Tuesday (available only on Hulu), seems to require a very short ride: A serial killer, who has a terrifying tendency to off those who irk him, kidnaps his therapist and demands to be cured. It is a concise premise, but it is also, at first glance, a little mundane: Serial killers are hardly an underrepresented demographic in contemporary fiction and nonfiction.
Still, if Gleeson and Carell had a reason to hope this mini-series might be different, they owed it largely to the show’s creators, Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, who were the showrunners for Weisberg’s critically acclaimed FX series “The Americans.” A thorny journey through identity and allegiance, “The Americans” was fundamentally a family drama disguised as a Cold War spy thriller. “The Patient,” likewise, emerges quickly as something other than “yet another ‘serial killer in the basement’ story,” as Carell, 60, put it. It is, among other things, a drama about fatherhood, Jewishness, responsibility and man’s search for meaning.
“We knew we wanted to do something that explored therapy and self-exploration and self-knowledge,” Fields, 57, explained in a recent three-way video call with Weisberg. Then the idea evolved into something more sinister — but still on brand.
“We very quickly got interested in this idea of a serial killer who wanted to get better,” Weisberg, 56, said. “It’s sort of right in our wheelhouse of what we’d like to do, which is humanize people who are being dehumanized.”
“The Patient” is Weisberg’s first major television venture since “The Americans” ended in 2018 — and, by extension, his first collaboration with Fields since that series, which in six seasons was nominated for 18 Emmys, winning four. (Fields, meanwhile, was a writer and executive producer of FX’s 2019 mini-series “Fosse/Verdon,” which also won four Emmys.)
Fields and Weisberg — both fathers, both Jewish, both believers in the powers of the talking cure — had been circling the idea of a series that took therapy as its starting point. In part, that was because of therapy’s centrality to their artistic processes, and to their history together.
“Joe and I really bonded in the first season of ‘The Americans’ over a mode of relating to each other that I think was born out of our own experiences in therapy,” Fields said. “We talked a lot about our feelings with each other when we were starting to work together. We would take time out of our days to talk through: How do we feel? How are we relating to each other? (They went on such long, chatty walks, he quipped, that “The Americans” “should have been sponsored by Fitbit.”)
“That paid enormous dividends for us, ultimately, as friends,” Fields added, “but also as creative collaborators and as writers.”
Notably absent in the early stage was Sam. “We had therapist,” Weisberg recalled. Then they started adding layers: “Therapist gets kidnapped by serial killer. Therapist is Jewish.”
Then they added more: “Jewish therapist is married to a cantor,” Weisberg continued. “Jewish therapist married to a cantor has a son who’s become Orthodox, and he’s in great conflict about it.”
Unsurprisingly, given the context, Sam is a little different than many killers found in books and on screens. His social awkwardness, punctiliousness and obsessiveness notwithstanding — he has a day job inspecting restaurants for the health department — his motivations don’t fit the usual mold. Neither a diabolical mastermind nor a leaver of pretty corpses, he is driven primarily by grudges, by perceived slights, by rage against an abusive father. He doesn’t kill for psychosexual pleasure. He kills because he thinks his victims deserve it.
“He wasn’t just interested in outfoxing everybody, being the smartest guy and then killing people in the most interesting way possible, which, frankly, I’m bored of,” Gleeson, 39, said. “And there’s a whole litany of things that go along with that that don’t make me totally comfortable.”
Like Carell, Gleeson, a versatile actor whose credits include the “Star Wars” franchise and “Ex Machina,” wasn’t particularly interested in doing yet another show about serial killers. He especially wanted to avoid sensationalizing them.
“I understand where the fascination comes from, but they end up getting put on some strange pedestal, where they’re fascinating,” Gleeson said in a video call from his native Ireland.
“It’s like the bad boy at the party: Everybody’s interested in, who’s that guy?” he added. “In real life, it’s really disgusting, pathetic.”
Still, there he is, playing one of those guys; viewers can judge for themselves whether his character, and the series, break free of the serial-killer subgenre’s frequent pitfalls. For his part, Fields made sure to note that his and Weisberg’s approach — humanizing the dehumanized — did not imply moral shortcuts to absolution.
“There’s a difference between humanizing somebody and sympathizing with them,” Fields said. “And there’s a difference between understanding and sympathizing with where somebody comes from, and accepting and endorsing what they do.”
Most serial-killer stories are deeply psychological, but “The Patient” is even more so. For much of its run time, it has the feel of a two-handed stage play. Scenes between Sam and Alan tend to replicate the intimate conventions of therapy. Most of the action takes place in the walkout basement of Sam’s house, and other characters appear infrequently, including Sam’s mother (Linda Emond) and ex-wife (Emily Davis). Alan’s son (Andrew Leeds) and deceased wife (Laura Niemi) show up, too, primarily in flashbacks that trouble Alan’s long hours of quiet confinement, challenging his sanity and belief system.
The viewing pace is brisk — most of the 10 episodes hover around 22 minutes, not even half a typical therapy session — but the production pace was not; Fields and Weisberg, alongside the executive producer Chris Long, who directed half of the episodes, were often pushing to slow it down.
“We would do really long takes with really long gaps in between what we were saying, and they would always say ‘No, go slower — see how it feels slower,’ ” Gleeson said. “It’s the only time I’ve ever been told that on a TV set or on any movie set.”
The script, meanwhile, veers wildly from moments of existential contemplation to ones of sheer terror, laced with micro-doses of bleak, surreal humor. The resulting impression is often one of watching some Bizarro version of a Samuel Beckett play.
“It’s certainly not a comedy,” said Carell, who is also an executive producer of the series. “But in table reads, we’d be laughing out loud because these comedic moments were juxtaposed with the most horrific things going on in these people’s lives.”
The actors were encouraged to experiment with their performances. The majority of Gleeson’s key scenes are with Carell, and he appreciated his co-star’s willingness to test the boundaries. (That included the ankle chain, though Carell did hide a key close by, just in case. “You never know if there’s going to be an earthquake in Los Angeles, and I didn’t want everyone running out of the soundstage while I was chained up to the bed,” he said.)
“It felt very comfortable,” Gleeson said, “to offer up something which was a little dangerous in terms of maybe the comedic aspect or the intensity of the emotion because he’s always just right there.”
Carell’s challenges were different, and not just the shackles. Known for his wide range of expressions and vocal modulations — picture him grilling his foot in “The Office” or having his chest hair waxed in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” — he had to rein it in considerably to play a therapist who must strive to appear calm and neutral, doubly so because of the uncommon pressures of treating a serial killer.
“I guess it’s a different set of tools within the toolbox,” he said with a laugh. “They’re really, really tiny tools, as opposed to a jackhammer and a rip saw.”
Spending all day thinking about serial killers gets heavy, and the humor and experimentation helped to lighten the load. So did going to therapy. Weisberg said he found himself bringing up the show in his own sessions — a particularly layered version of life imitating art imitating life.
“I will say that I found something amusing about talking to my therapist about making a show where a patient kidnaps his therapist,” Weisberg said.
“Was he uncomfortable at some point?” Fields, who is not currently in therapy, teased, laughing.
Neither creator pretended that “The Patient” had any answers for the biggest questions about faith and family, nature and nurture. They just hoped the series would encourage viewers to think about them.
“As human beings, the fact that we are able to grapple with these questions and to struggle individually and together to understand ourselves better, our relationships better and our society better, that’s the way we can move forward better,” Fields said. “And so it matters.”
