STREET NURSE
Format
9:16 vertical
Genre
Drama
Season
30 episodes
Location
Atlanta, GA
The story
STREET NURSE
LOGLINE
SYNOPSIS
If you get shot in a gang beef, the ER calls the police. If you’re undocumented, the ER calls someone worse. If you’re using, they walk you out the door. So somebody built another door. BRIANNA ANDERSON, 25, RN, three years clean, runs it: an illegal, warm, working clinic in a South Atlanta building everyone calls the Ragged Building. She was one of the people who came through that door — high, beaten and left for dead — and she has been paying it back ever since with a bag of sutures and a phone that never stops. The strangers who saved her were her dead mother’s secret. Miss Brenda built Street Nurses in the dark for eleven years.
The clinic is three people: ANGELIC, the woman who stood beside Brenda; MALVIN, the man who keeps the building standing and is quietly in love with Brianna; and ADELE, who wants to belong to this room more than anyone and is the reason it burns. The clinic is funded by the same gangs it patches up — SAINT on one side, TREE on the other — and the one rule is that Street Nurses do not choose sides.
When Brianna walks a nine-year-old into a real ER, a detective is waiting with a printout of her face. DETECTIVE GRAY doesn’t arrest her; he shows her a file with her mother’s name on it, opened in 2009 and never closed. CHIEF ALEX PEREZ is not hunting the clinic because it is illegal. He is hunting it because Brenda worked a body he left in the street, saw the wound track, and wrote it down.
Over thirty episodes the walls close in from the street, the badge and the inside: a favor Brianna cannot repay, a leak she cannot see, a boy who dies on the floor for want of cash, a raid, a fire, a steel box of handwritten records carried out the front door. Brianna wins by becoming the one thing Perez can’t survive — public. The season ends in a rented back room over a laundromat, one lamp, one phone, and a caller who says: “Your mother gave me this number. I need to tell you what happened the night she died.”
Casting List
The characters.
Age: 25 (and 22 in flashback)
BRIANNA ANDERSON
Role: SERIES LEAD
Age: 34
SAINT
Role: THE ANTAGONIST ON THE STREET
Age: 64 (61 in flashback)
ANGELIC LARKIN
Role: THE FOUNDATION
Age: 23
MALVIN
Role: THE HEART — ROMANCE ENGINE
Age: 27
ADELE WATSON
Role: THE FRACTURE
Age: 50s
DETECTIVE GRAY
Role: THE ANTAGONIST WHO TURNS
Age: 59
CHIEF ALEX PEREZ
Role: THE VILLAIN
Age: 30
TREE
Role: RETURNING GUEST — RUNS PRYOR STREET
Age: 19
JOJO
Role: RETURNING GUEST
Age: 20
DANTE
Role: RETURNING GUEST
Age: 40
DELROY
Role: RETURNING GUEST — THE DEALER
Age: 30s
ROSA ORTIZ
Role: RETURNING GUEST
Age: 9
MATEO ORTIZ
Role: RETURNING GUEST
Age: 38 (flashback) / d. 40
KELLY "MISS BRENDA" ANDERSON
Role: THE SPINE — FLASHBACK / VOICE
Featured role · SERIES LEAD
BRIANNA ANDERSON
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black female, 25. Honey-brown, 5’6″, braids, black scrubs. RN by way of a two-year sprint she should not have survived; three years clean off heroin. Runs Street Nurses because her mother built it and died before she could hand it over. In flashback (Eps 2–4) she plays 22, forty pounds lighter, nothing behind the eyes, being beaten by her dealer in an alley — same actress.
She is the only person in the show who never gets to flinch. Every episode hands her one impossible call and eighty seconds to make it; her tell is that she throws up afterward, alone. Her ritual — “Give me sixty,” counting a patient to sixty while she assesses them — is the show’s signature and becomes the antagonist’s death clock. Requires an actress who can carry medical procedure in close-up with her hands and hold a nineteen-hour interrogation in a paper jumpsuit.
Signature line: “We do the Lord’s work. But it ain’t free.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 30 — "CARE WITH CAUTION"
Read for the role of BRIANNA ANDERSON.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 30 — "CARE WITH CAUTION"
EPISODE 30
“CARE WITH CAUTION”
SEASON FINALE. HOOK: two cots, one lamp, one phone.
INT. LAUNDROMAT – BACK ROOM – DAY
A rented room over a laundromat, twelve feet by twenty. The
floor hums from the dryers below.
Two cots. One exam table Malvin got from somewhere and
nobody asked. A work lamp clamped to a water pipe. A coffee
can on a shelf.
And a phone. An actual desk phone, hard-wired, sitting on an
upturned milk crate in the middle of the floor.
Angelic hangs a moving blanket on a chain. Four spiral
notebooks stacked on a shelf where the wall of names used to
be.
Malvin comes in with a box and sets it down. He and Brianna
look at each other for slightly too long.
MALVIN
That’s the last of it.
BRIANNA
Okay.
MALVIN
Bri – about Tree. What I was doing.
Two years. I should’ve –
BRIANNA
Malvin.
She puts her hand on his arm. It is the first time she has
ever done that.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
Not today.
A knock on the doorframe.
MATEO, 9, in a jacket too big for him, holding a broom he
has clearly brought from somewhere else.
MATEO
The lady said I could stay till
five.
Nobody in this room is going to send that boy home.
ANGELIC
Then you better sweep, baby, ’cause
it’s filthy in here.
INT. LAUNDROMAT – BACK ROOM – LATER
Dusk. The others gone. Just Brianna and Mateo and the broom
and the hum of the dryers.
Brianna stands in front of the one bare wall with a marker
in her hand.
BRIANNA
Mateo. Come here.
He comes. She holds the marker out to him.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
You came through the door and you
walked back out. You’re first.
Mateo takes the marker in a fist and writes his own name on
a bare wall in a room over a laundromat, big and crooked and
about nine inches tall.
CLOSE: MATEO.
Brianna sits down on the milk crate beside the phone and
looks at it.
One name on a hundred square feet of empty wall.
The phone rings.
Mateo turns around. Brianna does not move for two full
rings, because only four people on earth have this number
and three of them are gone home.
She picks up.
BRIANNA
Street Nurses.
A pause on the line. A woman’s voice – older, careful,
somebody who has rehearsed this call for a long time.
WOMAN (V.O.)
Is this Brenda’s daughter?
BRIANNA
Who is this?
WOMAN (V.O.)
She gave me this number a long time
ago. She said if it ever got bad, I
should call it, and she said you’d
be the one to answer it.
Brianna is on her feet.
BRIANNA
Ma’am. Who is this?
WOMAN (V.O.)
I need to tell you what happened
the night your mother died.
BRIANNA
My mother died of cancer. In a bed.
I was in the chair.
WOMAN (V.O.)
I know.
Beat.
WOMAN (V.O.) (CONT’D)
I was in the room too.
On Brianna.
BUTTON. END OF SEASON ONE.
Featured role · THE ANTAGONIST ON THE STREET
SAINT
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black male, 34. Runs his side of South Atlanta. Calm in a room where nobody else is. Watches Brianna count a dying boy to sixty in Episode 1 and takes the ritual for himself: from Episode 12 on, whenever Saint is deciding something, he counts on his fingers, and everyone in the room goes still because somebody has until he stops. Calls her “nurse,” never Brianna — he does not use her name until Episode 28, and when he does it lands like a gunshot.
He grants the favor that puts Brianna on his books (Ep 12), demands the clinic exclusive to his people (Ep 13), comes for Dante’s body and is refused (Ep 21), and buys her publicly in front of every camera in Atlanta (Ep 28). Never loud. Never a cartoon. The most dangerous man in the show is the most reasonable.
