Noah Wyle - 'The Pitt'

28:35And so that was in our DNA to start, but I don't know that we really could maximize it until we had the personnel to do it. Not to take anything away from Ron Vidor, who was our first Steadicam operator, son of King Vidor. Very talented man. I'm glad you're bringing up King Vidor. And we were talking before we started recording about the fact that you love classic movies and Turner classic movies. And so I imagine it must have been kind of a pinch me thing for you to have so many great, legendary older actors come through ER and more often than not have scenes with you as Carter. I just want to mention we're talking, among others, Alan Alda, Red Buttons, Mickey Rooney, Ernest Borgnine, Rosemary Clooney, and then even, and perhaps you can share a little bit about this one, but not so much a person that is known for on-camera work, but Sanford Meisner.

29:29Yes, true. I'll just leave it to you if you wouldn't mind sharing. Well, you want my Me Too story with Sandy Meisner? If you don't mind. Sandy was cast on our show to play a patient, to play my patient, who was a gentleman who was estranged from his son. and we were trying to find family to come in because he was nearing the end of life. And Sandy was also nearing the end of life. He was 90-something years old. He had one functioning eye, one lung. He had a lot of fluid in his appendages. He was being fed through a gastric tube. He had a hole in his throat from where he'd had esophageal cancer or laryngeal cancer where he could no longer even use the voice box, which had been his mode of communication.

30:21You just had to sort of listen to air coming out that hole and read his lips. So he was in tough shape. But he wanted to do our show, and we were honored to have him. And the first day we worked together were the very sensitive scenes where we were, I was sitting bedside, and I was trying to find his son, and I was reading Walt Whitman poetry to him. And he was extremely present and very focused and occasionally would get nervous and wonder where his handler, Jimmy, was. And I was very attentive and very, you know, obsequious. And the second day we worked together, I went into a room to bring him from the car, and I pulled the chair across from him to tell him that I was very excited about working with him again today and that everybody liked the work we had done previously, that the day was going to be a little bit more complicated because we were going to shoot the trauma scenes.

31:15And anyway, long story short, he put his hand on my knee and I thought, oh my goodness, he's going to pay me a compliment. And then I put my hand on his knee and then he put his hand on my shoulder and I didn't put my hand on his shoulder, but he started to pull me in to tell me something. And I thought he's going to invite me to his island to study. He's going to tell me that I remind him of a young Montgomery cliffed but no even in that that state uh he had a very strong libido and um he uh you know made his move oh my god well so you uh you know you got a taste of the uh hollywood's golden age the good and the good the bad and the i got a taste of the other meisner technique yes That's hilarious.

32:07But circling back to what I think is the more interesting topic, all those incredible actors I got to work with, I was blessed. I was really blessed to get all those guys. And Eli Wallach and Paul Benjamin. I could add so many more to that list. So you were the last of the originals on that, I believe, to step away from regularly being on the show. after the 11th season. You did a four of season 12. Then you were gone for 13 and 14 and came back for six of 15. And I wonder if you can just talk about the, I think nowadays, particularly with certain streaming shows, other than yours, having like six or eight episodes a season, I don't know that people fully appreciate how grueling it must have been to do as many years in a row as you did on that show with what, 20?

33:0124, season 1, 22 after that. Yeah. You guys are now doing 15, which is certainly not child's play either. But how much of that was why you needed a little bit of a break after the 11? Or was that part of the... No, it wasn't the workload at all. I would have done that show forever. No, my son was born in the 11th season. And the day he was born, I got the day off. But then I went back to work the next day and worked the next day and worked the next day. and then really kind of saw him for the first time that Saturday and Sunday and then went back to work that Monday. And for the first time in 11 years, I looked at my watch and went, hey, guys, come on, what are we doing?

33:41And I thought, what are you doing? Where do you want to be? And I thought, I want to be home with him. So it was really only Owen showing up that made me not want to spend 80 hours a week on a soundstage. I think you've also helped people to understand the way Hollywood can sometimes work when I think it was after you were not even gone from the show fully, but you're gone after the 11th season and I guess came back to the lot. Can you give a little... No, this was after the 15th. Oh, it was after the 15th. Yeah, this was after we had the premiere, the finale, and we had a big party on the lot after we shot out our last day.

34:21And I went Italy with my ex-wife and my kids to sort of blow off some steam and then we came back two weeks later and I had an audition back on the lot for a Clint Eastwood film called Flags of Our Fathers which his office is right behind the soundstage where we shot ER stage 11 and then his office with the Malpaso production offices are right behind so I was super psyched to walk past the old place and walk right into my now prolonged film career uh but i couldn't get on the lot that you know it was one of those like i'd been on the driving through the same gate every day for 15 years knew everybody at that guard gate i think my face was still painted on the wall of the studio at the time but you know all of my attempts to charm my way onto the lot failed that's insane Yeah, this woman said finally, I'll let you on this time, but you have to have your pass or whatever.

