This article contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of “The Pitt.”
It almost feels like Noah Wyle’s life as a pretend doctor was destined when he casually mentions a detail from his childhood.
“Our butter knife was a brain retractor,” he says with a playful smile. Excuse me, what?
He’s not joking. His mom was an OR nurse for 10 years. And he lights up as he talks about the procedures she had a hand in — total hip replacements, all kinds of orthopedic surgeries. She would bring home surgical tubing, tubs, gauze and other stuff for him and his siblings to play with. And, yes, there was the unusual butter knife substitute. But it was her identity as a nurse that stuck most with him.
“What I look back on with my mother, it’s that my mom’s hardcore,” he says. “You can’t rub her shoulders too hard or she’ll bruise. If you tease her, she gets upset. But she carried a man’s leg to pathology and didn’t blink twice about it. I have a lot of respect for what my mom did and shouldered and carried all day long.”
We’re sitting in the dreary family waiting room on the set of “The Pitt,” Max’s medical drama that’s had critics and fans hooked and pulses racing since its January launch — boosted, in part, by its format. Each installment of the drama chronicles an hour in the 15-hour shift of the hospital’s morning staff. It had Wyle scrubbing back into a hospital environment 15 years after his breakout role in “ER,” NBC’s long-running medical drama in which he starred as
The series reunites Wyle, also an executive producer, with “ER” producers John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. (The series made headlines in 2024 when the estate of Michael Crichton, creator of “ER,” sued Warner Bros., producer of “The Pitt,” saying it is a rebranded version of an unauthorized reboot of the medical drama. The case is pending.) The series has been renewed for a second season and Wyle is currently taking a break from the writers’ room across the way on the Warner Bros. lot.
“We’re throwing spaghetti on the wall, trying to see what sticks,” he says. “We started about eight days after we wrapped [in February]. I went to New York for four days — my wife sent me away for three days because I was a basket case after the end of the season, and I got back from doing the press tour after the wrap party. I was just no good.”
He’s better now. Mostly. The reaction from medical workers has been overwhelmingly positive. And it’s hard not to notice his pride in what the show has achieved as he ushers this visitor around the set like a proud dad: He points out the intentionally uneven placement of the posters in the waiting room we’re in, which served as a de facto break room for the cast between setups; he animatedly shows off a congealed splatter of blood on the floor, lifting it up and slapping it back on the floor; he motions to the nearby pediatric room — yes, the one with the cartoon fox — that is central to key moments in the show; and he asks whether I would like to take home a box of medical gloves. (I was tempted.)
The Times spoke with Wyle about the whirlwind first season, which concluded on Thursday. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
We’re in an era where flashy or cliffhanger-type finales are big. It was refreshing to get a somewhat understated conclusion to this intense, 15-hour ride. Things close with some of the morning crew sitting at a park, coming down from an exhausting shift, and they’re reflecting on the beauty and chaos of the job and what keeps them coming back. And Robby eventually takes his walk home. Talk about ending on that note.
That was an interesting scene to shoot because our entire show was shot in sequence, except for the scene on the roof between Dr. Abbott and I and the scene in the park. Those were shot in September when we went to Pittsburgh to make sure we could shoot all the appropriate weather. We shot me walking into the hospital, we shot the stuff on the helicopter coming down, and then we shot the end of the show. Those scripts hadn’t even been written yet. There were placeholders and they were nonspecific enough that we felt that they’d be appropriate — the scene was Abbott on the roof, I make reference to having made a speech, the speech was TBD. When I watch those scenes, I’m mostly pleased with the technical prowess that they cut in seamlessly, and they make it feel as if it was all in the flow.
But in regards to the content you’re talking about, it was always the intention to make this a practitioner-centric show. Ending it on the debrief that they’re having casually in the park, they reinforce each other’s resolve to come back and the importance of what they do and the need for them to be in these jobs. I think that’s how a lot of these people see themselves — as much as you and I might not want to be in that situation, they’re sort of like Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan in the fourth quarter, down by two; they want the ball. They’re the best at what they do. There’s a lot of professional pride underneath it all. The takeaway is you watch Robby walk away with one beer in his stomach and another in his pocket — this is the beginning of a healing journey that he now has to face.
