Welcome to My Favorite Scene! In this series, IndieWire speaks to actors behind a few of our favorite Emmy-nominated television performances about their personal-best onscreen moment and how it came together.
For “Dopesick” star Kaitlyn Dever, her favorite scene from the harrowing Hulu drama showing the full history and scope of America’s opioid crisis, which earned her her first Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series, was a fateful phone call between her character Betsy, a coal miner hooked on Oxycontin after a bad back injury, and Dr. Fennix (Michael Keaton), the doctor who prescribed the drug to her, and later became addicted to it himself.
“It’s such a complex scene, these two characters that have gone through so much singularly, then coming together and having this conversation,” said Dever of the moment in Episode 7 written and directed by showrunner Danny Strong. “There’s a lot of layers to it, and a lot that isn’t said on the phone either. But what these two characters are going through is so powerful.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: How did you prepare for the scene? Both on an emotional level, and then I’m always curious about how phone call scenes are shot?
Kaitlyn Dever: It’s a very big moment for both characters in the show, [so] I wanted to make sure that I was able to actually talk to Michael when he shot his side of it, and then he reciprocated that when I went and shot my side of it. On past jobs I’ve done you have someone else read the dialogue off camera and it just completely changes the way the scene goes. To be able to actually hear Michael’s voice as Dr. Fennix on the other side of the phone when I was shooting that scene was so important to how that scene weighs on you, and how it felt for me.
Same thing for when I had my phone call with Cleopatra Coleman who plays Grace in the show, I think it makes a huge difference when you can actually connect just by certain pauses or certain breaths. It was just a matter of thinking and meditating on what Betsy as a character had already gone through. And I had already shot a lot of my material by that point. So I had already actually lived through these scenes. That was a really helpful part in preparing for the scene and what I was going to be thinking about. And then the fact that we had shot [all] of Dr. Fennix and Betsy’s scenes, and I hadn’t seen Michael in a while, helped as well because in the show Betsy hadn’t seen Dr. Fennix in a very long time. And so it did feel very real when we actually ended up doing it, which was really, really powerful.
How was it having Danny directing this episode? Do you remember any notes he gave you?
What’s so great about Danny …read more
Source:: IndieWire
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