Noah Wyle Is Asking for Grace

This story contains spoilers for episode 14 of The Pitt.

An hour and three minutes. It probably won't surprise you that Noah Wyle, who once again plays an ER doctor with preternatural attention to detail on The Pitt—and knows damn well that the clock often decides the difference between life and death—cites the exact amount of time until his next meeting. It's not because he doesn't want to Zoom with me on a Monday morning; it's because I jumped the gun and asked about season 2. An hour and three minutes? The time until his next writers' room meeting for the sophomore run of Max's breakout hospital drama.

"What excited me is the identification has been so one to one with these characters from people in healthcare and audiences watching it that it's now like, Okay, they identify," Wyle tells me. "We just have to make sure that wherever we take them, it's grounded, believable, and in keeping with their characters. We don't need to be too sensational. We don't need to go out there and try to find a shark to jump. We just need to figure out how to stay true to our format and say, 'Where would they be next? This is where they'd be next.' "

But I'm getting ahead of myself. This Thursday night, The Pitt dropped its penultimate episode, "8 P.M.," on Max. In it, we see Wyle's Dr. Robby struggle to recover as his world collapses in the wake of the mass shooting at Pitt Fest. His son blames him for the death of his girlfriend at the tragic event. He's still feeling the trauma of his mentor's death during the pandemic, and he's led his team through an unimaginable shift full of truly heartbreaking cases. "The waves are just crashing over his head and he's finally going under," Wyle says. "Somewhere between then and when we find him, he's trying everything he can to get himself out from underneath it."

My interview with Wyle was the second time I talked with him about The Pitt; in February, I spoke to him at a SAG-AFTRA Foundation panel. Back then, it was resoundingly clear that The Pitt—which healthcare providers have hailed for its medical accuracy—is something truly special. But something changed after a remarkable twelfth episode. Though the series gives a voice to doctors and nurses everywhere—which alone is an incredible feat—episode 12 showed that The Pitt has much greater designs. It's clear that Wyle, who brought the series to life alongside fellow ER alum R. Scott Gemmill, created an essential piece of television—one that the Emmys will surely recognize this fall.

Below, Wyle opens up about episode 14, the healthcare world's reaction to The Pitt, and what the series says about the struggles of young men in America. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

"The waves are just crashing over his head and he’s finally going under," Wyle says of where we meet Robby in episode 14. "Somewhere between then and when we find him, he’s trying everything he can to get himself out from underneath it."

When we last spoke, people were still catching on to The Pitt. It feels like episode 12 really brought the show to another level of urgency. People are really talking about it now.

That feels accurate. We were so insulated in the beginning that I didn't really have any sense of who was watching. And then I was really surprised to see a lot of non-industry periodicals writing articles about it. Then, an inbox full of DMs. It’s interesting how to gauge any kind of popularity these days. In the old days, they would publish it in the LA Times and you could read your show ranked and you knew how many households had watched. This is a bit more of a mystery. The twelfth episode redefines the series from being something that is slightly presentational as a hospital show into being something that arrives at more of a thesis statement.

As soon as the shooting happens, it does feel like you’re telling the story of America right now through the emergency room. It really is a thesis statement.

It's always been a deconstruction of a hero. It’s always been: Let's build a hero that seems incredibly capable, incredibly knowledgeable, trustworthy, dependable, responsible, and then chip away at him. And so in the moment when you expect him to come riding in on the white horse, the horse comes in without its rider. It's jarring because we're so used to him saving the day, that when he's not there to save the day, it underscores the fragility of the whole system. You recognize that it's people who are being strained to their breaking points day in and day out, unfairly in a job where we really need them to be healthy—because their health ultimately reflects on our health.

"We are all fallible," Wyle says. "We are all trying to figure this out together. That we should be allowed a little grace as we’re growing up that to see everything so binary all the time has really become problematic for our world."

It really comes through in the scene between Robby and Whittaker this episode.

We've sort of set up that he is Jewish, he was raised in a Jewish household, and he doesn't really talk to God anymore. That's not a conversation that's present in his life. The only thing that he can think of to do is to recite a very simple and basic prayer. And that's when Whitaker finds him—somebody who's on the opposite end of the professional spectrum. Different faith, different age. Watching those two guys try and negotiate this moment that was private and is now public was a really interesting and fun thing to play.

After talking to you at the panel, I was struck by how many people approached you afterward with a story. It was either, I'm an EMT and you got this little thing right, or I just lost my elderly parent and this one scene really got me.

