Matthew Broderick's last screen performance for the foreseeable future takes place over Zoom from his house in the Hamptons for an audience comprising a Netflix assistant and me. It's the day before the Screen Actors Guild goes on strike, putting a halt to TV shows, feature films, press junkets, the lot. Broderick can't imagine how this particular drama plays out. He gestures at the clock on the wall and the door to the garden. He says: "Here we are. This scene could be it."
He's had a good innings, 61-year-old Broderick, and appears to be ageing at a slower rate than the rest of us. The actor was already in his mid-20s when he played the truant hero of Ferris Bueller's Day Off, riding his luck in 1980s Chicago. Since then his fanbase has grown old while he's stayed much the same; fresh-faced and boyish, slightly rounded at the edges. "I always wanted to have a long career," he says. "And it's been 40 years so I guess I must have done something right."
If Broderick's screen career is about to go dark, his role in Painkiller provides a rousing parting shot. The six-part Netflix series is a bustling exposé of the US's opioid crisis, the latest salvo in a burgeoning subgenre that includes Laura Poitras's award-winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Disney+ series Dopesick and Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling novel Demon Copperhead. Broderick plays Richard Sackler, the disgraced former president of Purdue Pharma. It was Sackler who developed the morphine-based OxyContin, engineered its approval by the US Food and Drug Administration and thereby became the nation's most successful drug dealer. "All human life is a combination of two things," Sackler (or at least Broderick's version of him) explains. "Running away from pain and running towards pleasure." OxyContin was the full-strength pain relief that became the heartland's favourite legal high.
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