From serving in the U.S. Navy to working in medicine and eventually creating one of the most emotionally layered new series, Mark Labella’s journey into storytelling is anything but ordinary. In this exclusive interview, the Nurse the Dead creator opens up about Filipino representation, frontline workers, grief, comedy, and the real-life experiences that shaped the show.
WELCOME TO ABOUT INSIDER, MARK! FOR OUR READERS WHO MAY BE DISCOVERING YOUR WORK FOR THE FIRST TIME, COULD YOU PLEASE INTRODUCE YOURSELF AND TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR JOURNEY FROM MEDICINE AND THE U.S. NAVY TO BECOMING A WRITER AND CREATOR?
Thank you so much for having me. I’m Mark Labella, and I always joke that I took the most Filipino scenic route possible into entertainment: I got a doctorate in medicine, served in the U.S. Navy, terrified my mother by leaving the safe path, and then somehow still ended up making a medical show.
So in a strange way, I did use my degree. Just not in the way my family probably expected.
My background is in service. Medicine taught me how to observe people in their most vulnerable moments. The Navy taught me discipline, structure, and how to keep moving when things get difficult. But storytelling was always the thing tugging at me. Even in medical spaces, I was always noticing the human behavior underneath everything: the fear, the humor, the family politics, the denial, the love, the grief, the tiny jokes people make when life becomes too heavy.
Eventually, I realized that I wasn’t just interested in treating what was happening to people physically. I was interested in telling the stories of what they were carrying emotionally. That journey led me to Nurse the Dead. It is the collision of so many parts of my life: medicine, military discipline, Filipino family, comedy, grief, and the strange sacred chaos of hospitals.
WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO CREATE NURSE THE DEAD, AND HOW MUCH OF THE STORY COMES FROM YOUR REAL-LIFE EXPERIENCES WORKING IN HEALTHCARE?
I grew up around nurses, so before I ever understood medicine formally, I understood the emotional weight of caregiving at home.
My mom has been a nurse for 40 years. My family is full of medical people. I grew up hearing the rhythm of hospital life through them: the long shifts, the patients they never forgot, the jokes that were probably too dark for polite dinner conversation, and the exhaustion they carried quietly.
Then the pandemic happened, and everything became more personal. My mom and I were both frontliners. We lost colleagues and friends. My mom’s best friend, also an RN, passed away during COVID. Suddenly, the story I had always wanted to tell about Filipino nurses was no longer just an idea. It became urgent.
A lot of Nurse the Dead comes from emotional truth rather than direct autobiography. No, I did not personally work in a haunted Ward 5 where patients do not always check out, although honestly, some hospital night shifts do feel suspiciously close. But the grief is real. The humor is real. The exhaustion is real. The way nurses keep showing up even when they are hurting is very real.
The show became my way of saying thank you to the people who stay in the room.
THE SHOW BLENDS WORKPLACE COMEDY, EMOTIONAL STORYTELLING, AND SUPERNATURAL ELEMENTS. WHAT MADE YOU CHOOSE THIS UNIQUE COMBINATION TO TELL THE STORY OF NURSES AND FRONTLINE WORKERS?
Hospitals are already all of those things at once.
They are workplaces, yes, but they are also places where people are born, people die, families fall apart, families come together, someone is crying in one room, and someone else is arguing over missing Jell-O in the break room.
That tonal whiplash is very real.
I knew I couldn’t make a show about nurses where everyone just cried every week. First of all, I am Filipino. We cry, then someone feeds everyone, then someone makes a wildly inappropriate joke, and somehow the family survives the evening. That is grief too.
The comedy came from the way healthcare workers survive. The emotional storytelling came from what they carry. And the supernatural element allowed us to make grief visible. In hospitals, people leave, but emotionally they do not always leave. Patients, memories, guilt, unfinished conversations, they stay with you.
Ghosts gave us a way to talk about death without making death the only thing in the room. Comedy lets the audience breathe. Emotion gives the story its spine. The supernatural lets grief walk around in the hallway wearing a visitor badge.
NURSE THE DEAD SHINES A SPOTLIGHT ON FILIPINO NURSES AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO HEALTHCARE WORLDWIDE. WHY WAS IT IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO CENTER FILIPINO REPRESENTATION IN THIS PROJECT?
Because Filipino nurses have helped carry healthcare systems around the world, and yet their stories are still too often treated like background music.
