Get ready, Hollywood! A new series is being filmed in the United States right now, featuring a diverse cast led by Filipino-American actors. 

The cast of 'Nurse the Dead'

Some TV shows loudly announce themselves as “historic.” Others arrive quietly, carrying the weight of lived experience— “Nurse the Dead” belongs to the latter. In an exclusive interview with Mark J. Labella (@markjlabella in Instagram), the show’s creator and showrunner, it became clear early on that this supernatural dramedy is drawn from Labella’s own life as a nurse and the losses he has experienced, “..the 19-hour shifts, sleeping in the office, wearing the same N95 mask until it tore my skin..losing thirty percent of the Filipino nurses during the pandemic. That number isn’t just a statistic to us. It’s our aunties, our grandparents. It’s the person who smuggled me food on a double shift…These moments don’t read as dramatic; they read as truth,” Labella tells Gossip Girl. 

Mark Labella

Labella’s choice of actors was also “…structural, not symbolic. Filipinos lead both on-screen and behind the camera—not as tokens, but as tone-setters. From Princess Punzalan, arriving straight from an overnight nursing shift for a 6 a.m. call time, to Charlyn Villegas, our assistant director, who gave up a George Lucas project because the story of Nurse the Dead mattered. And let us not forget Anthony Jennings, who gave up numerous offers in the Philippines because, let’s admit it, he is one of the most sought-after actors in Manila right now. Comedienne Ruby Rodriguez chose to join the cast of  Nurse the Dead because, according to Rodriguez, the comedy in the script comes from pain. Not because pain is funny, but because humor is how Filipinos survive.” 

At its core, Nurse the Dead is not about death. It is about what we do after loss—how we keep loving, how we keep caring, and how, in tending to others, we learn to nurse our own wounds.  In one sentence, Labella calls Nurse the Dead “a love letter to the Filipino heart.”