Signature line: “Favors ain’t free, nurse. You just went on my books.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 12 — "WHAT YOU OWE"
Read for the role of SAINT.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 12 — "WHAT YOU OWE"
EPISODE 12
“WHAT YOU OWE”
BLOCK HOOK. HOOK: she walks into the trap house without her
bag.
INT. TRAP HOUSE – FRONT ROOM – NIGHT
The same door as Episode One. It opens. The guns come up.
Brianna walks in. No duffel. No gloves. Nothing in her hands
at all, which is the only reason anybody in this room looks
twice.
BRIANNA
I’m not here to work.
SAINT, in a chair, a plate of food in front of him. He sets
down the fork.
SAINT
No?
BRIANNA
Malvin got picked up on Boulevard
with the van.
SAINT
The tall one. Held your light on
Pryor.
BRIANNA
He’s twenty-three. He’s got a
mother who thinks he drives for a
hospital. And he will sit in that
room and say nothing for four hours
because he thinks that’s what
protects me, and then they’ll
charge him for the van, and the van
has my mother’s address on it.
SAINT
And that’s my business how?
BRIANNA
It isn’t. That’s why I’m asking
instead of telling.
Something moves across Saint’s face. Nobody comes in here
and says it that plainly.
SAINT
You want a favor.
BRIANNA
I want him out tonight.
SAINT
He yours?
She does not answer that, and the not-answering is the
answer.
And Saint starts to count.
One finger. Two. Three. Silently, against his own thigh,
eyes on her.
And the entire room goes still – every man in it stops what
he is doing, because they know this and Brianna does not.
Four. Five. Six.
Nobody breathes. Brianna holds absolutely steady, which is
the only thing she has to offer.
Nine. Ten. Eleven.
Saint stops at eleven.
SAINT
Done. He’ll be on the sidewalk
before midnight.
The room exhales. Malvin is free and it took eleven seconds
and one phone call that has not even been made yet.
Brianna knows better than to say thank you. She turns for
the door.
SAINT (CONT’D)
Nurse.
She stops.
SAINT (CONT’D)
You know what I like about that
thing you do? Give me sixty?
He picks the fork back up.
SAINT (CONT’D)
Everybody in the room gets quiet.
He takes a bite. Chews. Swallows.
SAINT (CONT’D)
Mine does the same thing. Only
difference is what’s waiting at the
end of it.
Brianna looks at his hand on the table. The fingers he was
counting on.
SAINT (CONT’D)
Favors ain’t free. You just went on
my books. Both of you.
BUTTON. END OF BLOCK TWO.
STREET NURSE
SEASON ONE · BLOCK THREE · EPISODES 13-18
“THE LEAK”
CREATED AND WRITTEN BY ALVIN V. WILLIAMS
BLOCK FUNCTION. Three walls close at once. Saint collects on
the favor and asks for the one thing the clinic cannot give.
Gray finds out what the 2009 file is actually for – and it
was never opened to investigate Kelly Anderson, it was
opened to find her. And the man who left Brianna in that
alley comes through the door bleeding.
The chain of this block is the chain of the whole season:
Brianna breaks Rule Two in Episode 15. Because she breaks
it, she leaves Room Three open in Episode 16. Because the
room is open, Adele finds the records. Because Adele finds
the records, Perez gets the address. Because Perez gets the
address, there is a raid in Episode 24. One broken rule, one
building lost.
ADELE’S FLOOR. Episode 17 is Adele on the tile, not a
colleague. Two days later she steps back from a femoral. The
audience has watched her go down for twelve episodes;
Episode 18 is not a surprise, it is a verdict.
Featured role · THE FOUNDATION
ANGELIC LARKIN
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black female, 64. Dark brown, 5’4″, warm as honey, Masters in Nursing, cannot say no to anyone in need. Co-founded Street Nurses with Miss Brenda — the only person alive who stood next to her. Gave up a child at sixteen and has been treating other people’s children ever since. Reads paperbacks in a folding chair beside the bed while patients wake up.
The institutional memory and the moral floor. She is the one who says “your mother wouldn’t,” the one who gets four patients out through the alley during the raid, and the one who works the block with a phone and sixty-four years of goodwill until there are three hundred people outside the precinct (Ep 26). That is how Brianna actually wins.
Signature line: “Whatever you put out comes back. Every time.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 3 — "NOT A HOSPITAL"
Read for the role of ANGELIC LARKIN.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 3 — "NOT A HOSPITAL"
EPISODE 3
“NOT A HOSPITAL”
HOOK: the first frame tells you where you are, and it is
nowhere good.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – ROOM THREE – DAY (THREE YEARS
EARLIER)
CLOSE: an IV bag. It hangs off a bent wire coat hanger,
hooked over a curtain rod screwed into plaster. A clamp lamp
behind it burns the fluid orange.
The line runs down out of frame. We follow it.
Past a coffee can half full of used needles. Past a wall the
color of old mint, peeling to pink. Past a room divider that
is a moving blanket hung on chain.
To a hand. To an arm. To BRIANNA, 22, opening one eye.
No monitors. No rails. No chart. No call button. No sound in
the whole building except a window AC unit and pipes.
Her face is stitched. Her arm is splinted with what appears
to be a paint stirrer.
In a folding chair beside the bed, shoes off, reading a
paperback – ANGELIC LARKIN, 61.
ANGELIC
(not looking up)
There she is.
BRIANNA (22)
What hospital is this?
ANGELIC
It isn’t one.
Brianna tries to sit up. Her body declines.
BRIANNA (22)
Then take this out of my arm.
ANGELIC
I will. When you can stand up
without me catching you.
Brianna looks at the door. It has no lock on it. That is
somehow worse.
BRIANNA (22)
How long.
ANGELIC
Four days.
BRIANNA (22)
Four –
ANGELIC
You were loud about it, too. Whole
four days.
Angelic finally closes the book.
ANGELIC (CONT’D)
You counted. Over and over. One to
sixty, start again. Sixty, start
again.
Something moves in Brianna’s face for the first time.
BRIANNA (22)
…My mother used to do that. When
I was little. She’d hold my hand
and make me count to sixty.
Angelic nods slowly, like a woman confirming a diagnosis she
was hoping to be wrong about.
ANGELIC
I know she did.
BUTTON.
Episode 5 — “THE CUT”
EPISODE 5
“THE CUT”
HOOK: cash on a folding table and a woman who has not slept
since Tuesday.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – FRONT DESK – NIGHT (PRESENT DAY)
A reception desk built out of two filing cabinets and a
door. One work lamp over it. Behind it, the wall of names –
three years longer than the last time we saw it.
Saint’s money on the desk in a stack.
The whole team. It is three people. MALVIN, 23, tall, still
in his jacket, because he has not been inside long enough to
take it off. ANGELIC, 64, a cup of coffee she is not
drinking. ADELE WATSON, 27, on her phone.
Brianna counts the bills. She is in the same scrubs from
Episode One, and they are the wrong color now.
BRIANNA
Twelve hundred. Eight goes to
supply, four splits three ways.
ADELE
(not looking up)
Four splits three ways is a hundred
and thirty-three dollars.
BRIANNA
It is.
ADELE
I pulled a nine-hour shift for a
hundred and thirty-three dollars.
ANGELIC
You pulled a nine-hour shift for
free, baby. The hundred and
thirty-three is a tip.
Malvin almost laughs. Adele does not.
ADELE
Miss Brenda used to split it even.
The room cools about ten degrees. Angelic sets down her cup.
ANGELIC
Miss Brenda used to split it even
because Miss Brenda used to buy the
sutures out her own check. You want
it even, buy the sutures.
Malvin has been watching Brianna, not the money.
MALVIN
When’d you sleep?
BRIANNA
I’m good.
MALVIN
That’s not the question I asked.
ANGELIC
(to nobody)
Tuesday.
