Billy Cutler

Billy Cutler works in the mines of a small Virginia town, an earnest, hardworking young man with a girlfriend and a future he's still building. When a workplace injury sends him to the doctor, he's handed a prescription for a new painkiller everyone insists is safe. He trusts the people telling him that.

Poulter plays Billy's unraveling with such careful gradualness that you almost miss the moment trust curdles into dependency. The show uses him as its human ledger of what OxyContin actually cost, and Poulter refuses to make him pitiable or stupid — just decent, hopeful, and catastrophically believed the wrong people.