The Pitt star Noah Wyle talks his seminal show as UK premiere arrives – and his reaction to Robby and Whitaker fan art

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

It’s perhaps unprecedented for a Golden Globe-nominated actor to travel to the ceremony with the award already in his luggage. However, such was the concern of Noah Wyle’s 10-year-old daughter Frances that she took matters into her own hands. In January, with her father’s limo waiting outside their Los Angeles home, she handed him a tin foil and sticky tape replica of the prestigious prize. At its base, it read, “Noah Wyle: Best Dad”.

Wyle’s features soften at the recollection: “She’s an empath and the prospect of me not winning was… Well, it was something she felt she could do something about.” The Golden Globes doesn’t do a Best Dad Award, so 54-year-old Wyle had to make do with winning the award for best actor in a TV drama, to sit alongside his tin-foil trophy on the shelf.

Here in the UK, Wyle (pronounced “Wy-Lee”) is still best-known for his portrayal of Dr John Carter in the long-running medical drama ER. However, that’s set to change when we finally get to see his return to the emergency room in the medical drama The Pitt – which parachutes viewers in real time, hour by hour, into a single day at the (barely) fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre.

It came out in the States last year, and now comes to the UK as the launch title for new streaming service HBO Max (all episodes of series one are available from Thursday 26 March, with episodes of the second series released week-to-week).

It’s not a usual release model – you know you’ve landed a hit when the network that makes your show decides to build its entire European launch around it. Which explains why, this afternoon, we find the rangy Wyle in his Berlin hotel room in an armchair that seems slightly too small for him, attempting to make sense of how he got here.

Back in 2009, when he finished work on his 254th and final episode of ER, he had no reason to imagine he’d ever don scrubs again. So what changed? “Good question,” replies Wyle, who also doubles up as the show’s executive producer. Quite a lot, is the answer.

In the ensuing years, he separated from his first wife, make-up artist Tracy Warbin, with whom he has two children, Owen and Auden. In 2015, a year after he married his current wife, actor Sara Wells, along came Frances. And although film and TV work kept him busy throughout that time, none of it quite managed to push him beyond the shadow of John Carter.

It was the Covid pandemic that prompted him to re-examine the psychological havoc that the emergency room wreaks on the staff who work there. In other words, the setting is familiar but, as Wyle, who plays Dr Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, puts it, very little else is.

“The opening premise of The Pitt is that the doctor is the patient,” he says. “Dr Robby is someone who probably should have retired in 2020. His mentor died four years to the day depicted in season one and he simply hasn’t dealt with that. And so here he is, experiencing both burnout and PTSD while not recognising any of the obvious signs.”

With Dr Robby having to negotiate such a difficult anniversary, one imagines he would want this day to pass relatively uneventfully – not least because this is also the first day on the job for this year’s intake of postgraduate “resident doctors”, young men and women looking to learn from him. In the early episodes, glimpses of complex backstories are dangled before us almost like flash-frames, all the better to give a sense of what Dr Robby’s team are dealing with on top of the near and actual fatalities that require instant attention.

We meet diligent Dr Mel King (Taylor Dearden), who is doing everything she can to mask the neurodivergence that may yet turn out to be her superpower; Dr Heather Collins (Tracy Ifeachor), who has to endure her own medical emergency during that day’s shift; recklessly pugnacious intern Dr Trinity Santos (Isa Briones) and her nemesis Dr Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball). And what’s with the police tag around the ankle of single mother Dr Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif)?

In episode three of the first season, when new resident Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell) loses a patient for the first time, Dr Robby advises that, “you learn to accept it as much as your own mortality and find balance if you can”. Whitaker replies, “You found balance?” To which Robby responds, “No, not even close”.

Ten hours later – and remember, every episode of The Pitt is in more-or-less real time, the whole series one long shift from hell – we’ve already seen what that amounts to, and just why the only way to deal with what you see during an average day in a trauma medical centre is to compartmentalise it. As the first casualties of a mass shooting at a local music festival emerge, it’s left to the callow Whitaker to try and find words that might bring the rapidly crumbling Robby back in the room.

