Netflix’s wild new film Pain Hustlers follows the real-life rise and fall of a small opioid company called Insys Therapeutics that sold a pain relief spray with fentanyl as the main ingredient in the 2010s. This obviously backfired a bit.
Pain Hustlers stars Chris Evans (with a whole facial hair situation), Emily Blunt, Andy Garcia, Catherine O’Hara, Jay Duplass, Brian d’Arcy James, and Chloe Coleman. The film is based on the New York Times article of the same name, which then inspired the 2022 book The Hard Sell.
The movie follows Blunt’s character Liza as she unexpectedly becomes involved in a drug conspiracy after taking a job as a rep at the pharmaceutical company. According to Netflix’s official description: “After losing her job, a blue-collar woman who’s struggling to raise her daughter takes a job out of desperation. She begins work at a failing pharmaceutical start-up, but what she doesn’t anticipate is the dangerous racketeering scheme she’s suddenly entered.”
Liza isn’t actually based on a real person, meaning there is no Emily Blunt lookalike roaming the streets out there in the pharmaceutical world. But she is a combination of several people whom producer David Yates and writer Wells Tower met while researching for the movie. Producer Lawrence Grey told Forbes,
There were various characters in this story, men and women, who all feed into Liza. She’s a composite of many different personalities and also partly our own creation as well. We wanted this woman who was ambitious, and idealistic, and perhaps a little bit naive, and who had not always been recognized for the ability that she had, because of her background, her sort of low income status, her lack of education. So there were lots of things that we created or added to Liza, that we all felt a connection to, in some shape or form, and we also cherry picked a few qualities in some of the characters of the Incys story. But yeah, she is ultimately our creation, Wells’ creation, I should say, at the end of the day.
Pain Hustlers is now streaming on Netflix.
(Forbes)