Like a defibrillator steadies an irregular heartbeat, so has HBO Max’s The Pitt jolted audiences and critics alike into confronting the pitfalls of the American healthcare system — and the fact that many stoic, deeply human practitioners keep the medicine pumping just long enough, day-in and day-out, amid dwindling resources and respect.
Created by R. Scott Gemmill and executive produced by director John Wells and star/writer Noah Wyle, the medical drama follows — hour-by-hour — the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s emergency department and its frontline workers over the course of a relentless 15-hour shift, as they navigate personal and professional crises. Tackling post-COVID nursing shortages and anti-vax stances, inceldom and abortion rights, the series’ incisive exploration triages not just its ailing patients, but the sickness of a nation unable, or rather unwilling, to provide adequate care — a burden that must be shouldered by the likes of Shawn Hatosy’s fan-favorite Dr. Jack Abbot.
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Generous and genial, the veteran actor (who is going on two decades of collaborations with Wells, notably Southland and Animal Kingdom — all beginning with a guest spot on ER in 2006) portrays a combat medic-turned-attending physician who works the night shift, an equal and foil of sorts to Wyle’s beleaguered Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. When talking of The Pitt, Hatosy — who is vying for an Emmy nod in the Guest Acting category, alongside three costars and a larger FYC push for the show — is quick to shower praise on his colleague who started it all.
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“What Noah brings, as a producer, writer and actor, it’s just extraordinary. I was in there with him as a performer, so I know how hard that all can be, but he’s got the doctor stuff so just in him, but I just marvel at what he’s done. This big of a role, this meaty of a role, I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it before, and it really took him pushing the boulder up the hill to make it happen, to create a character that is big enough for somebody like him, with that kind of talent. Just watching him do it — lead, play the doctor, show compassion and then completely unravel over time — was tremendous. It really is one of the most layered performances I’ve seen up close. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him,” he said of Wyle, who recently penned an op-ed about healthcare workers’ burnout and is currently advocating for the passage of better legislation in Washington, D.C.
Below, Hatosy talks about why The Pitt resonates for people inside and outside a hospital’s double-doors and what went into crafting a “real and authentic” on-screen doctor.
DEADLINE: My mom’s a doctor, and she actually came to me with this show, and I just wanted to thank you and everyone involved because I think it’s given us a language to communicate about her work that we didn’t have before.
SHAWN HATOSY: The most meaningful response I’ve gotten has been from medical professionals, nurses, paramedics, trauma surgeons, and they’re telling us we got it right, and that we captured something honest, and that means everything. It’s really about honoring the people who live in that pressure every day. If watching this show helps them even heal a little from some of the stuff that they have to deal with in that high-pressure situation, then, to me, we’ve done something that actually matters.
We get nuggets of information about Abbot after the pilot episode, even though he’s absent throughout a majority of the show’s run — from the letter to the veteran’s family to the low-balling of the abortion measurements, which you didn’t even know about until it aired. How do you approach the emotional depth or totality of a character when you might not have all the script elements for that?
I think part of the hardest work sometimes we do as an actor is getting out of the way of all the thoughts inside of your head — you feel like you need to know all this information, and what I’ve learned over this career is that sometimes it’s special not to know. Keeping Abbot as real and authentic as possible is what I was striving for, and he’s not flashy, he’s a listener. So this show does a great job at giving us information: so he’s an observant guy, he understands — that’s kind of his battery.
For me, a lot of what inspired my characterization of Abbot was I was around something that happened with paramedics where somebody needed help, and these guys came in, and they were just so calm and locked in, and they got the job done. And it was that kind of quiet control that stayed with me. Just being present, not planning, just accepting the stuff minute to minute, and being with such professionals like Noah, John and Scott, it wasn’t really that hard to do.
Speaking of Noah and his character, you’ve talked a lot about how Abbot and Robby are sort of mirrors to each other. There’s definitely a strong sense of brotherhood, with overlapping similarities and differences. What were the discussions between you and Noah about how they kind of reflect or refract each other?
The most we talked about it was my first day, which was after the roof scene — which we did later — where we were coming down the elevator; it was one of the very first things photographed for the show. And I looked at him, and I said, ‘We’ve just been up on the roof. You’ve essentially talked me off it. How serious do you think I was about jumping?’ And he kind of implied that this was more of a ritualistic thing that we do every so often, so that’s about the extent of our conversation.
It’s almost like this meditative thing, this show, because it’s not the kind of emotional preparation I would normally do on a project. The medicine comes first here, and we sort of work outwardly from there. So the preparation really is very much the memorization because these medical terms and the procedures are so foreign to me. So we didn’t have a lot of conversations about how these guys were. The script sort of gives it to us in a very beautifully written way.