35:17And then I went to take a look at the old ER set to boost my confidence. And I opened up the door to stage 11 and was staring at the back wall of the soundstage. The whole set was gone. They'd taken it completely apart in the two weeks that I was gone to the point where I closed the door to double check that I was standing where I thought I was. And then I went to the audition and there was a bunch of guys there. and one of them looked at me and said, sign-in sheets over on the table. And I thought, okay, here we go, new day in America. Now, you mentioned that you were there for a film project, and you had been, during the time of ER, doing a whole assortment of other projects.

35:58I'm going to just run off a few if I can. You played Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley, I know, complimented by the man himself, your performance was. Stephen Freer's live version of Failsafe. Another good one. You and Clooney, I believe, right? He produced it. Yeah, broadcast live. And he started it. So did Don Cheadle, Harvey Keitel, James Cromwell, Hank Azaria. That cast was ridiculous, including the guy who played the president, Mr. Richard Dreyfuss. Yes. Then science teacher in Donnie Darko. That was fun, too. Kind of a crappy husband in White Oleander. Good try. Good try. Almost. Great cast.

36:37It's a tremendous cast. Renee Zellweger, Robin Wright Penn, Cole Hauser, Allison Lohman. And then I guess just to the tail end of your ER period was the beginning of a period that would continue kind of beyond that with the librarian. I wonder if you can – if there are people who don't know about that. You basically said that you, between that and I think another thing as well, but like you essentially went to TNT film school. Like where you – this is where you really developed these skills that you've since applied. Well, to circle back, you asked me a little while ago whether or not writing and directing had been a long-held aspiration of mine.

37:18It was a long-held interest, but I put it on a very high pedestal and I really had a lot of imposter syndrome about attempting it until I felt that I had learned enough. And then going off and making those three librarian movies and then doing a TV show on top of it. You know, it would be unfair of me to say that it was like the Roger Corman school of filmmaking, but it was analogous in the sense that Dean Devlin, who's a masterful producer, I mean masterful, is so incredibly inventive and clever about how to stretch a dollar and how to reuse a set or how to economize a shooting schedule, that it forces you to be really, you know, economical and to be a good problem solver and to sort of come out the other side of the Swiss Army knife when it comes to production.

38:05And I wouldn't trade that education for anything. It serves me so well, especially now when you have all the time and the money and the resources to work with, it becomes an embarrassment of riches, but it's really nice to know that you don't need them. Yeah. Now, during that period of ER when you're working so many months of the year on so many episodes, but you're still – clearly there were – you made time for certain things. But how many things that you would have wanted to do extracurricularly were you not able to do? And I know there's sort of a couple of examples that are out there that I – The big one is Private Ryan and Saving Private Ryan.

38:47That's because – now, Spielberg obviously was involved with ER, right? He was an executive producer on it, so he was very familiar with my work and extremely complimentary at turns, writing me nice notes after episodes. And there were a couple of, you know, that was a big one. Legends of the Fall was one that I really wanted that was tricky to schedule. Wyatt Earp was another one that I wanted to get in on that was tricky to schedule. George's movie, Good Night and Good Luck, was another one I really wanted to be part of. But, you know, the show was a bit of a golden cage that way. It was affording me everything I ever wanted, but there were certain things that I couldn't do.

39:25And at the time, it's frustrating. But the truth is you look back in retrospect and you realize you get the jobs you're supposed to. You don't get the jobs you're not supposed to. And, you know, the guys that got those jobs were great in them. Were there things in your mind coming out of ER that you specifically did or did not want to do for a while? I didn't really want to play a doctor again. I kind of wanted to hang up the stethoscope for a while, if not forever, and pivot somewhere else. But that, ironically, is exactly where I'm at right now. But there have been – okay, so ER ended for everyone in 2005.

40:09No, excuse me, 2009, yeah. And then the pit doesn't come on until 2025. In that intervening period, just mention a couple of the other things that really seem to have stood out to you and to others. I mean, there's 52 episodes also on TNT of Falling Skies, which I think was also Spielberg, right, produced. Yeah, that's where I cut my teeth as a director. I directed on that show for the first time. We had a director fall out of the fifth season, and the cast nominated me and Spielberg approved me, which was really, really cool. Not bad. While you're also playing this guy who's sort of leading the fight to save the world from alien invaders, right?