They are everywhere: the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Middle East, Australia, and beyond. They leave home, send money back, miss birthdays, work double shifts, raise families across oceans, and care for strangers as if they were their own.
For me, centering Filipino nurses was not about representation as decoration. It was about telling the truth.
My mother is a nurse. Her friends are nurses. People I love are nurses. The Filipino nurse identity is not abstract to me. It is family. It is sacrifice. It is humor. It is migration. It is prayer before a shift. It is a balikbayan box. It is a nurse eating quickly in a break room before someone calls their name again.
Nurse the Dead is also historic because it is the very first Filipino-studio series filmed in Hollywood. That matters. It means Filipino stories do not have to stay small or explain themselves politely from the corner. We can be funny, emotional, weird, supernatural, bilingual, messy, ambitious, and global.
Representation is not just being seen. It is being seen fully.
AS SOMEONE WHO HAS WORKED DIRECTLY IN THE MEDICAL FIELD, WHAT ARE SOME OF THE EMOTIONAL REALITIES OF CAREGIVING THAT AUDIENCES WILL SEE REFLECTED IN THE SERIES?
One of the hardest things about caregiving is that you often have to keep moving before your heart has caught up.
In healthcare, something devastating can happen in one room, and minutes later, you have to walk into another room with calm hands and a kind face. There is no cinematic pause. There is no sad piano cue in real life. There is just the next patient, the next family, the next task.
That emotional compartmentalization is something Nurse the Dead explores deeply.
Noa, our main character, is someone who turns denial into a survival strategy. She keeps working, keeps smiling, keeps managing everyone else’s needs, because stopping would mean feeling everything. And that is something I saw often in healthcare. People carrying death home quietly. People making jokes because crying would open a door they might not be able to close again.
The show reflects the guilt caregivers carry, too. Did I do enough? Did I miss something? Could I have said something better? Those questions linger.
That is why the ghosts in the show are not just supernatural. They are emotional. They are the memories, regrets, love, and unfinished goodbyes that healthcare workers carry long after a shift ends.
THE SHOW PREMIERES ON FILIPINO INDEPENDENCE DAY AND DURING A TIME WHEN CONVERSATIONS AROUND HEALTHCARE WORKERS ARE ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT. WHAT MESSAGE DO YOU HOPE VIEWERS TAKE AWAY FROM THE SERIES?
Premiering on Filipino Independence Day feels incredibly meaningful because this show is also about claiming space.
For so long, many Filipino stories have existed in fragments: a side character here, a nurse joke there, a family reference, an accent, a food moment. But Nurse the Dead gets to put Filipino nurses, Filipino family, Filipino humor, and Filipino grief at the center.
I hope viewers walk away feeling that caregiving is not just labor. It is love under pressure.
I hope nurses feel seen not as saints or superheroes, but as human beings. Funny, exhausted, brilliant, complicated, grieving, loving, and deserving of care themselves.
And for Filipino viewers, especially those in the diaspora, I hope the show feels like home in a strange way. Not a perfect home. A real home. The kind where someone is crying, someone is eating, someone is avoiding their feelings, and someone’s auntie is somehow making everything everyone’s business.
At its core, I hope people leave with this message: the people who care for everyone else deserve to be cared for, too.
THE INTERNATIONAL TRIBUTE LIGHTING AT SAN FRANCISCO CITY HALL AND THE ELJ COMMUNICATIONS CENTER IS INCREDIBLY MEANINGFUL. HOW DID IT FEEL TO SEE THIS LEVEL OF RECOGNITION FOR NURSES AND FILIPINO HEALTHCARE WORKERS?
It was overwhelming. I thought about my mom immediately. I thought about her 40 years as a nurse. I thought about her best friend who passed during COVID. I thought about all the Filipino nurses who quietly carried hospitals through some of the most frightening years of our lives.
Nurses are so often asked to be strong without ceremony. They finish one impossible shift and then return for another. So to see major landmarks recognize them felt deeply emotional.
The San Francisco City Hall lighting and the ELJ Communications Center tribute felt bigger than Nurse the Dead. It felt like a public thank-you to people who usually do their most important work away from applause.
For me, it also affirmed why this series matters. We are not just making a comedy with ghosts. We are building a story around people who deserve to be honored in light.
And honestly, if a building is going to glow for nurses, I hope every Filipino nurse who sees it feels even a little bit of what they deserve: seen, remembered, and loved.
