The Pitt’s Noah Wyle on Returning to the ER for New Role

Few actors know their way around a fictional emergency room better than Noah Wyle, who played Dr. John Carter on ER for 11 years.

Now, the prodigal doctor returns as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch on The Pitt, a medical drama from Max that depicts an accurate and action-packed hospital drama over the course of one fifteen-hour shift.

During The Pitt panel for WBTV’s Press Day, Wyle discussed why he returned to the medical genre and how the industry has changed since he first picked up the stethoscope.

Wyle joins The Pitt as a star, writer, and executive producer. Being involved in the creative process this time has been an “extremely gratifying” experience for the actor.

“One of the most gratifying things I’ve been involved with in my whole career was getting to be in the writing room with Scott [Gemmill] and these incredible writers and learn at this caliber how the sausage gets made.”

Even though medical dramas have hardly gone extinct since ER went off the air, Wyle believes they are needed now more than ever.

“The pandemic changed everything,” he acknowledged. “I was getting a lot of mail from first responders that were confessional about how difficult their daily lives were — and I pivoted a lot of that to John [Wells] and said, ‘There’s something happening here that’s probably worth talking about again.’ Even though we didn’t want to do this again, if you ever did want to do it again, I’d volunteer.”

Wyle was “shocked” to learn that the work ER did to help develop a spike in candidacy and funding over the last 30 years declined rapidly after COVID-19.

“This was the first year that they didn’t match all of the positions in emergency medicine,” he explained. “I was shocked to see how bad it’s gotten, what the boarding crisis is like, what the nursing shortages are like, in real terms when we talk to the experts.”

The beauty of playing a doctor again after so many years is not lost on the actor either.

“It was so crazy putting this thing on the first time,” Wyle said, gesturing to the stethoscope around his neck. “It’s like, I have a groove in the back of my neck that it just clicks into place. It’s uncanny.”

“It would be rare for another actor or artist to have an opportunity to revisit something that was such a huge part of their early career, and that was so ingrained in their tissues. Then get to play that instrument again with a little wisdom and maturity and hear the tone and how it’s changed over the years. It’s been really rewarding.”

Wyle is fascinated to pick up the role again and explore how the medical industry has managed to stay the same despite constantly changing.

“I remember when, in 1994, ERs were the primary source of health care for most Americans — 22 million Americans didn’t have health insurance. That was part of what went into our show’s popularity was how relevant it was at the time,” he recalled. “And here we are 30 years later, talking about the exact same issues, except the problems have gotten a little bit worse.”

“We are still playing catch up from the nuclear bomb that was dropped on the medical community in 2020. And it’s going to take a while to right this ship. So part of doing this was to shine the spotlight back on this community and to hopefully inspire the next generation of health care workers to want to go into these jobs because we are going to need them.”

One of the crowning jewels of The Pitt’s concept is the setting: a circular emergency department in which the characters are sequestered. Designed by Nina Ruscio, many of the set pieces (including the waiting room) recreate the Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.

“It really is a perfect match,” Wyle confirmed. “I go into Pittsburgh into that stairwell and then come out at the bottom of that stairwell, and you can’t tell the difference.”

Yet, this Los Angeles-based set also holds a special significance for the former ER star.

“We showed up two weeks early to start medical boot camp on Stage 16, I think it was, which looks out across at Stage 11 where we’d spent 15 years of our life, and that 200 feet felt like 200 years. It felt like 20 pounds. It felt like a thousand miles.”

“It’s really been rewarding to come back and get to play in this arena again,” he assured. “One of the most gratifying aspects has been working with this ensemble and watching them go through this for the first time and to not be going through it for the first time again, but to be able to be available to them as a resource if they want.”

“And also enjoy watching them on their roads and be sort of a Trojan horse that is allowing everybody to meet this invading army of talent,” Wyle added.

That said, the actor wants viewers to understand that while this role is similar to the one he played on ER, The Pitt couldn’t be more different as a concept.

“This is a totally different acting exercise. This is building a pressure cooker hour by hour, degree by degree, ingredient by ingredient, playing with levels of fatigue and an ability to compartmentalize things that need to be compartmentalized. This has been a wonderful psychological examination of one guy having one of the worst days of his life and the presence required in that exercise.”

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The Pitt airs Thursdays at 9/8c on Max.

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