MALVIN
Tuesday?
ANGELIC
She had a man in Two with a chest
tube. She don’t leave ’em. Never
has.
BRIANNA
I’m standing right here.
ANGELIC
Barely.
Malvin reaches into the jacket he has not taken off and
comes out with a sheet of paper folded once. He has been
carrying it since he walked in. He did not want to be the
one.
MALVIN
This was taped on the front door.
Adele takes it, because she is closest. Reads. Her thumb
stops moving on her phone.
ADELE
It’s a shutoff notice. Power.
Fourteen days.
MALVIN
Okay so we pay it –
ANGELIC
Pay it with what account, baby?
This building don’t have a tenant.
It don’t have a meter in anybody’s
name. It has not had a bill in
nineteen years.
Beat. Brianna takes the notice.
BRIANNA
Then somebody had to go downtown
and ask for one.
Adele’s phone buzzes. She glances at it and stands.
ADELE
My cat’s sitter. Two seconds.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – STAIRWELL – CONTINUOUS
The door shuts. Adele puts the phone to her ear. Her voice
drops into something flatter and much older.
ADELE
It’s the same as I told you last
month. There’s nothing here.
She listens.
ADELE (CONT’D)
I said I’m looking.
She listens again. Then, quietly, and she hates herself the
whole time she says it:
ADELE (CONT’D)
How much.
BUTTON.
Featured role · THE HEART — ROMANCE ENGINE
MALVIN
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black male, 23. 6’3″, high-top fade, gray eyes, LPN. Ran from an abusive father at twelve, did gang time, got out. He keeps the Ragged Building running and has quietly been paying Tree for two years to keep it standing. Brianna was the one good thing in his childhood and he has never once told her. Careful about everything except the one thing — his face is nobody’s on purpose, which is why a traced van plate lands so hard.
The slow burn: he is in love with her and every episode he chooses her safety over the mission, which is exactly the wrong instinct in this job. He drives the supply run into a traffic stop (Ep 11), is the man Saint springs, carries JoJo through the door (Ep 18), and is the practical voice when the team splits over what to do with a body (Ep 21). He finds Adele’s phone.
Signature line: “Family is who you pick.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 19 — "RETALIATION"
Read for the role of MALVIN.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 19 — "RETALIATION"
EPISODE 19
“RETALIATION”
HOOK: Malvin puts an envelope on a table in a house he swore
he would never go back into.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – ROOM TWO – DAY
Morning after. The blood is off the floor of the exam room
and nobody has slept.
On the cot in Two – DANTE, the boy from Episode One, shirt
off, a fresh graze across the ribs that Brianna is closing
without being asked to. He has come back to the only place
he knows.
DANTE
Nurse. I keep ending up in here.
BRIANNA
Then stop standing where people
shoot.
DANTE
Saint says I’m supposed to stay
till you say.
BRIANNA
Saint’s right. You’re in that bed
till tonight. Don’t make me count.
Something like a grin. He is twenty years old and he has
been shot twice this season and he still thinks this is a
story he will tell.
Brianna finishes the last knot and looks up, past him,
through the open door.
Malvin, in the hallway. Jacket on. Not coming in.
MALVIN
I got to go do something.
BRIANNA
You’re doing the face you do.
MALVIN
I don’t got a face.
BRIANNA
You got a whole face.
He goes out the door. She lets him.
INT. TREE’S HOUSE – FRONT ROOM – DAY
A house full of people who are not talking. A folding chair.
A boy’s photograph propped on the mantel with a candle in
front of it that nobody has lit yet.
TREE, in the chair, forearms on her knees, eyes red and dry.
The woman who has never once raised her voice does not need
to now.
Malvin sets an envelope on the table. It is thick.
MALVIN
That’s everything I got and
everything I’m gonna have.
TREE
What is it.
MALVIN
It’s the same thing it’s been for
two years, Tree.
Somebody in the room turns their head. This is news to them.
TREE
Say it out loud.
MALVIN
Every month. Two years. So that
building stays off your list.
Tree looks at the envelope like it is an object from another
planet.
TREE
She know?
MALVIN
No.
TREE
Course she don’t. ‘Cause if she
knew, she’d have made you stop, and
then I’d have burned that place
down two years ago, and my brother
would’ve had somewhere to go.
That lands in Malvin like a hammer.
MALVIN
Tree –
TREE
They asked him for money.
MALVIN
That is not what happened.
TREE
Two people carried him in there and
both of ’em came out and both of
’em said the same thing. Woman in
the doorway wanted four hundred
dollars and my brother bled out on
the floor.
And Malvin cannot say that it is untrue, because a version
of it is not.
TREE (CONT’D)
I told her. I stood in my own
doorway and I told her. It’s going
to get you killed and I’m going to
be sorry.
Beat.
TREE (CONT’D)
I’m not sorry no more.
She picks up the envelope, weighs it, and hands it back.
TREE (CONT’D)
Your account’s closed.
EXT. RAGGED BUILDING – SYCAMORE STREET – DUSK
Malvin comes around the corner on foot and slows down.
Cars along the curb. Four of them. Then six. Doors opening
in no particular hurry.
He starts to run.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – FRONT DESK – CONTINUOUS
Angelic looks up from the desk at the sound of nothing at
all.
The front window comes apart across the waiting room.
BUTTON.
Featured role · THE FRACTURE
ADELE WATSON
CHARACTER PROFILE
Female, 27. Baton Rouge money, blunt, funny, permanently on her phone. Genuinely gifted with her hands under pressure — flawless when someone else is in charge, which is the whole tragedy — and nobody ever asked to see her license. She sat the RN exam four times and never passed. She is not corrupt; she is trapped, expensive and using. Ep 9 is hers alone: after a pill sale in a deli bathroom she takes one herself and counts to sixty in the mirror waiting for it to hit.
Her spine is one line: the phone call (Ep 5), the pill (Ep 9), photographing the records (Ep 16), the bathroom floor overdose (Ep 17), stepping back from JoJo’s table (Ep 18), the exam letters (Ep 22), and running to Perez with everything (Ep 23). Requires an actress who can be liked for fifteen episodes before the audience learns what she is.
Signature line: “Pics or it didn’t happen.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 22 — "SHE WAS NEVER A NURSE"
Read for the role of ADELE WATSON.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 22 — "SHE WAS NEVER A NURSE"
EPISODE 22
“SHE WAS NEVER A NURSE”
HOOK: a phone slid across a desk.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – FRONT DESK – NIGHT
The phone on the desk between Malvin and Brianna. Angelic
behind them with her arms folded, going gray.
Brianna scrolls. Four hundred photographs of her mother’s
handwriting.
MALVIN
Keep going.
She keeps going. A thread with a contact saved as nothing at
all. Good girl. Same as last time.
MALVIN (CONT’D)
Keep going.
And under it, in the mail app, a folder she has clearly gone
into a hundred times at three in the morning.
CLOSE: GEORGIA BOARD OF NURSING. Four messages. Four dates
across five years.
RESULT: FAIL. RESULT: FAIL. RESULT: FAIL. RESULT: FAIL.
Angelic says something under her breath and puts her hand
over her eyes. Malvin does not. He has known since the exam
room.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – CAFE – CONTINUOUS
Adele in a chair. She has not been dragged in. She walked in
and sat down when they asked her to, which is somehow worse.
Brianna puts the phone on the table.
BRIANNA
Say it.
ADELE
You already read it.
BRIANNA
Say it out loud in this room.
Adele looks up. No tears. She has done all that alone, for
years.
ADELE
I’m not a nurse.
Nobody moves.
ADELE (CONT’D)
I did the school. I did the whole
four years, I did the clinicals, I
did everything you did. I sat that
exam four times.
ANGELIC
Adele.
