‘Five Days at Memorial’ Co-star Adepero Oduye on the Ethics of Managing a Hospital in Crisis

In Five Days at Memorial, actor Adepero Oduye plays Karen Wynn, the real-life nurse who was also the head of the ethics committee at Memorial Hospital in New Orleans during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In playing Karen, Adepero sheds light on the challenges of maintaining ethical standards while dealing with an impossible situation. Memorial Hospital had no corporate evacuation plan and the local, state, and federal governments were porous in their response to a hospital that had no power and was running out of food, water, and life-sustaining supplies.

In our conversation, Adepero and I discuss the chaos, confusion, and the shades of gray that her character and the rest of the hospital staff had to try to manage when there were no good answers, only bad and worse ones.  

Awards Daily: The person you are playing, nurse Karen Wynn, is a real person. I imagine that adds another layer of responsibility when you’re playing the role.

Adepero Oduye: Absolutely. It’s a level of stressful responsibility, but stressful in a way that it’s good. Iit forces you, it pushes you to do your due diligence in terms of research, in terms of gaining as much knowledge as possible – not doing anything surface, not doing anything light. This whole story actually happened to real people, which I think sometimes for me it was a little bit hard, but it was also a driving force. Whatever my brain or my body was trying to get away from while I was on set and things were feeling too real, it was just a deep reminder that this actually happened. So, it is stressful, but it’s also great because it pushes you to try to find as much truth, and to be as authentic as possible.

Awards Daily: A lot of your work in the early episodes is not dialogue driven, it’s very action-based, you are just trying to do your job. It’s utilitarian, even. 

Adepero Oduye: It’s that idea of what nurses do, what doctors do, have been doing, and particularly in this story, particularly where Karen finds herself there’s so much going on around her. It’s not that she’s not aware of, she’s not aware of the things that are being done, but she’s got a job to do just like everyone else. Everyone else has their viewpoints about what their job is and what their focus needs to be or where they can or can’t help. I think for her there are patients that need to be taken care of, even though so much is happening. The patients are first and foremost, and when things start to break down, I think particularly for someone like her or anyone in that position, being professional is the thing that’s going to help you to stay focused, and to not think about your own family and what’s happening outside. It’s what you’re trained to do. You’re trained to take care and focus and I think that falls naturally. I found that natural rhythm and fell into it. The circumstances lend itself to you focusing and doing what’s natural.

Awards Daily: Your character is the head of the hospital’s ethics committee while this once in a generation storm is making landfall. Because of the loss of power and the lack of evacuation protocols, and the lack of help from the city, state, and federal governments, the staff only have bad decisions and worse decisions. Thinking about your character, and being in that position of being in charge of ethics and then seeing what went on around you, how did that feel for you personally to walk into that space and know that this character had these sort of dual responsibilities? How do I manage this moment and how do I manage this responsibility of ethics?

Adepero Oduye: I think it all boils down to…you can wax poetic about ethics, theorize and try to come up with scenarios in which we study it and, and, try to come up with solutions or methodologies to deal with unique circumstances. But at the end of the day, there are just some things that you just cannot prepare for. There are scenarios that you’re not even thinking about. I think that’s what happens here. You see it  with Mulderick’s (Cherry Jones) character. She’s the head of operational emergency procedures and, and the guidebook doesn’t even take in consideration the combination of things that happened during Hurricane Katrina. There was no corporate evacuation plan. What I understand is Adepero looking in, reading the book and knowing what happened there, is that everything kind of went out the window. Everyone was going about it in their own way and doing what they thought was right.

They also didn’t know enough. Everything was changing from moment to moment, and it was just compounding and compounding. On top of that, you’re not eating, you’re not sleeping…I can’t even imagine how you can come to a cogent agreement together cogent without food, dealing with all the heat, and the lives at stake. Everyone’s doing the best that they can. It’s easy to have very black and white thoughts about what went down on the surface, but the more you dig and the more you see and the more you know, for me, prepping and just being in it as an actor in the story, everything is just so gray. What I realized is that no one can say anything unless you were there. You can’t really speak on it unless you were there. I mean, obviously outside of the families who were affected by it.

Awards Daily: You have scenes with Vera Farmiga as Dr. Anna Pou, who interprets “first do no harm” as the relieving of suffering being the main priority. But then you also have a scene with Cornelius Smith Jr. as Dr. Bryant King who sees the preservation of life as the priority. Karen understands where Dr. King is coming from, but she makes it clear to him that there is no guidebook for these circumstances.

Right. It’s hard because everyone is coming from their own unique vantage point. The nurses are looking at things differently from the doctors because their tasks are different. For Karen, she’s literally dealing with a patient who has labored breathing. She doesn’t have time for  squabbles amongst staff. And that’s the thing, I don’t know what to do about the other stuff, but I know where I need to focus and I know where I can be helpful. Depending on who you are, your vantage point it’s just too much to deal with on top of everything else. Right? If you don’t stay on task, how can you even function? There are human bodies and lives and spirits that need tending. As things continue to break down all over, you’ve just gotta get things done.

Awards Daily: Speaking of getting things done, your character is charged with figuring out how to get people who cannot help themselves to the helipad, which is a possibly unsafe structure, and the journey to get patients to it is positively Sisyphean. It’s your character that realizes the only way to get patients there is the hard way, but it can be done.

Adepero Oduye: There’re so many moments in the show where you think, this happened in real life. It’s just astonishing to think that nurses and doctors had to carry patients from their rooms, through these corridors, and up all these steps in that heat. It’s incredible, really.

Awards Daily: You are the fifth cast member I’ve spoken to from the show and the other four told me that this story and their characters in particular have stuck with them in a way that other projects have not. Do you feel the same?

I do. It’s the care in which the story was told, the people that were involved, my castmates…there was a lot of care in that whole process, which made telling a challenging story more than bearable. It was an honor and a pleasure, honestly. Maybe it sounds weird to say, but I think if you’re going to tell a story like this, a story that should be told, being surrounded by so much care on all fronts is important. And you felt it at every level. That’s indicative of the leadership of (producers) John Ridley and Carlton Cuse. It rippled and manifested through all the parts. I feel very, very fortunate that this project found me and I found my way to the project.

Five Days at Memorial is available to stream now on Apple+ TV.