Is Edie Flowers from Painkiller a real person?

As well as Matthew Broderick, Taylor Kitsch and West Duchovny, Uzo Aduba stars in the new series as the lawyer going up against Purdue Pharma, Edie Flowers. The series goes on a journey with Edie as we see her initial determination to take on the Sackler family in the '90s and early 2000s, but it's then transformed into cynicism as we flash-forward to her giving advice to the new batch of lawyers forming their own lawsuits.

But is Edie Flowers based on a real person or story? Read on for everything you need to know about Uzo Aduba's character in Painkiller.

Is Edie Flowers from Painkiller a real person?

Although Aduba's performance as Edie Flowers is undoubtedly one of the major reasons to tune into Painkiller, the character herself is a fictional one.

The new drama is based on the book, Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic, by Barry Meier, as well as the New Yorker Magazine article, The Family That Built an Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe.

While the drama very much unpacks some of the real-life legal action taken against Purdue Pharma, Edie Flowers is not a real figure – but a composite character.

We follow Edie through a series of flashbacks and present-day moments where she has been persuaded to help the new legal team in their efforts to investigate and pursue a lawsuit against Richard Sackler (played by Matthew Broderick). While Edie seems reticent to help at first, we soon realise it's only because she has trodden this same path before with disappointing results.

In the flashbacks, we see how Edie worked for the US Attorney's office in Roanoke and was initially investigating a doctor who was billing Medicaid for procedures he wasn't performing, thus committing fraud. But when he turns over his invoices to Edie, she soon starts seeing an increase in prescriptions for a drug she hadn't heard of: OxyContin.

Soon, she gets information from him about the drug, how it's prescribed and sees for herself the levels people go to in order to get more OxyContin, with her seeing a man wreck a pharmacy after being refused more pills.

Speaking about the series, executive producer Eric Newman stated: "Some of our characters are clearly versions of real people. Other characters, like Edie Flowers, are composite characters – a fictional amalgamation of a few different people."

Newman describes Edie as "very much the moral compass of the show" while director and executive producer Pete Berg says that Edie is "the character who manoeuvres through these different worlds. She’s our guide as we unpack the complexities of what Purdue did and how the opioid epidemic started and then spread."

Berg also told Netflix last year: "We unpack the complexities of what Purdue did and how the opioid epidemic started to spread throughout the United States and other countries. That’s kind of dense and complex, and Uzo is sort of our guide on that journey."

The drama blends real-life events with fictional characters and when asked about striking that balance in the series, creator Noah Harpster said that "there is a challenge presented whenever you're dealing with real people in a story, public figures or not, to do service to the truth and to what really happened".

He continued: "In some cases, it's better to create a composite character that encompasses several peoples' points of view rather than having three separate characters. And so, that was a big decision for us in creating Edie Flowers, played by Uzo Aduba, who is a composite character of a few different folks, plus some imagination as well."

Painkiller is streaming now on Netflix. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV guide and Streaming Guide to see what’s on tonight.

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