ADELE
And I was good in here! You know I
was good in here. Two years, and
every person I put my hands on in
this building walked back out that
door –
MALVIN
Not all of them.
That stops the room. He does not say the boy’s name. He does
not have to.
ADELE
(quietly)
I couldn’t do a femoral. I have
never done a femoral. I have never
had anybody standing behind me
while I learned how.
And there is the truth: the money was never the reason. It
was the sentence she could say out loud.
BRIANNA
Do you understand what you’ve done
to this building?
ADELE
I know what I’ve done to me.
BRIANNA
No. Listen. Every patient I ever
handed you is now a felony with my
name on it. Not practicing without
a license – aggravated battery.
Reckless conduct. Eleven years of
my mother’s work, and you have
turned every single file in that
box into an exhibit.
Brianna picks up the phone.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
Get out of my mother’s building.
Adele stands. Gets as far as the doorway.
And then, because she is going to lose everything anyway and
because some part of her wants Brianna to have this before
it happens:
ADELE
They never wanted the records.
Brianna turns.
ADELE (CONT’D)
They wanted the address. I gave
them that in March.
BUTTON.
Featured role · THE ANTAGONIST WHO TURNS
DETECTIVE GRAY
CHARACTER PROFILE
Male, 50s. Coat always on, coffee always gone cold. The cop assigned to close the clinic. Reads Brianna correctly on first contact and refuses to treat her like a suspect, which puts him on the wrong side of his own chief. Buys her a coffee and shows her a file he isn’t supposed to have. Learns in Ep 14 what Perez is really hunting and sits on it until Ep 27, when he opens the steel box at his desk, finds the 2009 entry in Brenda’s handwriting, and puts it in front of the D.A. with Perez’s name on top.
The pressure that never lets up in Blocks Two through Four and the release valve in Block Five. He is the audience’s proof that the system contains individuals.
Signature line: “I’m not asking what you do. I’m asking who was afraid of your mother.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 7 — "YOUR MOTHER'S NAME"
ead for the role of DETECTIVE GRAY.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 7 — "YOUR MOTHER'S NAME"
EPISODE 7
“YOUR MOTHER’S NAME”
FIRST PAID EPISODE. Opens on the exact frame Episode 6 ended
on.
INT. HOSPITAL – WAITING ROOM – CONTINUOUS
Gray, seated. The photograph of Brianna turned toward her.
Brianna, standing, phone still in her hand.
Ten feet of orange carpet between them.
BRIANNA
Am I under arrest?
GRAY
You’re under a coffee. Sit down.
She does not sit down.
GRAY (CONT’D)
You walked a nine-year-old through
those doors on a referral signed by
a physician who retired in 2017.
Nobody in this building is going to
notice that for about six weeks.
BRIANNA
And then?
GRAY
And then somebody in billing files
it and it goes nowhere, because a
boy with a burst appendix is not a
case anybody’s making rank on.
He sets the photograph face down on the seat beside him.
Deliberate.
GRAY (CONT’D)
I’m not here about the boy.
He takes a folder out of his coat. Old. Softened at the
corners. He does not hand it to her – he opens it on his
knee and turns it, the way he turned the picture.
CLOSE: a case file tab. ANDERSON, KELLY M. Opened 04/2009.
There is no closing date.
Brianna sits down.
BRIANNA
That’s my mother.
GRAY
I know.
BRIANNA
She died of ovarian cancer four
years ago. In a bed. With me in the
chair.
GRAY
I know that too.
He lets that sit exactly as long as it needs to.
GRAY (CONT’D)
Miss Anderson. I don’t care what
you do at night. I’ve been police
thirty-one years and I have never
once been able to explain why the
gunshot wounds in the Fourth
precinct don’t show up in a
hospital and don’t show up in a
morgue either. I’ve decided I don’t
want to know.
BRIANNA
Then what do you want.
GRAY
I want to know who was afraid of
your mother.
Brianna looks at the tab again. 2009. She would have been
eleven.
BRIANNA
Who opened it?
Gray closes the folder. Puts it back inside his coat.
Stands, slowly, favoring one leg he did not favor when he
sat down.
GRAY
That’s the part I can’t tell you.
BRIANNA
Why not?
GRAY
Because he’s the man who gave me
thirty days to shut you down.
He walks out. Brianna does not move.
BUTTON.
Episode 27 — “CHAIN OF CUSTODY”
EPISODE 27
“CHAIN OF CUSTODY”
HOOK: a man alone at a desk with a box he booked in himself.
INT. POLICE PRECINCT – EVIDENCE – DAY
An empty cage. Gray alone at the counter with the log open,
writing his own name on the line under his own name.
He booked it in. He is signing it out. There is nobody to
ask him why, which is the point.
INT. POLICE PRECINCT – GRAY’S OFFICE – LATER
Blinds down. The box open on the desk. Gray with reading
glasses on, going through eleven years of a dead woman’s
handwriting, one page at a time, in a room where he can hear
three hundred people through the window.
Hours of this. His coffee goes cold. He does not turn on the
overhead.
Then his hand stops.
CLOSE: an index card. April 2009. A first name. And beneath
it, in the same small forward-leaning hand, four lines
written by a woman who knew exactly what she was writing and
wrote it anyway:
CLOSE (CARD): “ANDRE. 24. GSW x2, BACK. NO WEAPON PRESENT
- OFFICER PRESENT ID’D SELF AS SGT A. PEREZ. HE TOLD ME
TO GO HOME. I DID NOT GO HOME.”
Gray takes his glasses off.
He sits in the dark with that card in his hand for a long,
long time, and outside the window three hundred people wait
for something.
He is fifty-eight years old. He has nineteen months to a
pension.
INT. DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE – DAY
A different room. Better carpet. A DEPUTY D.A., 40s, looks
up at a detective standing in her doorway with a gray steel
box in both arms.
DEPUTY D.A.
Detective, if this is the Sycamore
case, I’ve got it on my desk
already –
Gray sets the box down on her desk and puts one index card
on top of it, face up, turned toward her.
GRAY
It isn’t the Sycamore case.
She reads it. Reads it again.
DEPUTY D.A.
Who else has seen this?
GRAY
Nobody. I pulled it out of evidence
myself, I carried it here myself,
and I did not photograph it or copy
it or tell one other person in that
building.
He puts his own signed evidence log down beside it.
GRAY (CONT’D)
I’m the chain of custody. Start
with me.
BUTTON.
Featured role · THE VILLAIN
CHIEF ALEX PEREZ
CHARACTER PROFILE
Male, 59, Latino. Rich brown, salt-and-pepper, gravel voice, one leg that doesn’t bend right from a stabbing. Looks exactly like somebody’s decent uncle. Reliable, fearless, genuinely believes in justice — and in 2009 shot an unarmed man and dropped a weapon beside him. He is heard before he is seen (voice, Ep 14) and walks into the series in person for the first time in Ep 25, into an interview room no chief ever sits in.
Every raid, every warrant, every threat this season is a man trying to find one piece of paper. When he says Brianna’s mother’s name out loud his voice does something it shouldn’t, and she hears it.
Signature line: “Justice always comes around. I’ve just got to be standing somewhere else when it does.”
SIDES
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Episode 23 — "THE WARRANT"
Read for the role of CHIEF ALEX PEREZ.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 23 — "THE WARRANT"
EPISODE 23
“THE WARRANT”
HOOK: a woman signing her name over and over in a room with
no windows.
INT. POLICE PRECINCT – INTERVIEW ROOM – DAY
Adele at a metal table. A statement in front of her. A pen.
Nine pages, and she is initialing every one.
Across from her, out of frame from the shoulders up, a MAN’S
HANDS. One of them turns each page for her as she finishes
- Unhurried. Patient. The voice from Episode 14.
