Ben Whishaw gives what is described as his best and most singular performance in This Is Going To Hurt, a seven-part Netflix medical drama that follows a young doctor inside an NHS hospital in 2006. The series, created and written by Adam Kay, casts Whishaw as a lightly fictionalized version of Kay as he tries to keep working while the pressure keeps building.
The performance matters because the show depends on it. Kay can only speak inward, using fourth-wall breaks to make visible the feelings he cannot put into words, while strict moral lines he refuses to cross put his career in jeopardy. That gives the drama its weight: a doctor trying to do the job without surrendering the parts of himself that make the job possible.
This Is Going To Hurt is based on Kay’s memoir of the same name and was presented in 2022 as a seven-part series. It is framed as a more realistic medical drama than many of its peers, and that realism is part of the appeal. The hospital setting is 20 years in the past, but the pressures it shows — exhaustion, compromise, and the strain on people trying to work inside a stretched system — still feel current.
Whishaw, who has also appeared in Women Talking and the James Bond films, carries that contradiction cleanly. He plays Kay as someone funny, battered and braced for the next blow, which is what keeps the series from slipping into lecture or melodrama. The result is a show that looks backward to 2006 but lands squarely in the present, because the problems it puts on screen have not gone away.
The question the series answers is not whether Kay can survive one bad shift. It is whether anyone in a system like this can keep their conscience intact and still keep going. By the end, This Is Going To Hurt makes the case that the real drama is not only in the medicine, but in the cost of being the person who has to deliver it.
