Jessica Chastain joins Netflix's Yale fertility series — the case where three quarters of the painkiller turned out to be saline
Netflix named a third star on Wednesday for the series it is making about the Yale fertility clinic, and the casting is the easy part. The case underneath it is documented in a federal court file, and the numbers in that file are worse than the logline suggests.
Netflix added Jessica Chastain on Wednesday to The Retrievals, the drama it is building out of the Yale Fertility Center case. She joins Emilia Jones, who plays Gabby Clemente, and Amy Ryan as Carla Russo. Chastain's role has not been described, which is unusual this late in a casting announcement.
The series comes from Susan Burton's New York Times and Serial Productions podcast, which won a Peabody. Netflix describes it as one woman's crusade against a fertility centre that operated on her, and on almost a hundred other women, without anaesthesia.
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The numbers a casting notice does not carry
What happened is documented in a federal court file rather than a press kit. Donna Monticone, a nurse at Yale's reproductive endocrinology and infertility clinic, took fentanyl vials from secure storage between June and October 2020, drew the drug out with a syringe and refilled the vials with saline so the levels would look untouched.
The Department of Justice put a figure on it: approximately 75 percent of the fentanyl given to patients at that clinic over those five months had been adulterated with saline. In November 2020 she discarded about 175 more vials. Egg retrieval is done with a needle through the vaginal wall. The patients were awake for it and were told what they were feeling was normal.
She was sentenced on 25 May 2021 to three years of supervised release, three months of home confinement and four weekends in jail.
Yale settled separately with the federal government in October 2022, paying $308,250 over allegations that it had failed to keep accurate controlled-substance records and failed to guard against theft — 685 separate alleged record-keeping violations. The women who had been treated pursued their own civil claims against the university, which settled in 2024.
Who is making it
The showrunner is the reason to expect this to land. Molly Smith Metzler wrote Maid and created Sirens, both for Netflix, and both built on the same thing this story needs: women being disbelieved by institutions that have paperwork on their side.
- Molly Smith Metzler — writer, showrunner and executive producer, through her Quiet Coyote banner.
- Lila Neugebauer — directs the pilot and executive produces.
- Andrij Parekh — directs further episodes.
- Susan Burton — author of the original podcast reporting.
Emilia Jones carries the lead. She was the daughter in CODA, which won best picture in 2022, and has spent the years since in smaller and harder parts. Amy Ryan has two decades of playing people who work inside systems, from The Wire to Gone Baby Gone.
A fertility clinic is one of the few places where a patient is awake, in pain, and told beforehand that pain is part of it. That is what made the substitution so hard to catch.
No release date, no episode count, and no word on which part Chastain is playing. The detail worth watching is whether the series names the nurse or keeps her off screen; the podcast spent most of its running time on the women and little on her.
Previously we wrote: Slow Horses lost its showrunner after five seasons. Season 6 opened at 100%