PEREZ (O.S.)
Room by room.
ADELE
Front desk, cafe, six rooms on one,
bunks on two. Generator’s in the
back stairwell now.
PEREZ (O.S.)
And the box.
ADELE
Room Three. In the wall.
The hand slides the last page toward her.
PEREZ (O.S.)
And you have immunity from
prosecution in this state as of the
moment you sign that.
Adele looks at the line for a long time.
ADELE
Nobody in that building has a gun.
PEREZ (O.S.)
Sign the page, Miss Watson.
She signs it.
INT. POLICE PRECINCT – OBSERVATION – CONTINUOUS
GRAY on the other side of the glass. He has watched all nine
pages.
The door opens behind him. Footsteps with a hitch in them –
one leg that does not bend the way the other one does.
A hand comes into frame and lays a signed warrant on the
ledge in front of Gray.
PEREZ (O.S.)
You wanted a judge.
Gray does not pick it up.
GRAY
Sir. Can I ask you something.
PEREZ (O.S.)
You can ask.
GRAY
April of ’09. Officer-involved on
Ashby. There’s a file on the
responding nurse and it never
closed.
A very long pause. Through the glass, Adele is being walked
out by a uniform.
PEREZ (O.S.)
What file?
Gray looks at the reflection in the glass – a shape in a
doorway, out of focus, no face.
Then he picks up the warrant.
GRAY
I’ll take it myself.
BUTTON.
Episode 25 — “THE DEAL”
EPISODE 25
“THE DEAL”
HOOK: the door opens and the villain finally has a face.
INT. POLICE PRECINCT – INTERVIEW ROOM – DAY
Brianna at a metal table in a paper jumpsuit, hands loose in
front of her. Nineteen hours in this room.
The door opens.
And CHIEF ALEX PEREZ, 59, walks in for the first time in
this series – salt-and-pepper, gravel voice, one leg that
does not bend right, a man who looks exactly like somebody’s
decent uncle.
He sits down across from her with a folder he does not open.
PEREZ
You know how many chiefs sit in a
room like this? None. Not one. It
isn’t done.
BRIANNA
Then why are you.
PEREZ
Because I want this finished today.
He sets his hands flat on the table.
PEREZ (CONT’D)
Practicing without a license.
Conspiracy. Aggravated battery on
nine counts, and that’s only the
ones your friend could remember by
name. That is twelve years, Miss
Anderson, and I have a woman with
immunity who will say all of it on
a stand.
BRIANNA
Okay.
PEREZ
Or.
And there it is.
PEREZ (CONT’D)
You plead to one misdemeanor. The
building closes. You surrender the
license and you leave the state of
Georgia, and I will personally make
sure not one of those nine counts
is ever typed into a computer.
BRIANNA
Why.
PEREZ
Because I am sixty years old and I
have watched this city bury enough
of its daughters.
It is a good line. He has used it before. It has always
worked.
PEREZ (CONT’D)
Your mother was a fine nurse and
she made one bad decision and it
has cost this city eleven years of
chaos. Don’t make hers.
And there. The name. And something goes wrong in his voice
on the word “mother” – a quarter of a beat, a place where
the gravel catches.
Brianna hears it. Everything in her face changes and none of
it shows.
BRIANNA
You knew her.
PEREZ
I knew of her.
BRIANNA
Chief. Can I ask you something
before I sign anything.
PEREZ
Ask.
Brianna leans forward.
BRIANNA
What was Andre Cole holding?
Perez does not move. Does not blink. Does not breathe.
Nineteen hours in a room and she has been reading her
mother’s handwriting in her head the entire time.
BUTTON.
Featured role · RETURNING GUEST — RUNS PRYOR STREET
TREE
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black female, 30s. Runs the other side of Pryor Street and has never once raised her voice. Malvin has been paying her, not a stranger, for two years. JoJo is her little brother. Tells Brianna in Ep 10 that the no-sides rule will get her killed; comes back in Ep 19 with red, dry eyes after JoJo dies on the clinic floor and takes the building. Two episodes; both anchor a block.
SIDES
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Episode 19 — "RETALIATION"
Read for the role of TREE.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 19 — "RETALIATION"
EPISODE 19
“RETALIATION”
HOOK: Malvin puts an envelope on a table in a house he swore
he would never go back into.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – ROOM TWO – DAY
Morning after. The blood is off the floor of the exam room
and nobody has slept.
On the cot in Two – DANTE, the boy from Episode One, shirt
off, a fresh graze across the ribs that Brianna is closing
without being asked to. He has come back to the only place
he knows.
DANTE
Nurse. I keep ending up in here.
BRIANNA
Then stop standing where people
shoot.
DANTE
Saint says I’m supposed to stay
till you say.
BRIANNA
Saint’s right. You’re in that bed
till tonight. Don’t make me count.
Something like a grin. He is twenty years old and he has
been shot twice this season and he still thinks this is a
story he will tell.
Brianna finishes the last knot and looks up, past him,
through the open door.
Malvin, in the hallway. Jacket on. Not coming in.
MALVIN
I got to go do something.
BRIANNA
You’re doing the face you do.
MALVIN
I don’t got a face.
BRIANNA
You got a whole face.
He goes out the door. She lets him.
INT. TREE’S HOUSE – FRONT ROOM – DAY
A house full of people who are not talking. A folding chair.
A boy’s photograph propped on the mantel with a candle in
front of it that nobody has lit yet.
TREE, in the chair, forearms on her knees, eyes red and dry.
The woman who has never once raised her voice does not need
to now.
Malvin sets an envelope on the table. It is thick.
MALVIN
That’s everything I got and
everything I’m gonna have.
TREE
What is it.
MALVIN
It’s the same thing it’s been for
two years, Tree.
Somebody in the room turns their head. This is news to them.
TREE
Say it out loud.
MALVIN
Every month. Two years. So that
building stays off your list.
Tree looks at the envelope like it is an object from another
planet.
TREE
She know?
MALVIN
No.
TREE
Course she don’t. ‘Cause if she
knew, she’d have made you stop, and
then I’d have burned that place
down two years ago, and my brother
would’ve had somewhere to go.
That lands in Malvin like a hammer.
MALVIN
Tree –
TREE
They asked him for money.
MALVIN
That is not what happened.
TREE
Two people carried him in there and
both of ’em came out and both of
’em said the same thing. Woman in
the doorway wanted four hundred
dollars and my brother bled out on
the floor.
And Malvin cannot say that it is untrue, because a version
of it is not.
TREE (CONT’D)
I told her. I stood in my own
doorway and I told her. It’s going
to get you killed and I’m going to
be sorry.
Beat.
TREE (CONT’D)
I’m not sorry no more.
She picks up the envelope, weighs it, and hands it back.
TREE (CONT’D)
Your account’s closed.
EXT. RAGGED BUILDING – SYCAMORE STREET – DUSK
Malvin comes around the corner on foot and slows down.
Cars along the curb. Four of them. Then six. Doors opening
in no particular hurry.
He starts to run.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – FRONT DESK – CONTINUOUS
Angelic looks up from the desk at the sound of nothing at
all.
The front window comes apart across the waiting room.
BUTTON.
Featured role · RETURNING GUEST
JOJO
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black male, 19. Small, skinny, Tree’s little brother. Planted in Ep 10 holding a stack of towels he was told to bring and cannot put down, watching Brianna’s hands like they are a magic trick. Comes back through the door in Ep 18 with a femoral bleed and no cash while Brianna is forty minutes away — and dies on the floor with six people watching. His name goes on the wall.