WHAT WAS THE EXPERIENCE LIKE WORKING WITH THE CAST, INCLUDING JELYNN MALONE AND ANTHONY JENNINGS, AND WHAT DO YOU THINK THEY BROUGHT TO THE STORY?
What I loved most about this cast is that they came in with heart first.
And thank God they did, because Nurse the Dead is not an easy tone to land. It is funny, but it is not empty. It has ghosts, but it cannot float away from reality. It is emotional, but if we leaned one inch too far, suddenly we were all in a telenovela thunderstorm with somebody staring out a window while a single tear falls in slow motion. I love drama, obviously. I am Filipino. I was born emotionally lit for close-up. But this show needed something more delicate.
The actors had to understand that, in Nurse the Dead, the joke often works because there is pain underneath it.
Jelynn Malone understood that immediately. She brought so much emotional intelligence to Noa. She understood the pressure of playing someone who is holding everything together while quietly falling apart, which is much harder than simply playing “strong.” It requires restraint, timing, vulnerability, and the ability to smile while your soul is basically filing a complaint with HR.
What made Jelynn’s casting even more meaningful is that her own family history is deeply connected to nursing and the Filipino immigrant experience. Her aunt, her Ninang Jojo, was a true Nurse of America. She helped bring her family from the Philippines and petitioned for her younger siblings, including Jelynn’s father.
I had not told Jelynn this at the time, but in my head, Noa secretly stood for “Nurse of America.” So when I later learned about her family’s story, it felt almost cosmic. Suddenly, the character and the actor were speaking to each other in a way none of us could have planned.
And Jelynn fought for this role. She went through rounds of auditions, even though she had already done major television work. She wanted it badly, not from ego, but because she understood what it meant. I remember calling her to tell her she got the part, and she fell to the floor crying.
Then I started crying.
So now we were both crying on the phone like two emotionally dehydrated people who had finally found water. It was not glamorous. It was not Hollywood chic. I’m sure my face looked like a collapsed empanada. But it was real. We both understood this was not just another role. It meant something to our families. It meant something to the nurses who raised us, shaped us, and carried us. Here we were, making this scrappy little show, fighting with everything we had to put our hearts on the line.
Anthony Jennings was also such a gift to the series. He is already a young household name in the Philippines, and his star is rising so quickly, so we knew having him would be special. But what surprised me was not just the talent, although the talent is absolutely bursting out of him. It was his humility, his commitment, and his can-do attitude.
He came in with so much heart and soul. I was honestly shocked by his emotional accessibility. Some actors protect themselves from feeling too much. Anthony walks straight into the feeling, leaves the door open, and somehow still finds the joke. That is rare. That is the real deal.
And of course, Gigette Reyes brought such tenderness to Mami Tess. As number two on the call sheet, she carries a major emotional presence in the series, and she gave that responsibility so much warmth, grace, and heart. She had this beautiful maternal energy with both Jelynn and Anthony that made the emotional center of the show feel very real. We cried a lot on that set, honestly. Not because anything was wrong, but because the material was personal for so many of us. Gigette helped make Mami Tess feel not just like a supernatural presence, but like love that had never fully left the room.
What also made the experience so special is that our younger leads were acting alongside true veterans and icons. We had Hollywood actors who have led their own shows and brought enormous depth to the world, including Johari Johnson, Trish Rae Stahl, and Latin star Pablo Azar. Then we had Filipino legends like Ruby Rodriguez and Princess Punzalan, whose presence carries so much history, humor, discipline, and cultural memory.
For younger actors, that could have been intimidating. Honestly, if I were them, I would have been hiding behind craft services pretending to examine grapes. But Jelynn and Anthony rose to it with such grace. They listened. They played. They adjusted. They met everyone with generosity and real professionalism.
One of my favorite memories is that Jelynn, Anthony, Ed, and Marvin somehow convinced me to take a day off.
Imagine my workaholic self taking a day off. That alone should be submitted to science. There should be a medical journal article titled: “Rare Case Study: Showrunner Briefly Touches Grass.”
But because they knew me, they were kind enough to let me bring the work with me. So we ended up rehearsing lines while waiting in lines at Disneyland. It was ridiculous and perfect. There we were, surrounded by churros, tourists, screaming children, and capitalism wearing mouse ears, trying to build emotional chemistry for a grief comedy about nurses and ghosts.
And honestly, it helped.
