In the six-part limited series Painkiller, a fictionalized retelling of some of the origins of the opioid crisis, Matthew Broderick plays three incarnations of Purdue Pharma exec Richard Sackler over a span of almost 30 years. 

First, in 1987, when Sackler allegedly began to help lay the groundwork for OxyContin’s rise; then in 1998, when Sackler was in charge while OxyContin was being prescribed across the country; and in 2015, after Purdue Pharma had been investigated by Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), a lawyer for the US Attorney’s office, for promoting the drug while reportedly misleading the medical profession about its side effects.

The physical transformation was only the beginning for Broderick. “I have wigs to have more and darker hair when I’m younger,” said Broderick from the set of Painkiller in 2022. “Then I’m basically me for [the 1998 scenes] — with a few added lines, I should add. And then the older Richard — that’s a whole, full prosthetic, which takes two hours, sometimes four hours, to put on one time… It’s kind of incredible to see yourself as you’re about to look.”

Beyond the outer transformation, inhabiting the billionaire scion’s mindset was a different challenge altogether. While Broderick read the source material for Painkiller — the book Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier and the New Yorker article “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe — he emphasized that his performance as Richard Sackler was a fully creative endeavor. “There’s not a whole lot of footage of [Sackler],” said Broderick. “We try to be accurate as much as possible, but at the same time, I don’t really know what his motivations were, so look at [the portrayal] as a fictionalized version.” 

Keri Anderson/Netflix

For a pivotal scene in which Richard gives a speech at a launch party for OxyContin, Broderick tried to see how his character would justify selling a potentially addictive drug to millions of people. “I don’t know if all of life is comprised of running away from pain and toward pleasure,” said Broderick, paraphrasing a line from the show, “but I could see if I was selling OxyContin, I would look at it that way… I think once you make the decision to market a painkiller, you have to really believe in it — you can’t be halfway.”

And Broderick went all in on bringing his version of Richard Sackler to life, even performing a dance to hype up a screaming crowd of Purdue sales reps at a corporate convention in Miami. Did he come up with the moves himself? “That was the Macarena — I did not make up the Macarena, that’s a classic dance move,” he joked. “But I did have to learn a tango. There was a choreographer to teach Clark Gregg [who plays Arthur Sackler] and myself the tango. Then some real tango dancers came, and… Clark and I realized our tango was not the real tango. We did our best.”

All six episodes of Painkiller are streaming now on Netflix.

Matthew Broderick Hears the Sound of Silence in First 3 Minutes of Painkiller“Hello darkness, my old friend…”