SIDES
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Episode 18 — "NO MONEY, NO HANDS"
Read for the role of JOJO.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 18 — "NO MONEY, NO HANDS"
EPISODE 18
“NO MONEY, NO HANDS”
BLOCK HOOK. Friday. HOOK: a kid comes through the door
already emptying out.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – FRONT DESK – NIGHT
The door bangs open. MALVIN comes through it carrying a
nineteen-year-old under both arms – JOJO, small, skinny, a
jacket tied around his thigh and completely soaked through.
The kid with the towels.
MALVIN
Table! Get the table!
A blood trail eight feet long behind them on the floor.
Angelic is already moving.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – EXAM ROOM – CONTINUOUS
JoJo on the table. Malvin’s fists in the wound. ADELE comes
in pulling gloves and stops one full step short of where she
should be standing.
Two days off the tile. Her hands are not steady and
everybody in the room can see it.
MALVIN
Femoral. It’s the femoral, Adele –
ADELE
Where’s Brianna.
MALVIN
Roswell. She’s in Roswell, she’s
got a man with a chest tube and she
won’t leave him –
ADELE
Then call her.
INT. VAN – DRIVING – INTERCUT
Brianna driving like the van owes her money. Phone on
speaker on the dash. Forty minutes of road in front of her.
BRIANNA
Adele. Listen to me. Pack it, clamp
above it, and get a line in him.
You have done this.
And Adele looks at the tray.
And Adele does not pick anything up off it.
ADELE
We don’t have a vascular kit.
That’s four hundred dollars and we
don’t have it.
MALVIN
He is nineteen years old!
ADELE
I know how old he is!
And that is the tell, and nobody in that room hears it,
because the only thing in her voice is terror.
BRIANNA (V.O.)
ADELE. Hands on him. NOW.
Adele takes one step back from the table.
Malvin looks up at her and something in his face changes
forever.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – EXAM ROOM – CONTINUOUS
Malvin takes his right hand out of the wound – he cannot
spare it and he does it anyway – and puts it around JoJo’s
hand.
MALVIN
Hey. Hey. JoJo. Look at me. Give me
sixty.
JOJO
(barely)
One… two…
MALVIN
That’s it. Three. Four.
JOJO
Five…
Six. Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
…
The count stops.
Malvin keeps going by himself for a while anyway.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – EXAM ROOM – LATER
Brianna comes through the door at a dead run and stops.
Angelic at the head of the table with her hand on the boy’s
forehead. Two patients from Four in the doorway who should
not be standing. Adele against the wall by the door, gloves
still on, still clean.
Malvin has not let go of JoJo’s hand.
Brianna crosses and puts two fingers on the boy’s throat
because she has to, because there is a procedure, and then
she takes them away.
BRIANNA
Who is he.
Malvin does not look up.
MALVIN
That’s Tree’s little brother.
And out of everybody in that room, Malvin is the only one
who understands exactly what is coming.
BUTTON. END OF BLOCK THREE.
STREET NURSE
SEASON ONE · BLOCK FOUR · EPISODES 19-24
“THE RAID”
CREATED AND WRITTEN BY ALVIN V. WILLIAMS
BLOCK FUNCTION. The team loses a body, a truth, and a home,
in that order. Malvin’s two-year secret comes out in Episode
19 and does not save anybody. Dante dies in Episode 20.
Adele is exposed in Episode 22 and the exposure is worse
than the betrayal – every patient that woman ever touched in
this building is now a criminal charge waiting to be filed.
Episode 24 is the raid.
PRODUCTION NOTE – DANTE. The death in Episode 20 is the boy
from Episode 1. He is back in Room Two at the top of Episode
19 with a fresh graze so that he is in the building when the
window comes apart. No pickup inserts are needed – the
audience met him in the first thirty seconds of the series,
and Saint’s line in Episode 28 (“they killed my boy in your
hallway”) closes the loop. One returning actor, two shoot
days.
EPISODE 21. Saint comes for the body. Brianna refuses him a
corpse the same way she refused him a clinic – and for the
first time she counts with him instead of waiting for him to
stop. That is the scene the season has been building toward
between those two, and it happens over a dead boy they both
held hands with.
Featured role · RETURNING GUEST
DANTE
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black male, 20. Saint’s. The boy on the mattress in Episode 1 — gray in the face, bleeding out, the first hand Brianna ever holds on camera and the count Saint watches. Returns to the clinic in Ep 19 and dies in the supply room in Ep 20 walking a woman out during the fire. Eps 1, 19, 20.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 1 — "I'M THE NURSE"
Read for the role of DANTE.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 1 — "I'M THE NURSE"
EPISODE 1
“I’M THE NURSE”
HOOK: 0-3s, a door, six guns, and a woman who does not stop
walking.
INT. TRAP HOUSE – BEDROOM – NIGHT
A door bangs open.
SIX HANDGUNS come up at once – fast, practiced, aimed
chest-high at whoever just walked in.
BRIANNA ANDERSON, 25, black scrubs, a duffel over her
shoulder, does not stop walking.
BRIANNA
I’m the nurse.
The guns come down. Nobody says thank you. Nobody says
anything.
On a bare mattress: DANTE, 20, gray in the face, a fist
pressed into his own thigh. The mattress under him has gone
from blue to black.
Standing over him – SAINT, 34. Calm in a room where nobody
else is.
SAINT
Forty minutes.
BRIANNA
(already kneeling)
Then be glad it wasn’t fifty.
She unzips the duffel. Gloves. Saline. Pliers wrapped in
foil.
She takes Dante’s hand.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
Look at me. Give me sixty.
DANTE
Give you what –
BRIANNA
Count. Out loud. With me.
And she starts. One. Two. Three.
He joins her, ragged. Four. Five.
While she counts she works – two fingers on his wrist, thumb
on his nail bed, penlight across his eyes, palm flat on his
chest to feel it rise.
The room stops moving. Six armed men, watching a woman count
to sixty with a boy who is bleeding out.
She hits sixty. She knows everything she needs to know.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
You’re not gonna die tonight.
Somebody get me towels.
Nobody moves for half a second – because Saint hasn’t. He is
looking at Brianna’s hand, still around Dante’s.
SAINT
(to himself, almost)
Sixty.
Then he nods, and the room comes back to life.
INT. TRAP HOUSE – BEDROOM – LATER
The bullet drops into a coffee can. Sutures going in, fast
and even.
Saint peels bills off a roll and sets them on the floor
beside her knee.
SAINT
Busy night out there, nurse?
BRIANNA
Same as any.
SAINT
You see anybody else with a hole in
’em? Anybody at all?
She does not look up. She does not stop stitching.
BRIANNA
Just you.
Two hours ago she took a bullet out of the man who put this
one in Dante. Saint studies the top of her head for a long
beat.
SAINT
Mm.
EXT. ALLEY – NIGHT
Brianna comes out the back. Steady. Professional. Twenty
feet. Thirty.
Then she stops, puts a hand on the brick, and throws up.
She wipes her mouth. Straightens.
And goes still.
She is looking at the wall. At a rust stain shaped like
nothing, four feet off the ground, beside a dumpster that
has not moved in a decade.
She knows this alley.
BUTTON.
Featured role · RETURNING GUEST — THE DEALER
DELROY
CHARACTER PROFILE
Male, 40s. Brianna’s dealer three years ago. Unhurried, holding a phone in one hand like the beating is an errand. “You said Friday last Friday.” Beats her and walks away in the flashback alley (Ep 2); returns in Ep 15. Never raises his voice; the menace is in how little the moment costs him.
SIDES
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Episode 2 — "LEFT FOR DEAD"
Read for the role of DELROY.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 2 — "LEFT FOR DEAD"
EPISODE 2
“LEFT FOR DEAD”
HOOK: same wall, same stain – and a card that drops us three
years.
EXT. ALLEY – NIGHT (THREE YEARS EARLIER)
The same brick. The same rust stain. The same dumpster.
Against the wall – BRIANNA, 22. Forty pounds lighter.
