You don’t cast Vera Farmiga and Cherry Jones if you want easy answers. You cast them if your show drops 45 dead bodies in a flooded hospital and you want the audience to feel it in their guts.
In Five Days at Memorial, the Apple TV+ miniseries based on Sheri Fink’s nonfiction book, both actors carry the burden of real-life moral ambiguity like they’re hauling stretchers through rising water. Farmiga plays Dr. Anna Pou, a physician caught in the eye of Hurricane Katrina and its bureaucratic hellscape aftermath. “I know I need to do it if I get scared of doing it,” Farmiga said, adding that the sheer weight of the material—“the responsibility”—nearly scared her off. “It just breaks up that very settled way of how society functions, and it exposes all the stuff that doesn't work,” she said, listing government, healthcare, and socio-economic injustice like she’s reading an indictment.
Jones, playing hospital administrator Susan Mulderick, was haunted by the headlines years before the scripts ever landed. “I saw the first article in the New York Times a couple weeks after the waters had receded,” she recalled. “I had tremendous sympathy for the doctors and nurses. There was no way any of us could imagine what they had gone through.”
This isn’t a heroic arc or a clean redemption story. These characters are buried under sweat, heatstroke, and the creeping weight of decisions made with no good options. “I was separated from my children at the time,” Farmiga said, referring to the shoot. “So that abandonment compounded with the character’s abandonment.” Some days, the emotional access came easy. “Some days it depends on my hormonal cycle,” she deadpanned. “But you always go back to your scene partner when you can't find it.”
That partner, Jones, says she’s drawn to cautionary tales because of what they might provoke. “If it just adds to the conversation even a scintilla, it'll have worth,” she said. And if there’s no catharsis, there is at least the act of witnessing. “Hope is not something that feels like it's going to be there,” Jones added, “but anything that gets us thinking socially is good.”
Farmiga bristled a bit at the inevitable “playing God” framing. “That phrase doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said. “I didn’t judge my character at all.” What mattered to her wasn’t control, but belief. “Her relationship with God and her spirituality—it was a huge part of this one. Not often do you get to explore that.”
As the waters rise, so do the stakes, and Five Days at Memorial never lets you off the hook. The acting—no surprise, given who’s doing it—is a master class in stillness and anguish. “Even in the silent moments,” said Farmiga, “there’s a heavy weight.” And by the end, the show has delivered not answers, but questions that hit harder than any hurricane.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
