When news broke in August that American Crime Story: Katrina would undergo a major “creative pivot,” ditching its initial planned story to zero in on New Orleans’s Memorial Medical Center and its Dr. Anna Pou (who will be portrayed by Ryan Murphy repertory player Sarah Paulson), outlets from The Hollywood Reporter to Deadline wistfully hoped that Murphy might also find a way to weave in the series’s previously announced stars, including Dennis Quaid as President George W. Bush, Matthew Broderick as FEMA Director Michael D. Brown, and Annette Bening as former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco.
But in the case of Bening, at least, those wishes will never get off the ground. The multiple-Oscar nominee says that she and her Governor Blanco have been written out of the series.
“What happened was, from what I understand, Ryan Murphy—who I’ve worked with before—decided he needed to stop and rethink the way he was approaching Katrina,” Bening told Vanity Fair at the 31st annual Museum of the Moving Image Salute on Dec. 13, where she was being honored for her body of work. “He found that the best way to do it was to basically use one of the—there were a couple of major books written about Katrina that were completely brilliant and thorough and thoughtful, and one of them is called Five Days at Memorial. So I think he decided that he would just focus on the story by telling it that way. Kathleen Blanco really isn’t in that.”
Five Days at Memorial, by Pulitzer Prize winner Sheri Fink, tells the true story of Dr. Pou and her colleagues and patients, who were stranded in New Orleans’s Memorial Medical Center in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Left without power and proper medical resources, Dr. Pou and two I.C.U. nurses resorted to euthanizing multiple terminally ill patients by overdosing them with morphine. The three Memorial employees were later charged with second-degree murder. Adapting Fink’s 2013 book for the small screen marked a major shake-up for American Crime Story: Katrina, which was originally slated to be an adaptation of The Great Deluge by Douglas Brinkley.
Bening is aware of reports indicating that roles may or may not be written for herself, Broderick, and Quaid in the season’s new iteration. Her response? “Yeah, I don’t think so. Which is O.K.”
The important thing, she said, is that the behind-the-headlines story of Katrina will be told at all. “[Murphy] was right: he needs to do it thoughtfully and carefully. And maybe just making the Memorial hospital the microcosm of the larger thing is the way to do it . . . It was a great, great tragedy, and there was so much unnecessary suffering and death because of racism and poverty. So it’s important when we’re told that story again that he does it in the way that he thinks is right.”
Later in the evening, Bening followed presentations from her husband, Warren Beatty, Call Me by Your Name breakout Timothée Chalamet, her Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool co-star Jamie Bell, and others to accept the Museum of the Moving Image’s coveted recognition. Twenty minutes into her wonderfully rambling, anecdote-stuffed acceptance speech, Bening returned to the importance of the arts and their ability to shine through issues illustrated in Katrina’s aftermath, like racism and classism.
“There’s a lot of things to be happy about. There was a great victory yesterday in Alabama,” Bening said to a cheering audience, citing Doug Jones’s Senate race defeat of Roy Moore. “But we certainly can’t be fooled by that. With the political situation that we’re in, what we try to do—what everybody in this room is trying to do in some way or another—is really important . . . We’re not involved in this nationalistic, racist, xenophobic, homophobic movement. We are not part of that. We’re part of something that’s full of hope and love and acceptance and openness, and our voices will be heard. We just have to keep the faith.”