Nothing behind the eyes.
In front of her, DELROY, 40s, unhurried, holding a phone in
one hand like this is an errand.
DELROY
Four hundred.
BRIANNA (22)
Friday. I swear to God, Delroy –
DELROY
You said Friday last Friday.
BRIANNA (22)
I’m good for it.
DELROY
Nobody’s good for it. That’s the
whole business.
He hits her once. She goes down and does not get back up,
and he keeps going anyway, because the point was never the
four hundred.
When he stops he is barely breathing hard. He crouches,
pulls her shoes off, and puts them in his jacket.
DELROY (CONT’D)
Friday.
He walks out of the alley.
EXT. ALLEY – CONTINUOUS
Brianna on her side on the concrete. One eye is closing. She
cannot move her left arm and cannot make herself care.
Somewhere far off, a car alarm.
And then – quietly, through a split lip, without deciding to
–
BRIANNA (22)
One. Two. Three.
She does not know why she is doing it. Her mouth just knows.
BRIANNA (22) (CONT’D)
Four. Five…
She gets to nineteen. Twenty.
Her eye closes.
And two pairs of HANDS come down out of the dark and get
under her.
BUTTON.
Episode 15 — “RULE ONE”
EPISODE 15
“RULE ONE”
HOOK: the alley walks through the front door.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – EXAM ROOM – NIGHT
A man face-up on the table, shirt cut open, a stab wound low
and left and leaking badly. Two friends already backing
toward the hallway.
Brianna comes in pulling gloves on, eyes on the wound, not
the face.
BRIANNA
How long ago?
FRIEND
Twenty minutes. Maybe.
She leans over him with the penlight.
And stops.
DELROY. Three years older and twenty years worse. Gray at
the temples. Thin in a way that has a name. His arms tell
the whole story of what happened to him after that alley.
He looks up at her with nothing in his eyes but pain.
DELROY
You the nurse?
Long beat. Malvin, at the tray, looks up because Brianna has
not moved.
MALVIN
Bri.
Brianna takes his hand.
BRIANNA
Look at me. Give me sixty.
And they count. His hand in hers. One. Two. Three.
She works the exam and her face does not move at all, which
is its own kind of scream.
Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
It missed everything it could’ve
hit. You’re the luckiest man in
this building.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – EXAM ROOM – LATER
Sutures going in. The friends are gone. Just the two of them
and a work lamp.
And Brianna does the thing she has spent eleven years of
somebody else’s rules not doing.
BRIANNA
What happened.
Malvin, at the door, actually turns his head. In three years
nobody has heard Brianna ask that.
DELROY
Ain’t nothing. A boy owed me two
hundred dollars.
BRIANNA
Two hundred.
DELROY
It’s never the money.
Her hands keep working. Even. Perfect.
BRIANNA
Do you know me?
Delroy looks at her properly for the first time. He tries.
He genuinely tries.
DELROY
…Should I?
Beat.
BRIANNA
No.
She ties off the last stitch and steps back and strips the
gloves.
DELROY
Hey – I ain’t got nothing on me
tonight, baby. But I’m good for it.
Brianna stops in the doorway with her back to him.
BRIANNA
Nobody’s good for it.
She goes out.
BRIANNA (O.S.) (CONT’D)
That’s the whole business.
BUTTON.
Featured role · RETURNING GUEST
ROSA ORTIZ
CHARACTER PROFILE
Latina, 30s, single mother. Holds her nine-year-old’s shirt with one hand and stands where she can see the door. She will not let Brianna call an ambulance because there is a warrant attached to her name; she is the one person at the curb who cannot cross the line. Picked up in the hospital parking lot in Ep 8 while Brianna watches from across the street. Eps 6, 8. Spanish helpful.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 6 — "THE BOY WHO CAN'T GO"
Read for the role of ROSA ORTIZ.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 6 — "THE BOY WHO CAN'T GO"
EPISODE 6
“THE BOY WHO CAN’T GO”
PAYWALL EPISODE. The last free frame of the series.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – EXAM ROOM – NIGHT
MATEO ORTIZ, 9, on the table, knees to his chest, gray. His
mother ROSA, 30s, holds his shirt with one hand and stands
where she can see the door.
Brianna takes Mateo’s hand.
BRIANNA
Hey. Mateo. Look at me, not at her.
Give me sixty.
MATEO
Sixty what?
BRIANNA
Count. I’ll go with you.
They count. Her fingers at his wrist. Her palm flat on his
belly – and the second she presses, he screams and her face
changes and she keeps counting anyway, calm as church, all
the way to sixty.
She lets go of his hand. Steps to Rosa.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
His appendix is already open.
That’s not a maybe. He needs an OR
and an anesthesiologist and a
surgeon, and this building has none
of those things.
ROSA
No hospital.
BRIANNA
Ma’am –
ROSA
They take our names at the desk.
They put our names in a computer.
There is nobody else. It is me and
him.
And there it is, sitting on the table between them.
BRIANNA
If he stays in this room, he dies
in this room. Tonight. That is the
whole conversation.
Rosa looks at her son. Then at the door. Nobody in this room
is wrong.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – FRONT DESK – MOMENTS LATER
Brianna pulls a folder from a drawer – blank referral forms,
a clinic stamp, three different pens.
Angelic in the doorway.
ANGELIC
Brianna.
BRIANNA
Rule Four.
ANGELIC
Rule Four says one of us walks them
- It don’t say one of us forges a
referral and signs a doctor’s name
to it.
BRIANNA
(writing)
Then it’s an incomplete rule.
INT. HOSPITAL – EMERGENCY ENTRANCE – NIGHT
Automatic doors. White light. Overhead fluorescents. Monitor
tones down the corridor – the first time this series has
made that sound.
Brianna carries Mateo in with the folder on his chest. Rosa
stops dead at the curb outside, alone, at the exact line she
cannot cross.
Rosa says her son’s name once. He does not hear it.
INT. HOSPITAL – CORRIDOR – CONTINUOUS
A gurney. A triage nurse takes the folder, scans it, waves
them through. It works. It actually works.
TRIAGE NURSE
You riding with him?
BRIANNA
No, ma’am. He’s got people outside.
The doors swing shut with the boy on the other side of them.
And Brianna stops.
She puts her back against the wall and lets her face go –
all the way, for the first time in six episodes. Her eyes
close. Something that is almost a laugh comes out of her.
She gets her phone out to text Angelic. Two words: HE’S IN.
Her hands are shaking so badly she has to try it twice. They
did not shake once while the boy was on the table.
She sends it. Breathes. Smiles at nothing.
Then she turns around.
INT. HOSPITAL – WAITING ROOM – CONTINUOUS
Forty feet of orange chairs, almost all of them empty.
In one of them, DETECTIVE GRAY, 50s, coat on, coffee gone
cold beside him. He has been sitting here a while.
In his hand, face up on his knee, is a printed still from a
security camera.
It is her.
He does not stand. He does not reach for anything. He just
turns the picture around so she can see it, and waits.
BUTTON. END OF BLOCK ONE.
STREET NURSE
SEASON ONE · BLOCK TWO · EPISODES 7-12
“THE PRICE” · THE FIRST PAID BLOCK
CREATED AND WRITTEN BY ALVIN V. WILLIAMS
BLOCK FUNCTION. Episode 6 cost somebody something. Block Two
is the invoice. The boy lives and his mother does not
survive it. Adele keeps one pill for herself and we watch
her take it. Malvin puts the clinic’s address into a police
computer. And Brianna, to fix it, takes a favor from a man
who does not give them – which is the debt the back half of
the season collects on, from both of them.
Episode 7 has one job: justify the transaction inside ninety
seconds. It does that by giving the audience the thing Block
One only implied – somebody powerful was already hunting her
mother.