But what you’re hitting on: This idea that Abbot hands him a letter, he talks about the teen and that she needs mifepristone — these are very simple conversations, they’re not very deep, but they’re well-understood, and I think that says a lot about how these two communicate. He’s asking him to do something without any language at all, and Robby gets it.
Totally, it’s such an unspoken thing. I think a lot of the show really thrives in the little details — you have to keep your eyes peeled. There’s so many dynamics that flash in front of you. Rewatching the pilot, the look Robby has on his face when he hears from Dana (Katherine LaNasa), ‘Oh, I think he’s getting some air.’ It’s understood, we’ve been here before.
When you first meet Abbot, he’s clearly dealing with something, hidden trauma. And as it unfolds, we learn that he’s a combat veteran medic, but we don’t know that he’s standing there on one leg, but the reversal of that coming up at the end of the show, where Abbot has to then travel up those stairs to the roof, is very complex, but so well-drawn.
And again, there isn’t a ton of conversation that leads up to their understanding of each other, but it’s just because Robby has spent this 15-hour shift dealing with so many things — he’s leading, he’s teaching, he’s playing the father [figure], he’s playing the mentor to Langdon [Patrick Ball], and dealing with what that looks like, so he’s being pulled in so many directions — and he hasn’t had a chance to connect with somebody who is, in many ways, on the same level. And it’s just such a damn relief once they get up there together, to have that moment to break down a little bit. He’s been keeping it all in for so long, and to be able to have somebody that he can let go in front of was tremendous to me, seeing that.
Going off of that, that scene was so masterfully done, acted, written. You spent a lot of time with John Wells directing that scene. But since the script is so kinetic and propulsive, there’s not a lot of room to, I’m sure, improvise or anything. Was there any space to play around there, especially since you didn’t have the beats going into it?
There’s just little things that happen, like kind of peering over a couple times, which, thankfully, we did the first episode and the last episode the same day, so it was also very fresh to be able to mirror some of the things that were happening.
Not a lot of improv on this show, but working with John, as I have now for almost 20 years, I just have this memory — because I’ve certainly worked with John as a director more than anybody in the business — and we were doing the fork in the nose scene, and I think I came in a little too hot, just this opportunity to play comedy, and I might have been chewing up the scenery a little bit, and I just remember John poking his head out of where the video village is, and he kind of was doing this hand motion of, like, ‘Turn it down,’ and I think that says a lot about how we communicate. [Laughs]
Something that I haven’t seen touched on as much is Abbot’s dry, awkward sense of humor that often doesn’t land with people. How much of that wit was on the page, and how much were you bringing to the character? There’s almost a paradoxical lightness to him — even though he finds comfort in the darkness.
There are nuggets of it in there, and then there are just the aspects and attributes that are very much me, and kind of letting my guard down and accepting: This is an older middle-aged man going through some stuff and just riding that wave is how we came to this guy who is a little dark, but a little dry. Now that you say it, it reminds me of that scene where we first meet young Mel [Taylor Dearden], who comes in and Dr. Robby is like, ‘You know, this is Abbot, don’t listen to him, he’s having an existential crisis.’ She says, ‘I’m very excited about my first day.’ And he says, ‘Talk to me at the end of the shift.’ So, yeah, it’s obviously in there and gosh, what a terrific performance that Taylor gave, man.
When we’re introduced to Abbot, he’s so world-weary after this traumatic night, which is so personal to him and his background. And then with the MCI, he’s so unflappable. With all the context about his combat history — from the go-bag and later on, the prosthetic — how much research did you do into portraying that? Specifically, if you could talk about the donating scene, which Joe Sachs said he had read about in a real-life combat event.
Yeah, he did mention that that came from a real [event]; I think it was a doctor or a combat medic he knew who was donating and like literally squeezing bags as that was going on. The spontaneity of Abbot — his skill and talent as a combat medic, and also a guy who finds comfort in the darkness — we learn so much with these little pieces of information throughout. He’s got this hidden trauma that he’s dealing with, but I think it has created this guy who is so addicted to the work and almost the adrenaline of it. He knows his purpose, the ‘bees that protect the hive.’
There was the fantastic documentary called Code Black that deals with an emergency department in L.A. County, and just seeing those attendings and going back to the calmness of how they function and are so damn good at what they do — almost emotionless — but I think there is a little [part of] Abbot that has a connection emotionally to these things, just because of what he’s seen, particularly with the veteran who got killed in a crosswalk after surviving three tours.
Abbot is a guy who can read the room very well. He sees in people like Santos [Isa Briones] and Dr. Mohan [Supriya Ganesh] — the future, and he’s not afraid. His teaching style is to watch, observe and let them swim, and he believes in them.