Wyle says it’s “one of many sources of delight to me” that Welsh actor Howell – best known here for his role alongside David Mitchell as DC Simon Evans in Ludwig – has been such a hit with US viewers. “If you give Gerran a nugget of something, he’ll turn it into a rose garden.” It was Wyle’s ER former co-star George Clooney who alerted him to Howell after casting him in Hulu series Catch-22. “I vetted him before we hired him and he’s become a dear friend.”

Well, quite. Such is the on-screen chemistry between the two, that some fans have clearly let their imagination run away… “Oh!” smiles Wyle, “The online fan art? Yeah, we’ve been depicted numerous times together in romantic settings. I’m amused by it – but what I’m mostly amused by is that I get to send it to him and just tell him I’m thinking about him!”

At whatever level you choose to engage, it seems there’s something for everyone in The Pitt. In America, actual doctors have declared it the most realistic on-screen depiction of an emergency room. “I’ve met a lot of veteran doctors and this show hits hard – too hard – with some of them,” says Wyle. “It’s a rare thing for a doctor to have the courage to be self-analytical and really take stock of the toll their career has taken on them.”

Asked when he knew that The Pitt had made a profound emotional impact on its audience, Wyle’s thoughts turn to his 80-year-old mother Marjorie, a former nurse at a hospital in East Hollywood with whom he and his two siblings lived after their parents’ divorce in 1977.

“After watching one of the mass casualty episodes, she came to my house for breakfast and she was very agitated,” he tells me. “She said, ‘I keep thinking about that episode. I started remembering all these things, all these cases. I remembered this six-year-old kid that I put into a morgue drawer and also this gang member I tried to save, squeezing two litres of blood while we tried to keep him alive…’ You know, she’s listing all these people she’d attended at the end of their life.

“And I said, ‘Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years and you never told me any of these stories! And she goes, ‘Well, that wasn’t real.’ I said, ‘This one’s not real, either.’ And she said, ‘Well, it sure felt real.’”

Wyle momentarily stops to compose himself. “After she put that poor kid in the drawer, she came home that night and helped us with our homework and made us dinner and she didn’t talk about it until 42 years later. And if that’s happening to her, I mean, extrapolate that across America…”

In a country where healthcare access remains a political hot potato, Wyle is visibly proud that The Pitt is helping to keep the topic on the agenda. Also a source of palpable pride is the simple fact that this almighty risk – to reunite with ER writer R Scott Gemmill and its showrunner John Wells and create something that might eclipse ER in the public’s affections – has paid off. Season two has been a similar monster hit to the first run in the USA. Wyle says that his wife has derived considerable amusement watching him trying to take ownership of this wave of acclaim. “She calls me ‘The Awfuliser’. I go in with the expectation that everything’s going to be awful, and then I’m always pleasantly surprised when it’s not.”

I tell him that I noticed a similar reserve when I saw him on the chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live! following his Golden Globes victory. Perhaps a sense of not wanting to wholly give in to the emotion of the moment, lest he miss it too much when it’s gone. Wyle nods in recognition.

“I understand the quality you’re referring to. It’s to do with the finite nature of precious moments – and also the reason I don’t like birthdays. I don’t like to get to feel special for one day and then have it end. Winning an award is like a birthday. It’s so powerful and it’s almost like if you bought into it, it’s then shameful to admit that you love to feel special every day.

“But now, everybody’s looking at you – all these people whose work you’ve enjoyed! – and there’s Leonardo DiCaprio beaming at you and making you feel special. Why would you want that to end?” The good news for Noah Wyle – and whoever’s job it is to keep his house stocked with tin foil and sticky tape – is that it’s not ending any time soon.

The Pitt season 1 is available on HBO Max in the UK from Thursday 26 March. Season 2 begins on 2 April

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