I was aiming at everybody's chest. If I hit it, it's gonna make you want to come up and tell me why. And so I look at the people that want to go and tell me. What they want to tell me is their way of saying, You hit me in the chest. It means that my little mission was accomplished. We opened a window where we all look at where we are collectively. Reflect, refract, reveal is my job. If that's successful, then people do feel acknowledged or represented in some way.

Last night, I got this lovely message from a guy who was a 32-year practitioner pediatric ER guy. Covid ended his career and he lost a colleague. He had not dealt with grief over it and had not unpacked the traumas that he experienced. He said he'd basically seen and done everything we've depicted on the show already, and is now contemplating doing some sort of memoir to make sense of it. That comes in multiple times a day. I love that.

The Pitt has also grappled with what's going on with young men in America right now—loneliness, hurt, and an identity crisis. Tell me about your goals for that aspect of the series.

Misunderstood is a really good way to start. Because that became what we really wanted the storyline to be in one form or another. David is not feeling seen or heard, and he's slipping through the cracks. It triggers all sorts of paranoia and feelings of judgment and bias. We wanted to play that out to have it be misunderstood that he was not actually responsible for this shooting and yet still will be punished for what in essence is a thoughtcrime. In reality, it’s cautionary behavior that needs to be addressed. It speaks to this very interesting place we're living in where there is a problem and I'm not sure what the right remedy is.

It's really hard to get all of your self-esteem from a screen and all of your context for the world through a screen screen… We were supposed to be brought together by this technology. It seems that the opposite has happened. We've all been sort of fragmented into a lot of different little micro bubbles and some of them are really lonely places. I'm not being very articulate because I'm no expert.

Wyle appeared in a whopping 257 episodes of ER, where he inspired the next generation of healthcare practitioners. Now, in The Pitt, he’s doing it again.

You are articulating this well.

I'm just speaking as a father of a 22-year-old son. I've been watching him and his friends try to negotiate manhood. It's not been easy, because any expression of budding manhood can also be interpreted as budding toxic masculinity. So, I've watched my son have to figure out how to be a man, but not too much of a man. Enjoy camaraderie, but not have it be the kind of camaraderie that could be worrisome. It's just unfair and sad. If I tried to identify one general emotion out there, you could say it's anger.

But I don't think anger is anger. I think it's sadness. Most people at heart just feel a little heartbroken and don't know how to express that. And so we all go about getting attention however we do. Sometimes it's positive, sometimes it's negative, but it's certainly attention and you're certainly going to be seen and you're going to be heard one way or the other. That's what's at the root of it—everybody just wanted to be acknowledged. But man, it can go some pretty abhorrent ways if ignored.

I feel like young men don't feel like they can talk like how we are now—a conversation about masculinity between two men and what that means today.

It’s really interesting for me to talk about what I was trying to do with Robbie in a sense, which is to at least display a different form of masculinity on television. He's a good, heroic, and complex guy. He's not perfect. He's got some temper. He's got some undealt with pain. Ultimately, he's got to come to the realization that compartmentalizing his feelings and suppressing them isn't any healthier than it is for David. There needs to be an avenue of release and a safe community for conversation and healing to take place.

There's a lot of damage that gets done from suppressing this stuff. I'm a firm believer that undealt with trauma, pain, and anger manifests itself in disease and sickness. What people carry around with them, health-wise, is what they're not dealing with emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. There's a very strong connection there. We all need to clean our attics and basements.

Wyle’s remarkable performance as Dr. Robby might just nab the actor his first Emmy win.

Even in this episode, Robbie tells Mel, "Never apologize for feeling something for your patients," which is really beautiful.

That's to retain your sense of humanity. Langdon gives her the same advice. The ER is tough on sensitive people, but it needs sensitive people. It needs sensitive people very badly. So you have to retain a sense of humanity and sensitivity without becoming so empathic that you take on the problems of the world and they become your problems at your own detriment—or so desensitized for your own survival that you can't connect human to human.

Is there anything else that would be important for someone to read here?

I just think there used to be so many other ways for young men to be able to do this kind of stuff—improve their mettle and their manhood and test themselves and each other. And if didn't, they weren't punished so thoroughly for their mistakes. Nobody's perfect, especially when you're growing up and you make a mistake and you're immediately chopped down so vehemently by a society that is like, We will not tolerate that. That will not be part of this discussion. I do not want to see that. And you are wrong for even thinking it. The shame and embarrassment, the recoil from that, is so detrimental to the cause. We are all fallible. We are all trying to figure this out together. We should be allowed a little grace as we're growing up. To see everything so binary all the time has really become problematic for our world. Out of necessity, we have to appreciate complexity.