Richard Sackler

Richard Sackler is heir to the Purdue Pharma dynasty, eager to step out from his uncle's shadow and prove himself worthy of the family name. He is fixated on launching OxyContin, certain it will be both a medical breakthrough and his own vindication. Precise, thin-skinned, and hungry for respect, he treats doubt as an insult.

Broderick plays him as brittle rather than villainous, a man convinced of his own righteousness who bristles at any suggestion he's wrong. The performance keeps him small and anxious even as his decisions grow enormous, which makes the character genuinely unsettling: banality dressed up as ambition, doing catastrophic things while sounding entirely reasonable to himself.