In a previous interview, Scott mentioned that while it didn’t come out this season, Abbot is a widower. I was curious if there were conversations about that, what you know and how that might have informed his journey toward therapy amid grief and possible PTSD?
For me, it was a lot of, ‘What was I wrestling with up there?’ in that first roof scene. I sort of understand how he lost his wife, and I made the decision to wear a ring, just because I feel like it’s fresh enough that he’s still holding on to that. We haven’t gotten into the very specifics of it, so I don’t know what those are exactly. I just know it’s there, and it lives inside of him. And I know that people that lose people are constantly walking around with that grief, and it becomes such a heavy character in their lives. He also offers Robby the phone number of his therapist because it’s important for people dealing with this kind of trauma and PTSD to go there and do the work.
Definitely a 180-degree turn for this question: Something that’s been pointed out, and upon rewatching I was taking note of, is your character loves heavy eye contact with everybody, from Robby to Myrna. I was curious if you had any thoughts on that: He’s a bit of a lone wolf, but again, speaking to the lightness he carries, he sort of gives workplace flirt potentially.
[Laughing] OK, I’m blushing.
Yeah, I don’t know. Well, first of all, with Noah, I will say, when we were on the roof, it was a scene about two guys saying things and not making eye contact. He was clearly going through a lot, and I feel like that scene was so damn important, and I wanted to make sure he was hearing it, so that was the intent. Because he wouldn’t look at me, and so I was trying to grab him and hold him and get that connection that I feel like he desperately needed.
With Myrna, I feel like nobody was really giving — I had watched the season, and I felt like there was just something happening with us, so I gave her the look. It’s not an overrated thing, I’m not trying to say that he was flirting, but I do think that the connections … it’s hard when you got these goggles on.
Some of the other dynamics I was curious about — obviously, you and Supriya have both talked about Dr. Mohan and Dr. Abbot’s connection, which I love — are with Dr. Walsh, another player during the pigtail catheter scene. There seems to be a rivalry there. In general, when surgery comes down to the ER floor, they’re sort of thrown by how unorthodox everything is. Did you and Tedra Millan have any conversations about that?
The information I was given is there’s a little bit of a battle that goes on between the surgeons. The EZ-IO, it’s like, ‘Get it in the arm, that way we could do everything we need real quick,’ and they’re like, ‘No, you don’t need to,’ so that’s always underneath the stuff between Dr. Abbot and Walsh. I felt bad for her because I was always right. From what I know and understand, that is a real thing. In [Episode] 15, we did have a moment, the preperitoneal packing, where we did find some common ground, which I was very happy about.
Both the medical and laymen response to the show has been really incredible. How has that impacted you, professionally and personally?
The thing that resonates is that all these characters are decent people, they are all well thought-out, layered, they’re all multidimensional. And in the face of tragic circumstances, seeing people care — really care — is a powerful aphrodisiac. I think there’s a lot of toxicity in the world, and people are rallying around the show, not just because it’s high quality, but because it’s comforting. It’s a reminder that empathy still exists in a world filled with divided people.
I would be remiss not to ask about Season 2. We know it takes place over the Fourth of July weekend — what would you like to see for your character?
I know nothing. I know exactly what you know. For me, and I’m being selfish, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about their enjoyment of the night shift doctors — to explore that a little bit. That would be kind of cool just because I think it takes a certain kind of person to choose to work nights, and we already know that Abbot’s a little off-center. A world where we see the others, the charge nurse, Shen — this is just me speaking, again. But also if you can imagine the types of patients they would receive at night. Those 11 episodes that I wasn’t there, I was watching it with you guys as a fan, and just so caught up in enjoying it, so I am thrilled, as a fan, to see what they have in store.
Is there anything you can share about Ready or Not: Here I Come?
I do know April 10th is our release date, which is exciting because we just wrapped. If they’re already giving us a release date when we wrap, that means they like it, so it’s gotta be good. Tyler [Gillett] and Matt [Bettinelli-Olpin], these guys are just incredible directors for the genre; I am a huge fan, there is no ceiling to how gory it can get with these guys. There’s just never enough blood on me, you could multiply it by 10, every single time.
Samara [Weaving] and Kathryn [Newton] are so damn terrific; I am impressed by their talent and how they’re able to navigate the tone of this piece, which is at times hilarious, and how good they are at that with the timing of it, but in the same scene you’ll see them have to go to this dark, terrified place. Sarah Michelle Gellar brings her badass-ness to it and just this iconic character already, she just does it by walking into the room. Elijah Wood, Néstor [Carbonell] — just a really talented cast, we had so much fun.
And also, Animal Kingdom is on Netflix, and it’s climbing up the charts, which is so thrilling. Here’s a show that’s been off the air for a little while, and I think The Pitt probably has something to do with it, it’s just finding this new audience and that makes me happy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for concision and clarity.
