For a movie about the opioid crisis, Pain Hustlers has a surprising amount of fun. Director David Yates— the same guy who spent a decade wrangling wizards through the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts franchises—decided to take a real-world disaster and wrap it in satire, color, and a touch of manic capitalism.
“It felt like part of the national conversation,” Yates says, looking almost amused that it took a Brit to tackle America’s favorite pharmaceutical nightmare. “From Europe, it was extraordinary to watch—so many people losing their lives. We didn’t want to make an ‘eat your vegetables’ drama. We wanted it to be entertaining while still bringing home the issues.”
Producer Lawrence Grey nods along, the grin of a man who knows how absurd reality can get. “I’d been looking to do something in the opioid space,” he says. “But this felt different—like a peek behind the curtain of the whole pharma world. You don’t often get to see the level of excess and debauchery that goes on. We literally found footage of executives dressed as fentanyl bottles rapping about their crimes. Once you find something that surreal, you can’t not make the movie.”
That surrealism bleeds right into the film. Pain Hustlers, now streaming on Netflix, stars Emily Blunt as Liza Drake, a broke single mom who stumbles into pharmaceutical sales and finds herself caught in a morally collapsing tower of greed. Chris Evans plays her slick recruiter, Andy Garcia her increasingly unhinged boss, and Katherine O’Hara and Chloe Coleman round out the chaos.
Yates and Grey describe a balancing act: staying true to real events while shaping something larger. “A lot of the details—the bribery, the emails, the ridiculous corporate parties—those are all real,” Grey says. “Where we took license was in the composite character of Liza. She’s based on a mix of executives and sales reps so we could tell a bigger story about the industry.”
Yates’s job was to make us root for someone who knows she’s in the wrong. “We wanted her to be an everywoman,” he says. “Flawed, ambitious, greedy, vulnerable. Someone undervalued but brilliant. Emily brought all that.”
He tells a story that sounds like a deleted scene from the movie itself: “She was on a plane lifting her bag into the overhead bin when a guy said, ‘You’re Liza Drake, aren’t you?’ He’d seen the film at a test screening the night before. He talked about her like she was real. Emily called me right after—she said, ‘He liked her, but he wouldn’t have done what she did.’ That’s exactly the point. Liza feels real because she’s messy. She’s us.”
For Yates, the film also marked a return to something smaller, faster, and human. “On the wizard films, everything’s built on stages north of London. You wait months for a set. With this, it was just us in a van, jumping from Miami to Atlanta, shooting wherever we landed. It reminded me of the British dramas I made before Potter—spontaneous, scrappy, alive.”
Grey laughs. “We went from Hogwarts to hot tubs full of pharma reps. I call that range.”
Pain Hustlers hits that sweet spot between true-crime outrage and jet-black comedy. It’s both a cautionary tale and a feverish rush—one that never forgets how much charisma money can buy, and how fast it can destroy everything else.
Or as Yates puts it, “We didn’t want to make you wag your finger. We wanted you to look in the mirror.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
