JeremyNortham.net

Source: Edmonton Journal   Written by: Nancy Mills  Posted on: March 29, 2010

England’s Jeremy Northam is a trauma surgeon in Miami Medical

TV PREVIEW

Miami Medical series premiere

Time and channel: Friday at 11 p.m. on CBS

“English people who look and sound like me are going to get cast as bad guys,” Jeremy Northam says. “It’s inevitable.”

The 48-year-old actor did indeed make his American-film debut terrorizing Sandra Bullock in The Net (1995), and since then has played more than his share of villains. So when the offer came to play a noble trauma surgeon on Miami Medical, a CBS series scheduled to debut this Friday, Northam quickly signed on. For once, his character would be trying to save lives rather than to end them. Miami Medical is built around the premise that the 60 minutes following a critical injury may offer the only opportunity to prevent death. That’s why a team of surgeons at a top trauma facility in Miami is always on call to treat patients with life-threatening injuries. The show views the city as a battle zone and the surgical team as medics, and Northam credits Robert Altman’s MASH (1970) as a major influence. “Before we started shooting,” he says, “one of the things we talked about was the influence of MASH.

MASH is one of the seminal films of that period. It confronts people with the notion of brevity of life and the brutality of saving life.

To read the rest of this article on the Edmonton Journal website, click here.