“The Knick” is not for the faint of heart.

Cinemax’s new turn-of-the-century medical drama follows surgeons at a New York City hospital in 1900, a time when archaic medical knowledge meant patients would “die as a rule and survive as surprise.” “The Knick” pulls no punches in its depiction of gory surgical procedures of the day, as stars Clive Owen and Andre Holland told HuffPost Live’s Ricky Camilleri on Tuesday.

The series employed Dr. Stanley Burns, who boasts a massive archive of medical photos from the period, to keep the surgical scenes accurate. That meant making them as bloody as possible, Owen said.

“He was there to advise on all the operations, and his mantra on most of them was: more blood, more clamps,” Owen said. “That’s the reality. You see pictures of the time, and the bodies are just — there’s just metal hanging off them everywhere and blood everywhere.”

Catch all the visceral surgical drama when “The Knick” premieres on Cinemax on Aug. 8.

Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation with stars Clive Owen and Andre Holland here.

Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live’s new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!