‘Ratched’ Trailer: Sarah Paulson Takes on the Iconic ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ Villain on Netflix

ratched trailer

Ryan Murphy‘s latest collaboration with Sarah Paulson may yield another hit for the American Horror Story creator. Murphy’s upcoming Netflix series Ratched looks to be a glorious showcase for the Emmy-winning actress, who plays the young Nurse Ratched before she became one of cinema’s most notorious villains in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Watch Paulson don the nurse’s cap and the iconic chilling stare in the official Ratched trailer.

Ratched Trailer

Netflix has released the official trailer for Ratched, and despite better judgment (and the fact that Ryan Murphy has burned us so many times before), it looks good. The series, created by Evan Romansky and executive produced by Murphy, looks as stylish and macabre as Murphy’s best works, with Paulson a towering menace as a young Nurse Ratched in 1946 Northern California, starting her job at a psychiatric hospital conducting disturbing experiments.

The series, which takes the character that originated in Ken Kesey‘s 1962 novel that was later adapted into a play and an Oscar-winning 1975 movie starring Jack Nicholson, has been long in the making, with the Emmy Award-winning showrunner spending a year securing the rights to the character before the project finally got going in 2017.

Ratched stars Sarah Paulson as Mildred Ratched, Cynthia Nixon as Gwendolyn Briggs, Judy Davis as Nurse Betsy Bucket, Sharon Stone as Lenore Osgood, Jon Jon Briones as Dr. Richard Hanover, Finn Wittrock as Edmund Tolleson, Charlie Carver as Huck, Alice Englert as Dolly, Amanda Plummer as Louise, Corey Stoll as Charles Wainwright, Sophie Okonedo as Charlotte Wells, Brandon Flynn as Henry Osgood and Vincent D’Onofrio as Gov. George Wilburn. The series is executive produced by Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, Sarah Paulson, Alexis Martin Woodall, Aleen Keshishian, Jacob Epstein, Jennifer Salt, Margaret Riley, Michael Douglas, Robert Mitas and Tim Minear.

Here is the synopsis for Ratched:

From Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, RATCHED is a suspenseful drama series that tells the origin story of asylum nurse Mildred Ratched. In 1947, Mildred arrives in Northern California to seek employment at a leading psychiatric hospital where new and unsettling experiments have begun on the human mind. On a clandestine mission, Mildred presents herself as the perfect image of what a dedicated nurse should be, but the wheels are always turning and as she begins to infiltrate the mental health care system and those within it, Mildred’s stylish exterior belies a growing darkness that has long been smoldering within, revealing that true monsters are made, not born.

Ratched premieres on Netflix on September 18, 2020.