Canada’s own Joshua Jackson is back on the small screen in one of his most chilling roles to date.

Premiering Sunday, September 12 at 9 p.m. ET on Showcase and based on Wondery’s hit podcast, Dr. Death is a new Peacock Original series, taking inspiration from the terrifying true story of Dr. Christopher Duntsch (Joshua Jackson), a rising star in the Dallas medical community.

Young, charismatic and ostensibly brilliant, Dr. Duntsch was building a flourishing neurosurgery practice when everything suddenly changed. Patients entered his operating room for complex but routine spinal surgeries and left permanently maimed or dead. As victims piled up, there came two fellow physicians. One was neurosurgeon Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin) and the other, vascular surgeon Randall Kirby (Christian Slater). Teaming up with Dallas prosecutor Michelle Shughart (AnnaSophia Robb),they set out to stop him. Dr. Death explores the twisted mind of Dr. Duntsch and the failures of the system designed to protect the most defenseless among us.

It is an absolutely chilling real life story of a surgeon. One who kept on practicing and conducting surgeries after permanently mutilating his patients, killing two of them. Duntsch was a blue-eyed, smooth-talking former college football player. In the roughly two years that Duntsch practiced medicine in Dallas, he had operated on 37 patients. Almost all, 33 to be exact, received injuries during or after these procedures, suffering almost unheard-of complications. Some had permanent nerve damage. Several woke up from surgery unable to move from the neck down or feel one side of their bodies. Two died in the hospital, including a 55-year-old schoolteacher undergoing what they assumed was a straightforward day surgery.

Joshua Jackson felt compelled to take on the role for the mini series, but not without a few reservations. He knew it would be difficult to play this real-life doctor of death but was up for the challenge.

Our Bonnie Laufer spoke with Joshua Jackson about what it took to play Dr. Duntsch on a psychological level and why he felt a determination to help retell this story.