Episode 10 plants two things for later: JoJo, the kid with
the towels, and Saint clocking Malvin outside Tree’s
building. Both pay in Block Three.
Featured role · RETURNING GUEST
MATEO ORTIZ
CHARACTER PROFILE
Latino boy, 9. Ruptured appendix, knees to his chest on the exam table in the paywall episode (Ep 6). Brianna forges a referral and walks him into a real ER herself. He survives; his mother does not come home. Seen again three blocks from where he used to live (Ep 26) and in the finale in a jacket too big for him, holding a broom (Ep 30). Eps 6, 8, 26, 30. Minimal dialogue.
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 6 — "THE BOY WHO CAN'T GO"
Read for the role of MATEO ORTIZ.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 6 — "THE BOY WHO CAN'T GO"
EPISODE 6
“THE BOY WHO CAN’T GO”
PAYWALL EPISODE. The last free frame of the series.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – EXAM ROOM – NIGHT
MATEO ORTIZ, 9, on the table, knees to his chest, gray. His
mother ROSA, 30s, holds his shirt with one hand and stands
where she can see the door.
Brianna takes Mateo’s hand.
BRIANNA
Hey. Mateo. Look at me, not at her.
Give me sixty.
MATEO
Sixty what?
BRIANNA
Count. I’ll go with you.
They count. Her fingers at his wrist. Her palm flat on his
belly – and the second she presses, he screams and her face
changes and she keeps counting anyway, calm as church, all
the way to sixty.
She lets go of his hand. Steps to Rosa.
BRIANNA (CONT’D)
His appendix is already open.
That’s not a maybe. He needs an OR
and an anesthesiologist and a
surgeon, and this building has none
of those things.
ROSA
No hospital.
BRIANNA
Ma’am –
ROSA
They take our names at the desk.
They put our names in a computer.
There is nobody else. It is me and
him.
And there it is, sitting on the table between them.
BRIANNA
If he stays in this room, he dies
in this room. Tonight. That is the
whole conversation.
Rosa looks at her son. Then at the door. Nobody in this room
is wrong.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – FRONT DESK – MOMENTS LATER
Brianna pulls a folder from a drawer – blank referral forms,
a clinic stamp, three different pens.
Angelic in the doorway.
ANGELIC
Brianna.
BRIANNA
Rule Four.
ANGELIC
Rule Four says one of us walks them
- It don’t say one of us forges a
referral and signs a doctor’s name
to it.
BRIANNA
(writing)
Then it’s an incomplete rule.
INT. HOSPITAL – EMERGENCY ENTRANCE – NIGHT
Automatic doors. White light. Overhead fluorescents. Monitor
tones down the corridor – the first time this series has
made that sound.
Brianna carries Mateo in with the folder on his chest. Rosa
stops dead at the curb outside, alone, at the exact line she
cannot cross.
Rosa says her son’s name once. He does not hear it.
INT. HOSPITAL – CORRIDOR – CONTINUOUS
A gurney. A triage nurse takes the folder, scans it, waves
them through. It works. It actually works.
TRIAGE NURSE
You riding with him?
BRIANNA
No, ma’am. He’s got people outside.
The doors swing shut with the boy on the other side of them.
And Brianna stops.
She puts her back against the wall and lets her face go –
all the way, for the first time in six episodes. Her eyes
close. Something that is almost a laugh comes out of her.
She gets her phone out to text Angelic. Two words: HE’S IN.
Her hands are shaking so badly she has to try it twice. They
did not shake once while the boy was on the table.
She sends it. Breathes. Smiles at nothing.
Then she turns around.
INT. HOSPITAL – WAITING ROOM – CONTINUOUS
Forty feet of orange chairs, almost all of them empty.
In one of them, DETECTIVE GRAY, 50s, coat on, coffee gone
cold beside him. He has been sitting here a while.
In his hand, face up on his knee, is a printed still from a
security camera.
It is her.
He does not stand. He does not reach for anything. He just
turns the picture around so she can see it, and waits.
BUTTON. END OF BLOCK ONE.
STREET NURSE
SEASON ONE · BLOCK TWO · EPISODES 7-12
“THE PRICE” · THE FIRST PAID BLOCK
CREATED AND WRITTEN BY ALVIN V. WILLIAMS
BLOCK FUNCTION. Episode 6 cost somebody something. Block Two
is the invoice. The boy lives and his mother does not
survive it. Adele keeps one pill for herself and we watch
her take it. Malvin puts the clinic’s address into a police
computer. And Brianna, to fix it, takes a favor from a man
who does not give them – which is the debt the back half of
the season collects on, from both of them.
Episode 7 has one job: justify the transaction inside ninety
seconds. It does that by giving the audience the thing Block
One only implied – somebody powerful was already hunting her
mother.
Episode 10 plants two things for later: JoJo, the kid with
the towels, and Saint clocking Malvin outside Tree’s
building. Both pay in Block Three.
Featured role · THE SPINE — FLASHBACK / VOICE
KELLY "MISS BRENDA" ANDERSON
CHARACTER PROFILE
Black female, 38 in flashback. ER nurse. Brianna’s mother. Founded Street Nurses after a girl died in her hospital because she couldn’t afford the drug on the shelf. Died of cancer. Kept eleven years of handwritten patient records behind the drywall of Room Three — including what she saw on a body in 2009. Appears in a flash (Ep 4) and lives in the show as a stethoscope, a box of handwriting, and the memory of a woman kissing her daughter’s forehead at 2 a.m. and leaving. One shooting day.
Signature line: “God found the strongest women and made them nurses.”
SIDES
Audition sides
Episode 4 — "BRENDA'S GIRL"
Read for the role of KELLY "MISS BRENDA" ANDERSON.
See The Character Script
STREET NURSE
Season One ·Episode 4 — "BRENDA'S GIRL"
EPISODE 4
“BRENDA’S GIRL”
HOOK: four words – “I knew your mother.”
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – ROOM THREE – CONTINUOUS
BRIANNA (22)
How do you know what my mother did.
ANGELIC
Because I stood next to her for
eleven years.
Angelic gets up. Opens the door.
INT. RAGGED BUILDING – HALLWAY – CONTINUOUS
Brianna, barefoot, one arm splinted, holding the doorframe.
A hallway in a building that should be condemned – work
lamps clamped to exposed conduit, one every twenty feet, so
the corridor goes bright, dark, bright, dark.
And along the whole length of it, floor to ceiling – NAMES.
Hundreds. Written on the wall in marker, in pen, in nail
polish. Some dated. Some crossed out.
A man carries a crate of saline past her and does not ask
who she is.
ANGELIC (O.S.)
Everybody who came through that
door and walked back out.
BRIANNA (22)
What is this place.
ANGELIC
It’s where you go when the hospital
is the thing that’ll kill you.
Brianna’s hand finds a section of wall where the handwriting
changes – small, forward-leaning, the same letters that used
to be on notes in her lunch bag.
BRIANNA (22)
No.
ANGELIC
Your mama built this. Her and me,
out of a basement, eleven years,
and there is not one person in this
building who did not love her.
Angelic holds something out. A stethoscope, the tubing
cracked, the bell worn to brass.
BRIANNA (22)
She worked nights. At Grady. She
worked nights, that’s all –
And she hears it as she says it. Every 2 a.m. of her
childhood. Her mother in the dark by the bed, coat already
on, kissing her forehead.
FLASH: MISS BRENDA, 38, whispering – “Somebody needs me,
baby. Count to sixty and go back to sleep.”
Brianna is crying and does not appear to have noticed.
BRIANNA (22)
Why didn’t she tell me?
Angelic looks at her a long moment.
ANGELIC
Because you were the one thing she
didn’t ever want in this room.
Brianna looks down at the IV taped into the back of her own
hand.
BUTTON.