Apple TV+’s newest limited series Five Days at Memorial premiered its first three episodes on the streaming platform Friday and audiences are already getting rather emotional over it. But while viewers will connect over the course of eight episodes to the heartwrenching realities one New Orleans hospital endured during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, series star Julie Ann Emery admits to PopCulture.com exclusively she is still emotionally affected by the show they filmed last summer.
With Emery transforming into Diane Robichaux, the real-life incident coordinator at LifeCare (an elder care facility that rented a floor at Memorial Hospital in 2005) and subsequent crucial witness for law enforcement of the horrors that took place at Memorial Hospital, the Tennessee actress is noticeably emotional during our PopCulture on-camera when discussing Robichaux’s experience, especially in Episode 5. During the first five days after Katrina impacted the hospital and knocked out power as the heat soared and floodwaters rose, Robichaux was particularly worried about leaving any of her living patients behind, particularly 61-year-old patient Emmett Everett, who was conscious but weighed 380 pounds and was paralyzed. It was this moment Emery tells PopCulture still affects her.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“Without spoiling anything, it was so beautifully written and directed by John Ridley — that whole sequence,” she said. “Damon Standifer, who plays Emmett Everett, is such a love of a human being and we had such a wonderful experience being together, but also as the characters. I really pride myself on being able to leave work at work, I think it’s necessary if you’re going to do this emotional work or the extreme character work I sometimes do. But I obviously have still not shaken that scene. It’s obviously still emotionally affecting me and I think that probably will be true forever.”
Adding how the scene, which airs in Episode 5 premiering Aug. 26 on Apple TV+ is a heavy one, Emery adds that the fact that it was “really beautifully written and directed” honors the realities of the hospital’s horrific tragedy. “Everyone was so very committed, including Ramsey Nickell, our DP, did such a beautiful job trying to emotionally climb inside these characters with us, visually and he’s so inventive in doing that,” she said. “It really makes the audience feel like they’re just either peeking over your shoulder, or in the point of view with you.”
Reiterating how that “depth of work” though comes with a cost, Emery says it’s a cost she is “happy to pay” if it means telling this story in an honorable way. “It’s a privilege to tell a story like this, and I hope that it will have an impact socially, for us,” she said. “I hope we can start a conversation in a larger way about who we want to be together in these collective crises, how we want to show up for each other, and the standards we hold our institutions and our government to. Everybody abandoned these guys.”
Based on actual events and adapted from the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial portrays the impact of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath on Memorial Hospital, which found fatigued and overworked caregivers forced to make decisions that would follow them for years to come. While Emery’s co-star Vera Farmiga told PopCulture.com that the series serves as a “teaching and learning tool” when it comes to this kind of ethical dilemma, Emery believes the mismanagement following Katrina was a model of how corporate medicine is a failure when looking at numbers instead of lives.
“When you talk about corporate medicine, LifeCare really paid the price for corporate medicine that day, during the storm. The fact that LifeCare and Tenet were totally separate corporations and that they, in no way, even attempted on a corporate level to try to work together, and then Tenet actively hindering the evacuation process for LifeCare patients — I still am flabbergasted by that,” she said. “But it does show a massive failure of corporate medicine and we need to have that conversation in our country too. Do we still believe in corporate medicine? Is it okay with us that people are making decisions in a boardroom, that comes down to good business decisions maybe for them, but completely leave out the human element of it?”
Sharing how she hopes everyone is “up in arms” over the tragedy in hopes the events never repeat, Emery praises author Fink for the “intense amounts of research” she shared with the cast in understanding this national failure. But it was her take on Robichaux, who was just two months shy of giving birth when the hurricane hit that she remains in awe of. “This is a woman who at seven months pregnant, shows up to the worst hurricane in a century and it was forecast to be the worst hurricane in a century, to care for her patients, and see her staff safely through the storm — and that says so much about a person,” she said. “She’s also very connected to her people. She’s this really wonderful mix of compassion, empathy, and real grit, that’s very attractive to me. So, even just the circumstance of this woman in this hospital during these five days, says so much about her character. It was a real pleasure to step into those shoes.”
The first three episodes of Five Days at Memorial are now available to stream, followed by one new episode weekly, every Friday through Sept. 16. For more on Five Days at Memorial, its cast, and all your Apple TV+ programming, keep it locked to PopCulture.com for the latest.