Before we reach that point, Robby has a bit of a breakdown in the peds room —
When that room was first built, it hadn’t been painted yet, it was just raw walls, I stood in there and I spent, like, an hour in there, thinking: This is the room where it will all have happened. As that room came together, I had to spend more and more time in there. It’s loaded with emotion.
It’s fitting that Robby’s breakdown happens there. What do you remember about shooting that scene and the vulnerability you had to tap into in that moment?
I think if you ask anybody that was on this show, they would have said that I was that vulnerable from Day 1 and it was more an exercise and suppression of that emotion. When I finally got to shoot that scene, I was like a kid in a candy store. I know it sounds crazy, but we actors are kind of masochistic. You give us a day like that, that’s pure catharsis for both character and performer, we get giddy. I think the take that’s in the show is either Take 1 or Take 2.
It’s a moment that comes to haunt him. There’s a confrontation with Langdon (Patrick Ball) and he uses that as a reason to say Robby is just as unfit as him.
I don’t know that we have unpacked that all on camera yet. That moment comes in Episode 15, about 20 minutes shy to the end — these are all revelations happening in real time for the character. He’s going to go home and have a very short night if he can knock himself out, or a very long night if he can’t. We are in the process of writing Season 2 and it’s not lost on us how people are identifying with these characters and see themselves in them. So we’re asking all those really important questions. Where would they be now? How would they feel now, after going through this? As long as we stay honest to those answers, we’ll be in the right trajectory. But as far as what the character was processing toward the end, I think it was pure panic and trying to keep up this mask that just keeps falling down. It’s in pieces. You’re trying to not show every emotion that you’re having, but you no longer have a filter and you can no longer kid yourself that you’re OK. You have to go home and at least acknowledge that something’s not right.
We come to learn it’s a difficult day because it’s the day that he lost his mentor — he blames himself — and he ends the day with his quasi–stepson Jake (Taj Speights) angry at him over the loss of his girlfriend Leah. He’s carrying a lot into the day, and taking a lot on from the day — and we only see how it reveals itself across 15 hours of a day. Can you tell me about the process of pacing his journey?
There are signposts along the way. You’re watching the removal of all of his bearing walls and all of his anchoring chains. Then you get into the mass casualty and it coming close to home with Jake being shot and losing Leah, being blamed by Jake for her death, having to tell her parents that she’s dead. You’ve now escalated this to a degree that sent him straight back up to the roof. For all the actors, you have a tendency when you get an episode with a good little speech that you want to swing for a big fence with it. You’re going to have a big high, you’re going to have a big low. It’ll be scripted and it’ll be specific. Stay on the surfboard, let that wave carry you; when it’s ready to break, it’ll break. That was true for Robby, especially. It was a lot about letting that mask almost slip.
Did you take it on differently than your time on “ER,” what your character is processing as a first responder?
I feel that I’ve personally taken on a tremendous amount that I’ve not been able to process or unload. That started in 2020 and has been building steadily since. And this show was born out of a twin intentionality to both highlight the work being done by first responders and also to cathartically deal with this feeling that I’ve got that I really wanted to get out of my system.
Tell me more about that.
The aspects that I think bothered me the most was the seeming mistrust that people were developing for doctors, the calling into question what was an objective medical fact and what were reasonable protocols in the face of an unknown threat. All of that getting politicized. It‘s becoming a badge of honor to defy science, the loss of reason and logic in the argument to get to an objective fact; the unceasing magnitude of the people that were sick coming in, wave after wave and practitioners not only having to treat them but risk taking it home to their families. Suddenly this act of service, this very noble vocation that they’ve gone into, is like doing a tour of duty in a war zone. And it hasn’t stopped. It hasn’t let up. If anything, resources have been strained to a greater degree. Patients are coming in sicker and they’re coming in angrier and they have to wait longer to be seen in less time, so that more time can be spent on charts, avoiding being sued, while hospitals are experiencing this incredible clog. It’s an unsustainable system. And we tried to personify that unsustainability by saying our system is as strong as the mental health of our practitioners and in the quality of support that we give them. We reap what we sow. Their health is our health.