CHICAGO MED Post-Mortem: Nikki Taylor-Roberts on Her Favorite Scenes to Direct in ‘The Winds Of Change Are Starting To Blow’

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Wednesday, May 10 episode of CHICAGO MED, “The Winds Of Change Are Starting To Blow.”]

The CHICAGO MED team was dealt a blow on the Wednesday, May 10 episode, when their returning patient, Richard (Dan Bucatinsky), who had a seemingly successful surgery in OR 2.0 had a stroke post-procedure and ultimately lost his life.

Though this was director Nikki Taylor-Roberts’ first time helming an episode of the series, that “storyline was introduced on the first episode that I shadowed,” she shares with Give Me My Remote. “So I was already familiar with the character and also the actor, and the thinking around how to introduce him and present him. So that was background knowledge I already had.”

“So, in approaching this, it was like, ‘Okay, what’s [episode] number 2? What’s the next thing we’re saying about him?’” she continues. “It’s all about that emotion. It’s the thing that’s being withheld, that needs to be revealed, and how it unfolds. And I just allowed my actors to just go there emotionally. Those days when we filmed were very heavy days on set, because my actors are amazing—they’re great. And they allowed that [ability to relate to] loss from their personal experience to roll out.”

On a lighter note, Taylor-Roberts counts the early scene where Maggie (Marlyne Barrett) and Charles’ (Oliver Platt) patient refused to leave the ambulance as a memorable shot to pull off.

“It had several different lives before it was in our standard bay, our ambo bay,” she recalls. “It was gonna be outside, it was gonna be on location, it was going to be these different things. But the idea was to hone in on who this character is, and heighten that. and really set up that, ‘Oh, this is going to be Maggie’s battle—she’s the hero in this’…we gave her the hero shot. This is the thing that is gonna at least carry us through. So that was the goal of that—to make it feel bigger than the limitations of the space that we had. And all of the crew is responsible for that genius. I just made sure that we had it.”

As for her favorite scene in the episode? “It was the delivery and the worm extraction,” Taylor-Roberts says. “I loved that so much, because I hated the idea of extracting such a thing. But the visual of it, it’s ripe with amazing camera angles and…I could just play with it.”

“And our prop team, they’re amazing,” she continues. “[And the] special effects. Oh my gosh, they’re amazing, the special effects people. Shout out to them for creating all of that. But yeah, it was a lot of fun. And it was one of the best things to shoot, because I think everyone was excited to do something like that.”

CHICAGO MED, Wednesdays, 8/7c, NBC

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