John Oliver ropes in Bryan Cranston, Michael Keaton to help punish Purdue Pharma's Richard Sackler for hiding

The opioid epidemic "is very much ongoing" but "we've learned a lot more about many of the companies involved" since Last Week Tonight last covered the issue in October 2016, John Oliver said Sunday night. The first chapter of the opioid crisis turns out to be "a story of how major companies acted wildly irresponsibly, skirted any meaningful consequences, and for the most part, avoided public scrutiny," he said. "For companies involved in the opioid crisis, fines just became the cost of doing business, and throughout this crisis it has been difficult to find any real accountability for the people involved."

Oliver briefly highlighted the drug distributors, but his main example of lack of accountability was "Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer behind OxyContin," he said. Purdue is owned by members of the Sackler family, collectively worth about $13 billion.

Oliver focused on Richard Sackler, the near-invisible heir who was company president when OxyContin went viral. "This invisibility feels deliberate, and whether it is or not, it has definitely been convenient for Richard Sackler, because it's honestly hard to tell the story of his time at Purdue without any video," Oliver said. "To help you get the emotional impact of Richard Sackler's actual words, we got an actor to play him."

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Four actors, it turned out, starting with Michael Keaton (because "when you're casting for a shadowy heir to a vast fortune who doesn't like to be in the limelight, you go Batman") plus including Bryan Cranston, Richard Kind, and Michael K. Williams. The Sacklers and Purdue deny causing the opioid crisis and say Sackler's comments were taken out of context, Oliver said dutifully. To add context, he had the actors read parts of Richard Sackler's emails and a newly leaked deposition, both on the show and at SacklerGallery.com. Oliver pitched it as an incentive for the Sacklers to release video of Richard Sackler. (There is NSFW language throughout the video.) Peter Weber