That day made everyone more comfortable. It deepened Jelynn and Anthony’s chemistry, especially because their characters have this opposites-attract, antagonistic back-and-forth energy. They needed to feel like two people who could annoy each other, challenge each other, and still somehow become safe for each other. That kind of trust does not always happen in a rehearsal room. Sometimes it happens while you are sweating in a theme park line, holding a script, pretending this is a normal way to produce television.
But that is what I loved about this cast. They were willing to go there. Into the joke. Into the grief. Into the weirdness. Into the love.
The whole cast understood that Nurse the Dead is ultimately about people trying to survive grief together. That is what they brought to the story: not just performance, but humanity.
And if the show works, it is because they made the ghosts funny, the comedy human, and the heartbreak feel like something you could hold in your hands.
FINALLY, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY TO NURSES, HEALTHCARE WORKERS, AND ASPIRING STORYTELLERS AROUND THE WORLD WHO MAY SEE THEMSELVES REFLECTED IN NURSE THE DEAD?
To nurses and healthcare workers: thank you.
And I mean that beyond the easy, slogan version of thank you. I mean it as someone who was there beside you during the pandemic, on the frontlines, trying to do the work, trying to stay calm, trying to follow protocols, trying to keep people safe, and sometimes getting humbled very quickly.
I still remember getting yelled at by a nurse because I missed an infection control protocol when doing rotations with Dr. Filart! And honestly? She was right! That moment stayed with me because it reminded me who really holds the line in a hospital. Nurses are the ones watching everything. They see the small mistakes before they become dangerous. They protect the patient, the room, the team, and sometimes even all the doctors who think they know what they are doing. My doctorate helped me understand disease, but nurses taught me what vigilance looks like in real time.
So when I say thank you, I mean thank you for the rooms you walked into when everyone else was afraid. Thank you for the hands you held. Thank you for the families you comforted. Thank you for the protocols you defended, even when people were tired, scared, or careless. Thank you for the jokes you made when the night was too heavy. Thank you for staying human in systems that sometimes ask you to operate like machines.
I know what it costs to keep showing up. That is something I think about every day as we fight to finish Nurse the Dead. This show has asked so much of all of us. Our cast, our crew, our producers, our directors, our post team, our families. People have given their time, their sleep, their savings, their hearts, their bodies, their belief. There were days when we were running on caffeine, adrenaline, borrowed strength, and the kind of faith you only find when quitting would hurt more than continuing.
And I think that is why this show matters so much to me. Because in a very small way, the making of Nurse the Dead began to mirror the people it was trying to honor: people who keep showing up even when they are tired, even when they are scared, even when they are carrying grief no one can see. We were not making this from a place of comfort. We were making it from sacrifice. We were making it from love. We were making it because so many of us knew nurses who deserved to be remembered with more than a caption, more than a statistic, more than a thank-you post once a year.
My mother has been a nurse for 40 years. Her best friend, also an RN, passed away during COVID. I have lost colleagues and patients. I have seen the look in the eyes of healthcare workers who had to keep going before they had time to break. That kind of love leaves a mark on you. That kind of grief does not disappear. It becomes a responsibility.
So I hope Nurse the Dead makes nurses feel seen. Not romanticized. Not flattened into heroism. Not turned into saints who never get tired, never get angry, never correct someone sharply because infection control actually matters and everyone’s life is on the line. Seen as full people. Funny people. Exhausted people. Brilliant people. Messy people. Loving people. People who have carried more than most of us will ever know.
And to aspiring storytellers, especially Filipino storytellers, I would say: do not assume your story is too specific to matter. For a long time, many of us were taught to sand ourselves down. Make the story more universal. Make it less Filipino. Less strange. Less bilingual. Less emotional. Less “too much.” We were taught to translate ourselves before we were even asked to speak. But sometimes the thing you are afraid is too specific is exactly where the heartbeat is.
Your family is not too complicated.
Your grief is not too strange.
Your humor is not too local.
Your contradictions are not weaknesses.
They are the proof that you lived.
If there is one thing this journey has taught me, it is that stories do not become powerful because they are easy to make. Sometimes they become powerful because everyone involved had to give something real to bring them into the world. Nurse the Dead was built by people who cared past the point of convenience. And maybe that is the most honest tribute we could give to nurses: a show made with the same stubborn, exhausted, impossible love that they give every day. So to every nurse, every healthcare worker, and every storyteller who has ever wondered if their pain, their family, their language, their humor, or their survival was worth putting on screen: it is.
