Like many, Cherry Jones has a precise memory of August 29, 2005, when the hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and caused the death of nearly 1,600 people in Louisiana: she was on the boards of a Broadway theater for the play Doubt. “Back home, I watched in horror as the news got worse in the days that followed because of the flooding,” she said.
And then there was this article by reporter Sheri Fink published in 2009 in the New York TimesMagazine — a journalistic investigation that she published in a book in 2013, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital — recounting the ordeal experienced at Memorial Hospital, where several hundred patients and members of the medical team waited up to five days in a building without electricity before being evacuated. Shortly after, a few dozen corpses were discovered there.
“No one had yet been accused of anything, but it was already said that there would probably have been recourse to euthanasia, recalls the actress. After all they had been through, the entire medical staff would have to fight back. »
Five Days at Memorialby John Ridley (12 Years a Slave) and Carlton Cuse (Lost, Bates Motel), is thus a fiction adapted from Sheri Fink’s investigative work. Cherry Jones brilliantly plays Dr. Susan Mulderick, Director of Nursing and Chief of Hurricane Response Katrina at Memorial. The Dr Mulderick will have to make heavy decisions, in particular with regard to the sorting of patients to be transferred and the fate of the most critical of them, those who are dying in the oppressive heat. Preparing for such a role raises, in fact, ethical issues and an involvement beyond measure.
“I’ve had the chance to work with doctors for a long time and I was able to question them scrupulously about hospital protocols or the tasks of medical managers, for example. I also asked them concretely what they would have done if they had been at Memorial Hospital for Katrina. Their response was that they hoped they would never have to find themselves in this kind of situation! explains Cherry Jones.
At the forehead
How do you know what could, or should, be done when human life is at stake? Without judgment or injunction, the series has the merit, and perhaps the courage, of confronting these social issues with striking precision where fiction and reality intertwine thanks, among other things, to the integration of images of archives to the story. “On set, we were all very aware of what we were doing. We had to show unwavering respect for victims and caregivers,” she said.
Because Five Days at Memorial takes place in a hospital, there are plenty of storylines to explore. It also deals with racial and economic injustice, climate change, but also and above all with the blatant failure of the infrastructures and the authorities who have never ceased to pass the buck during these five critical days.
“Already, in this pre-pandemic era, we knew that our healthcare workers were frontline soldiers,” recalls Cherry Jones. According to her, we now live in a world that gives the impression that adults have abandoned their responsibilities, which the series illustrates remarkably well.
“Yet we elect our leaders to make the tough decisions, but nothing happens. We must be ready to make sacrifices, especially the younger generations,” she continues. In this, Cherry Jones believes that the series Five Days at Memorial is essential because it may eventually encourage “necessary conversations”.