Spoilers ahead for the finale of The Patient.
When Candace Fortner (Linda Emond) first appears in The Patient, she’s a mysterious presence, the unidentifiable source of the creaks from the ceiling above Dr. Alan Strauss (Steve Carell). Strauss, the therapist chained to a bed in the basement, has been led to believe he’s all alone with Sam (Domhnall Gleeson), the serial killer who has kidnapped him and demanded treatment for his violent urges. But before long, Candace introduces herself as Sam’s mother. She may not share her son’s compulsion, but she repeatedly refuses to turn him into the police, making her an accessory to murder.
Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg’s thrilling drama explains a bit about Candace’s backstory early on; her parental passivity was also present during Sam’s childhood, when she refused to leave Sam’s abusive father. At the end of The Patient, Sam can’t stop himself from killing his prisoner, but he does take one step to keep himself from hurting more people: He chains himself up and hands Candace the key. It’s a small, poorly timed sign of growth for Sam and also, in Emond’s estimation, a moment of “the veil being lifted†for Candace. It may not be the ending she expected (“we were all really gutted,†she tells Vulture of receiving the script for the finale), but it’s one she feels underlines the series’ core theme of the devastating effects of denial.
It often feels like you’re playing Candace pretty straight, as a genuinely concerned, scared mother; she isn’t violent or particularly unstable herself, but she’s still complicit. There are a lot of funny details, especially when she’s telling her son to stay in therapy or even just to get a good night’s sleep, traditional stuff that a mother would tell her kid but happening under these strange circumstances.
Yeah. Obviously some psychopaths, like the Sam character, are just freaky as heck, and everybody knows something’s wrong with them. But we repeatedly hear these days especially, about people who end up doing horrible things, people will say, “I had no idea. I would never have guessed.†I think the J’s were interested in pursuing that realm, where someone lives a pretty normal life. They wrote it that way. Ed Kemper, the actual serial killer Sam shows, that’s a real guy, and those are real interviews. There’s something so kind of normal about the way that he acts.
However, you said Candace seems stable, and of course she’s not. I think she’s pretty cray-cray. But she’s able to get through the world just like Sam is. And yes, I could’ve easily pitched scenes to be really comedic. They were meant to walk that line, just like a lot of Sam’s stuff. One of my favorite moments is “Do you play ping-pong?â€
When it comes to imagining your character’s history before the events of the show, do you think there was a point in Sam’s development when Candace could have made a difference and stopped him from becoming what he became?
Yeah, for sure. For one thing, she could have taken him and herself out of the violent situation that he was in, and she didn’t. And that’s hard, obviously — domestic violence is really potent and difficult and fucks with people’s heads, so it’s tricky for them to leave. She also certainly could have called the police once she became aware of it, many times, and saved people’s lives.
In the final episode, Dr. Strauss needs me to take a Kleenex for his last shot, basically. He accuses me of not doing anything to really protect my son, and in the writing we saw how quickly she disintegrates. So it isn’t far for her either to see her complicity. There’s an enormous amount of denial throughout the show. That’s true of Dr. Strauss’s character, it’s certainly true of Sam’s, and it’s very much true of Candace.
During the moment when Dr. Strauss holds the sharpened tube to Candace’s throat, Sam says, “I don’t think you’re the kind of man that can even do it,†and then Strauss does start to cut her, showing that maybe this experience has made him into somebody who could be driven to murder. Do you think Candace could similarly be capable of causing harm, either to someone else or herself, in some circumstance?
I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t know. One of Candace’s weaknesses is that she really sees herself in large part as a victim. Well, she is a victim herself. But I think there’s a certain martyrdom for what she went through. I think in some ways that’s how she made sense of it: She saved her son and stood by him, and it was the two of them together against this horrible thing. She never really recognized that she had the ability to leave and to get out of it or call the police or whatever else.
I don’t know that she’s very strong, actually. I think she got through by weaving these stories in her head of her protecting her son and comforting him after things were terrible, and the two of them were in it together. That’s such a made-up fantasy. I think in the moment she really wouldn’t be able to leave Sam, because she feels so much like she’s saved him.
Our last glimpse of the two of them interacting is at the very end, when Sam chains himself to the floor and hands the key to Candace. Do you view this ending as Sam finally letting Candace be a mother and help him?
As in all sorts of art and good storytelling, the answer to those questions really lie in the viewer. I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but it’s really true. The J’s put that out there. I know that even within the group of us, there were different feelings. The day we went to shoot that someone asked, “Do you think that Sam and Candace are still as close as ever?†Someone immediately said, “Yes, of course,†and I said, “No. I don’t think so.†My feeling was that denial has gotten Candace through a ton, but when she sees Sam kill Dr. Strauss — the violence of that, the reality in her face, and it’s Dr. Strauss, who she really respects — I think something breaks.
I don’t think she even knows yet what she’ll do. I love keeping open the possibility that Candace calls the police, or a hospital. Something breaks in her that day, and that’s certainly how I tried to play it when we were shooting it. There’s something very different about a mother who’s able to say, “I pour a beer when this kind of thing happens. I get a beer and I sit and I wait.†That’s so cuckoo. She tells that story to Dr. Strauss about all the victims she feels so bad for. But there’s a difference between imagining all of those people, being able to be compassionate about them, and seeing someone die a violent death in front of her. That warrants the veil being lifted and this turning into something completely different.
So when she comes down the stairs in that last scene, I feel like she knows it’s the best thing in the moment. “For sure, I’ll take the keys.†But what happens or what she thinks over time, I don’t know. Maybe she does fall back into a martyr thing and think, “Well, this will keep him from doing it again,†but of course when you think in the long term, and what happens when she dies … there are all kinds of things.
Do you think Sam is healable at all?
I don’t think so, especially after so many years. I even think Dr. Strauss mostly recognizes that. Even though Dr. Strauss says people can be healed if they’re honest enough, we have to remember that everything he’s saying is fundamentally about trying to save his life. But in many ways, the answer lies in Sam himself, because for Sam to get to the point of handing those keys is him recognizing that something’s wrong with him.
I like that it’s clear the therapy will not be enough to magically turn Sam into a good person, but it does have an effect on how he thinks and feels. You’re lulled into thinking it’s possible to change his mind.
It also keeps you on the line of thinking, Dr. Strauss can get out of here. You think, This might turn out okay, and then something happens and you go, This is not going to turn out okay, and then it’d be, Maybe! Oh my God, maybe! and when it just turns out in the worst possible way, it’s so awful. We were all really gutted when we got the script that showed that he would die. We’d been told something different.
The ending is pretty brutal: The hero is dead and the villain is still at large. When all is said and done, what do you take away from that? Do you see some sort of catharsis, any source of hope, or is it just that bleak?
I think if I were to say what I think, people might think that’s what they meant. I will just go back and say that in watching it, the themes that pop out to me are denial and what denial can lead to: dysfunction and pain and lost love within families or outright murder. These places of self-protection make us blind to what may be really happening, and that’s true for all the characters in this.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.