Before Drea Castro ever stepped onto the set of “Nurse the Dead,” she had already spent years doing the kind of work that rarely gets a curtain call. She helped blind and visually impaired hikers attempt Mount Baldy and turned the experience into an award-winning documentary that now lives as a permanent mural at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles. She built FilAm Creative into one of the most important spaces for Filipino American storytellers in Hollywood. She photographed Sheryl Lee Ralph, Lil Wayne and Taye Diggs. She worked camera operations at Birns & Sawyer, one of the oldest rental houses in the business. She mentored. She produced. She opened doors.

Castro, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, multi-hyphenate and one of the directors of the new iWant series “Nurse the Dead,” has never done just one thing at a time. What ties all of it together is the same thread she has followed since the beginning: the belief that underrepresented stories deserve to be told on a mainstream level and that someone has to be willing to do the work of making that happen.

“Nurse the Dead” premiered June 12 on iWant. The series follows Noa Reyes, a Filipina nurse supervisor with a third eye who becomes the unlikely handler of a hospital ward full of restless spirits. It is supernatural and comedic, filmed entirely in the United States inside a working Los Angeles hospital and anchored by a cast that includes Ruby Rodriguez, Princess Punzalan, Gigette Reyes, Tootsie Guevara and Anthony Jennings.

For Castro, signing on came down to one thing.

“Anything my dear friend Mark Labella touches, I’m in. He’s someone who has helped carry me through some of the darkest moments of my life, and beyond that, he’s a creative genius,” she said.

She has watched Labella move through the industry in a way few people do.

“He genuinely believes that when one of us wins, all of us win. He’s constantly opening doors for people, believing in you before you believe in yourself,” she said.

That spirit, she said, is woven into “Nurse the Dead” from the inside out.

“It’s an intergenerational story about family, grief, healing and connection. Yes, it’s a Filipino story, but it’s also so much bigger than that. It’s a love letter to nurses. It’s a love letter to immigrant families. It’s a love letter to anyone who has ever lost someone they love and wished they had one more conversation with them,” Castro said.

She paused before adding, “For me personally, it’s also dedicated to the children who grew up yearning for the protection, comfort and unconditional love of a mother and didn’t always have it. This story is for them.”

Growing up Filipino, nursing was always in the room.

“If you’re Filipino, chances are you’re either a nurse, related to a nurse, or your best friend is a nurse,” she said. “One way or another, you’re connected to that world.”

Filipino nurses make up roughly 4% of the American nursing workforce but accounted for more than 30% of registered nurse deaths during the early waves of the pandemic.

“Nurse the Dead” sits with that truth without flinching from it.

“We’ve watched medical dramas for years and years while one of the largest nursing populations in the country was practically invisible in those stories,” Castro said. “That’s changing now.”

On set, she got to direct performers she had grown up watching on television: Gigette Reyes, Ruby Rodriguez, Princess Punzalan and Tootsie Guevara.

“I am so lucky that I get to work with these legends,” she said. “It was such a dream.”

What surprised her was how completely that translated into the work. Veterans of that caliber, she found, gave her room to go further.

“They come in incredibly prepared and are so comfortable in their craft that I was able to spend more time exploring the smaller details, the layered backstory, the nuances of performance,” she said.

And they gave back.

“Sometimes they’ll make a choice or suggest something that wasn’t on the page, and it ends up making the scene even better. That’s one of my favorite parts of working with these legends. You get to really collaborate and build something together,” she added.

Her own experience as an actor sharpens all of it. Earlier this year, she appeared in “Red Light Teachers,” directed by Chris Soriano, and she carries that knowledge onto every set.

“Being an actor absolutely changes everything,” she said. “My goal is not only to create the visual language but to help actors create a really four-dimensional person. The nuances that aren’t on the page. The in-between lines. The thought before the words. The listening to your fellow actor. To me, that is the kind of performance that really grounds us in reality.”

Three advance screenings in, the show has already started finding its audience. Castro has watched it resonate differently depending on who is in the room. The scene in which a Filipino mother speaks in Tagalog and her daughter responds in English, a moment so small and so familiar, has become quietly electric.

“That’s such a familiar dynamic in Filipino households,” she said. “Different generations, different languages, but still trying to connect with one another through love.”

Audiences in the Philippines, she believes, will recognize themselves in it despite the Los Angeles setting. But what has moved her most is watching the show reach far beyond the Filipino community.

“Whether you’re Filipino, Latino, Black, White, Asian or anything else, if you’ve ever lost someone who meant the world to you, there’s a piece of this story that’s for you,” she said. “The Filipino experience is the doorway into the story, but the emotions are universal.”

For Filipino nurses and their families watching, her hope is simple and sincere.

“I hope that when they watch it, they feel seen and heard. I hope that they know we are honoring them and the many sacrifices they have made to help heal us in our time of need,” she said.

She added, “I also hope they can feel how much love went into making it.”

After this, Castro is not slowing down. She will appear in “Crab,” a dark thriller written and directed by Labella, alongside Jelynn Malone, who plays Noa in the series. She is directing “The Nightshift,” written by and starring Georgina Tolentino and scheduled to shoot in Europe later this year. She is also co-producing “Jollibee: Bee-yond the Fried Chicken” with Emmy Award-winning director Michele Josue.

But first, she is hoping for something else.

“I’m really hoping for a Season 2 of ‘Nurse the Dead,’” she said. “We’ve only scratched the surface of these characters, and I’d love to keep telling their stories.”

For someone who has spent much of her career helping Filipino stories find space in the entertainment industry, that hope feels less like ambition and more like unfinished business.

“Nurse the Dead” premiered June 12 on iWant.