Entertainment
‘Twilight’s Dr. Carlisle Cullen Isn’t Done With His Most Morally Messy Medical Role [Exclusive]
For Twilight fans, Peter Facinelli will forever be known as Carlisle Cullen, the benevolent doctor and head of the Cullen family. From 2008 to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 in 2012, he was one of the most unique vampires to ever take the screen, completely conquering his thirst for human blood and proving himself as driven primarily by his compassion for his family and his patients alike. However, while the actor was making the five-film saga, he was also busy in a very different medical role on the small screen. Showtime counted him among the staff of All Saints’ Hospital in the Emmy-winning dark comedy-drama, Nurse Jackie.
In the Edie Falco-starring hit, Facinelli was the “Golden Boy” Dr. Fitch Cooper, a petulant, deeply competitive, and nervous emergency room doctor who still managed to be a likable presence despite his flaws. Compared to Carlisle, however, he showed a completely different side to what a physician could be on-screen. Before a post-con screening of the original Twilight at Big Lick Comic-Con over the weekend in Roanoke, Virginia, Collider’s Maggie Lovitt held a Q&A session with Facinelli and Kellan Lutz in the Historic Grandin Theater, where the subject of the unhinged Nurse Jackie and, specifically, how the former juggled his roles as the two doctors and whether a return as Fitch could be in order, came up. Despite being locked into both roles at the same time and constantly swapping between them, he emphasized there were never any moments of Fitch slipping into Carlisle or vice versa, thanks to the very different, yet uniquely enjoyable experiences both brought.
“So fun… I did a show called Nurse Jackie, and that character’s also a doctor. If you haven’t seen it, he’s like, socially awkward, and he has weird Tourette’s, physical Tourette’s that I won’t get into. And he’s kind of like a 13-year-old boy in a grown man’s body, so he’s very funny to watch. So, I just happened to always be filming both at the same time every year, because that’s when the schedules went, so I would go and shoot like two weeks in Vancouver doing Twilight, and then they’d let me out to go do Nurse Jackie for a week or two. And I’d be flying back and forth, and people would be like ‘Don’t you get the characters mixed up or the lines?’ and I’d say no, because they’re so different. So for me, as an actor, it’s the best time of my life, because I have these two great jobs where I’m playing these two opposite doctors, and one is in a critically acclaimed show and one is like in a franchise that’s doing really well. So, every time I was on an airplane — I felt like I lived on American Airlines because I was just always on an airplane.”
Peter Facinelli Says ‘Nurse Jackie’ and ‘Twilight’ Show Doctors Are More Than Their Jobs
Stepping into the shoes of two doctors who were worlds apart in so many ways at the same time satisfied Facinelli as an actor. Funnily enough, Carlisle, despite being an immortal creature of the night, proved to be the more picturesque image of a good medical professional fighting to save lives and treating his job with the utmost care when compared to Fitch, who wasn’t always the most thorough. Yet, both satisfied vastly different needs in their respective stories and became fan favorites in their own ways. Each also got plenty of runway to evolve, with Fitch sticking around at All Saints’ for parts of all seven seasons of Nurse Jackie through 2015.
Facinelli believes that, in taking on both Twilight and Nurse Jackie together, he demonstrated that on-screen doctors can’t be stereotyped. While he knows many fans have an assumption of what characters in these professions should be in their heads, he says actors and writers need to focus on the person first, and not their line of work. Doctors can be renegades, like House, compassionate goofballs, like Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H, or complete messes like The Simpsons‘ cheery Dr. Nick Riviera, and so much more that their job doesn’t necessarily define.
“But, like, as an actor, to have two fantastic jobs and have together doctors who could be completely different and so fun to shoot. And it shows you that people often think that doctors are a certain way, and so they’re like ‘Oh, you play a lot of doctor roles, you must be this type of person,’ but it’s not the occupation you play. It’s the person in the occupation you play. So, like, a fireman can be a lot of different people, a police officer could be completely… so a lot of times, early on, if you’re a young actor, you’re like ‘Oh, doctors act like this, lawyers act like this, plumbers act like this!’ It’s not, it’s just their job to do, so you find the person and the character within the occupation.”
Facinelli Would Gladly Return for a ‘Nurse Jackie’ Reboot
Finally, Lovitt asked in a follow-up about what Facinelli knew about the Nurse Jackie reboot. News broke back in 2023 that the medical dramedy and fellow Showtime darling Weeds were being eyed for reboots that would bring back both Falco as Jackie Payton and Mary-Louise Parker as Nancy Botwin. Despite changing hands to Prime Video and seemingly gaining momentum, however, Falco revealed last year that nothing concrete was in place and, so far, Nurse Jackie was just talk. A story idea following Jackie’s attempts to stay on the straight and narrow after losing her nursing license, with Liz Flahive and Abe Sylvia writing, was said to be in place, though, and Falco hasn’t been willing to give up on the possibility that something could eventually happen.
“I heard something about it!” Facinelli confirmed before assuring that he’d be all-in if he was ever asked to come back. “No one ever reached out to me, so maybe they’re doing it without me. [Laughs] No, I don’t think they ever did it, but I would love to again revisit the part, too.” He sees any chance to get to reprise a long-time role as sacred, because, once it’s over, he knows all too well the sting of saying goodbye to a character for good. That may be the one thing both Fitch and Carlisle have in common — both were huge parts of his life that left him with a sense of loss when they were over.
“The sad part is, you play these roles, then, when the job is over, that character kind of dies. I honestly go through a period, I don’t know if you do, but there’s like a three-to-four-day, sometimes longer period where you kind of feel sad because this person that you’re playing no longer exists. And you can see them and watch them on a screen, but they’re no longer part of you, and they don’t belong to you; they belong to an audience. So it’s just, when you’re finished with a character, you definitely feel a sense of loss. Yeah, so being able to revisit that is always incredible. I mean, I did Nurse Jackie for seven years, and I was able to revisit that character over and over, and it would grow with me, and same with Twilight. It was a five-six-year period where we got to all come together all the time.”
Nurse Jackie is currently streaming on Netflix. Stay tuned here at Collider for more from Big Lick Comic-Con.
- Release Date
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2009 – 2015-00-00
- Network
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Showtime
- Showrunner
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Liz Brixius
- Directors
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Paul Feig, Steve Buscemi, Craig Zisk, Miguel Arteta, Scott Ellis, Adam Bernstein, Alan Taylor, Allen Coulter, Michael Lehmann
- Writers
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Liz Brixius, Rick Cleveland
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Eve Best
Dr. Eleanor O’Hara
