hat happens when a
person decides that life is merely a state of mind? If you're Betty Sizemore, a small town waitress and soap opera fan, you refuse to believe that you can't be with the love of your life just because he doesn't exist.

  From director Neil LaBute (In The Company of Men) comes Nurse Betty, a darkly comic story about one woman's
incredible determination to make her dreams come true against numerous odds. Fantasy collides with reality as Betty, played by Renée Zellweger, inspires herself and everyone she meets.

  The popular daytime soap "A Reason to Love" has an especially devoted fan in Betty, a young woman with a good heart and a bad marriage living in Fair Oaks, Kansas. Her no-good car salesman husband treats her like dirt and forgets her birthday. As Betty quietly celebrates alone, she can barely remember her deferred dreams of becoming a nurse.

  At home one night watching a videotape of that day's episode of "A Reason To Love", her favorite character, Dr. David Ravell, stares up at the moon and says "I know there's someone special out there for me." Betty feels as if he's speaking  
directly to her. As she tries to watch her show, her husband
Del comes home, along with two men, to negotiate a shady
business deal. As she tries to watch her show, Betty becomes

actors
Renée Zellweger
Chris Rock
Morgan Freeman
Greg Kinnear

director
Neil LaBute

locations
California and
Arizona, U.S.A
Rome, Italy

outtake
Chris Rock took the direct approach to researching his role as a hit man: “I killed people. I literally went on a killing spree.”

 
an accidental witness to this deal going fatally wrong. Del offends courtly hit man Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and his excitable protege Wesley (Chris Rock) and is quickly dispensed with. Betty, traumatized by the savage event, enters an alternate reality, becoming "Nurse Betty" who is set on returning to the love of her life, Dr. Ravell, who she left at the altar six years earlier.

  Betty promptly leaves Kansas in a 1997 Buick LeSabre, which her husband's killer are on the hunt for. Not only are the hit men after her, but behind them are Fair Oaks Sheriff Ballard (Pruitt Taylor Vince) and local reporter Roy Ostrey (Crispin Glover), who are investigating Del's murder and Betty's sudden
disappearance.

  Betty arrives in L.A. to search for her fictional beloved, Dr. Ravell, played on the soap by George McCord (Greg Kinnear). As she eventually makes contact with Ravell/McCord, life begins to imitate art and the hit men slowly but surely track her down.

  To play the two hit men, LaBute wanted actors with dramatic capability and chemistry. Chris Rock jumped at the chance to play the younger, more impulsive, Wesley opposite Morgan Freeman . Also the prospect of portraying a hit man in a dramatic context appealed to him. LaBute found the pivotal pairing of Rock and Freeman to be "a casting marriage which works superbly. Morgan has a great sense of reserve. Below the surface, there's a smolder there - you know you don't want to get him angry. In this film, he gets the chance to explode at times. Chris gets to build up his intensity in this story; he's not fueling all of the humor. It's a very different role for him."

  For the title role director LaBute knew he needed an actress who could convey "genuine, imbued-in-the-bone goodness," he recalls. "There is no one more right for this part than Renée Zellweger."

  She wanted the role immediately. "I loved Betty," says Zellweger, "and I've never played anybody like her before. How often do you get a chance to play somebody who changes so dramatically. The script was great. All the characters are so well-developed. After I met with Neil, I knew that Nurse Betty was going to be something special."

- Rise Levy