Sanjay Gupta
Sanjay Gupta is an actor, born 1969.
Gupta's day job is surgery. He is an associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Emory University School of Medicine, and he sits in the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The television work runs alongside that rather than in place of it, which is unusual and is the reason it carries weight: he has been CNN's chief medical correspondent while continuing to operate.
His screen credits reflect exactly that. Almost every one of them is him, as himself: news programming, CNN specials, a turn at the lectern on Jeopardy!, archive footage in a documentary about a blood-testing company that promised more than it could deliver. The single acting credit is Contagion in 2011, where he plays Sanjay Gupta interviewing a character about a pandemic, in a film that turned out to be a rehearsal.
The interesting question about the career is one the credit list cannot answer: whether a doctor who explains medicine to millions is doing more good than one who spends the same hours in an operating theatre. He has declined to choose.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Sanjay Gupta
Watch Contagion first, knowing that Gupta is not acting: he plays himself conducting the sort of interview he conducts for a living, inside a film that got a great deal right about how an outbreak feels from the inside. His scene is small and it is one of the film's most convincing textures.
After that, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley is the strongest documentary here, on a Silicon Valley blood-testing company and the reporting that unpicked it, with Gupta appearing in archive footage from his own coverage.
The rest is broadcasting rather than filmmaking. Anderson Cooper 360° and CNN Special Report are where the bulk of his working life sits, and Jeopardy! is the curiosity: a neurosurgeon behind a quiz show lectern.