‘Dr. Death’ Producers Explain What Mandy Moore Brings in Season 2 (Exclusive)

Mandy Moore has moved on from the NBC series This is Us as she’s starring in the new season of the Peacock series Dr. Death. The 39-year-old plays Benita Alexander in the anthology series whose character falls in love with Swiss-Italian surgeon Paolo Maccharini, who is keeping a lot of secrets from her and the entire medical community. PopCulture.com spoke to Dr. Death executive producers Ashley Michel Hoban and Patrick Macmanus, and they talked about having Moore star in the new season. 

“She had actually had a baby six weeks before we started shooting,” Hoban, who is also the showrunner, told PopCulture. “So the fact that she was interested in telling the story at all, let alone at this point in her life and moving her family to New York, I mean, it was a no-brainer for her. She’s so right for the character. She can play anything, but I think this is a little bit of a departure for her from roles that we’ve seen before.”

“And she brings this real warmth and this trustworthiness to screen and she just brings that character into life in such a nuanced way. We are just grateful that she wanted to be a part… I mean the entire cast, it’s just like can’t believe that these are the actors that wanted to tell our story with us. So we’re happy.”

Macmanus said: “Somebody who was sort of watching it go from script stage into the production stage, I never imagined Mandy in the role. Not for any reason that I didn’t think that she would be right, but it was more the fact that I couldn’t imagine that she would do it. And that is in no way, by the way, the narration of the scripts. The scripts are very, very good.”

Edgar Martinez plays Paolo, which means he and Moore share plenty of scenes throughout the season. He was the person Hoban targeted because Martinez and Paolo have similar qualities. “Jennifer Morrison, who directed the first four episodes, and I went to meet with Edgar early on to try to convince him to come to our show, to beg him to do the show because he was in my mind early on,” Hoban said. “And he just really physically, emotionally, charmingly, personifies all of the good things of Paolo. He also speaks all the languages that Paolo speaks, and he worked before he started acting, he was an investigative journalist. So he sort of had that insight into the Benita side of the story.”

While Macmanus enjoyed the Paolo-Benita story, he also loved seeing the three doctors, Nathan (Luke Kirby), Ana (Ashley Madekwe) and Anders (Gustaf Hammarsten) working as whistleblowers to take down Paolo. “When Ashley Michel took over for season two, the perspective on the whistleblowers was the thing that I felt was most novel to the story,” Macmanus said. “I know it’s very, the romance is another side of it, but I felt like we had this opportunity with these whistleblowers to truly look at how they were complicit in helping in many ways, Paolo Macchiarini get to where he got, but at the same time then recognizing within themselves that it was their responsibility that they were held to account for what they had done and that they had to somehow rectify. And I felt like that was the part of the story that also could most benefit our viewers.” 

All eight episodes of Dr. Death Season 2 are streaming now on Peacock.