Ratched's Jon Jon Briones on Performing (Fake) Lobotomies
Nobody wants a doctor like Richard Hanover. While the character on Ratched (played by Jon Jon Briones) might appear to have it together—after all, he runs California’s Lucia State Hospital and seems to have the ear of the governor—once we get to know him, it’s clear that his power and privilege are easily outweighed by the dark secrets that threaten to consume him.
But is it really so bad to have a secret identity, a price on your head, and a mental hospital spiraling out of control? Not if you ask Briones. “It was exciting and a little scary,” he says of taking on the role, “but I was committed to it.” Here, the actor fills T&C in on what it was like to live inside of Ryan Murphy’s world (opposite Sharon Stone, no less) and why he’ll never look at his own doctor the same way again.
What did you know about Nurse Ratched before this series?
I think I saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the Philippines before I migrated to the United States. My English wasn’t very good so I didn’t necessarily understand all of it, but one thing I did understand is that Nurse Ratched was evil. I researched [Ken Kesey] the author of the book and found out a lot of interesting things about him—including that he went to an asylum and actually experimented with LSD, which I do in one of the scenes. That entire preparation, the research to do this, was very interesting and enlightening, especially finding out about the 1940s and the way they dealt with mental health issues. It was macabre and horrific and made me realize how awful it could be for someone diagnosed with a mental health issue.
Your character's a man with a serious past—and it's about to catch up with him. Is that what made him appealing to play?
When Ryan Murphy first told me what I would be doing in the series, it was at an Emmys afterparty. He said, “I wrote a brilliant character for you. He’s an amazing doctor with a lot of monologues.” Then, as soon as I got the first three scripts, I really worked on them. My wife would read the scripts with me, and I would just hear her react to the scenes—she’d yell out, “Oh, my God!”—and that was my gauge. Her reactions told me, this was going to be a really good part.
Without giving away too much, he has a lot of things go wrong for him over the course of this season. What was the most interesting of his mishaps for you to play?
One of them was the LSD scene. I didn’t know what I was doing! I went on YouTube trying to find out how patients under LSD treatment would react to the drug. I would also ask people I knew who are a bit older than me, 'have you experienced this?' I found one and he told me a little about it, so I had some understanding. When we got to set, I just decided to go wild—the director would tell me if it was a little too much. So Brandon Flynn and I just went for it, and we had so much fun.
Was there anything he had to do that made you nervous?
There was a scene when I’m stitching limbs onto Brandon's character. At first I had a tutorial with the set doctor, and I thought I was ready for it. But once we were filming it, and there was blood and oversized forceps, it was hard. In a way, my desperation to do it properly helped me get into the scene—I was trying to save a life and also not waste time. And when we were filming lobotomies, I didn’t realize how intense that would be until I was on set. We had an actress playing a cadaver on a table, and as soon as I saw her, it just clicked for me. I had studied enough that as soon as I was on set and wearing my costume, I was ready to go.
Can you play a character like this and still view your own doctor in the same way? I imagine it'd be difficult.
That occurred to me so many times even before I started filming this. You wonder, how knowledgable is this person? Because of my characters past, he’s surrounded by closets packed with skeletons, and he’s trying hard not to reveal them. But he does honestly want to help people. And because of his ego, he thinks he can do it. There’s a God complex in him, and I’m sure there are real-life doctors who feel that way. For my character, his ego gets in the way, and he ends up willing to risk someone’s life because he’s so convinced he can’t be wrong. Unfortunately, that wasn’t true.
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