40:50And so that was four seasons, I believe. 52 episodes, probably five. Five, yeah, sorry. So that was 2011, 2015. 2019 Critics' Choice Award nomination for the Red Line on CBS, limited series. That was another good one. I call that right drug, wrong delivery system. It was a really good miniseries, and CBS was the wrong place to air it. They burned it off against the last four episodes of Game of Thrones. So if you're ever curious what dragons eat, the answer is anything that goes on CBS Sunday nights between hours of 8 and 10. Oh, my gosh. Clearly, you're pretty consistently busy and doing good work and all of that.

41:32And yet I wonder the fact that when you come out of the gate and you are in the center of the culture in the way that ER was, is that something that you are always striving to achieve again, or would you have been perfectly content to keep working in interesting projects that maybe don't reach as wide an audience? It's a great question. I don't think I ever set out to get the kind of level of fame that ER brought me as early in my life and career as it did. And because it wasn't expected, it was a little overwhelming. And there was a period of time where I really wanted to sort of scale that back.

42:12And then the world scales it back. And you kind of then wonder where it's going or where it's gone and if it'll ever come back again. And if you're lucky enough to have it come back again, maybe you don't have to be so scared. Maybe you don't have to be so on your back foot with it. Maybe you could actually enjoy it or be present with it. And that's what I'm enjoying now is this this very rare second lightning strike, which is allowing me an opportunity to be extremely grateful and humbled by it without feeling necessarily like I have to fake my way through it. Sure. I guess when in those intervening years between the two emergency rooms.

42:58The wilderness years. What was that? My blue period? The wilderness years? How did we want to refer to that? No. Well, I mean, again, a lot of really good work. But I wonder does... You know, you show up. You show up day in and day out. You show up at your call time, and you show up, and you know your day's work, and you try to bring a professional and personal attitude to everything you do. And, you know, don't burden people with your problems. Take it out in your work. And that's been my school all along, whether it's a big movie, little movie, good show, bad show, you know, whether I'm enjoying myself or not enjoying myself, whether it's my kid's birthday, or it's the middle of the night and it's raining.

43:32You just go to work with a little bit of a blue collar attitude about if they give me a folding chair and access to black coffee, I'll do my job. And I like that discipline. I like that almost stoic approach to my work because then it's really hard to rattle you and you kind of feel like your technique is going to be there for you whenever you need it. Maybe because you're saying you like the routine and being at work and all of that, can you take us into what it was like for you? I mean, for everybody it was a weird time when when the pandemic hit but and it's certainly for your for your fictional character on the pit but uh what for for noah wiley was the pandemic like uh well you know in relative terms relatively easy because i did not lose close family members and uh i was living in an area that was where i had good access to health care information good access to health care.

44:27You know, my supply chain was not interrupted, so it wasn't this uncomfortable in that sense. I do know people who got sick. I do know people who died. But moreover, I felt this real sense of uselessness. You know, I looked around at doctors and nurses who were on the front lines, and they were saving lives and risking of themselves, and I didn't have anything to contribute to that. What I did for a living was totally superfluous not only superfluous it was shut down and there wasn't any promise of when we were going to go back to work so i just i'd never really experienced that before i had been working so consistently that work stoppage uh was a very sobering concept to me mirrored again with the writer's strike a couple years ago where the industry was on 198 day standstill and made me very reflective about what work means to me, what I get from it when I'm at my best, what does it feel like, and a lot of that question and answer that I was giving myself during those fallow periods became in a weird way the DNA that the pit is the answer to.

45:38It is the answer prayer to what do I want work to feel like and what do I want the set vibe to be and you know the sense of buy-in and community. It's everything that I used to have on ER and more because there's so little work in Los Angeles. The sense of gratitude for having work right now has changed. The buy-in that this show because the characters are so rich and we enjoy the collaboration of our background and our crew, you know, immensely. It's a really fun place to work and I'm kind of addicted to it. Yeah. Well, and not only did the story of Dr. Robbie kind of emerge from what we see on the show, the events are, I guess, can be traced back to that period.

46:23But the show itself, for you and your collaborators, that's when it started to come together, right? Like, can you connect the dots between you? Well, if you go back to 2020, I think I sent John an email saying I'm getting a lot of mail from first responders who were telling me that I did something good with my life by playing an ER physician because I helped them go into their careers and they're saving lives right now. So indirectly, I guess I helped save some lives. I'm trying to find some meaning in that. But, you know, I think there might be another story to tell in this arena post-COVID.

46:58If you're interested in screaming, Jeremiah from a mountaintop, I would be volunteering to scream it. And so that we started a conversation, but he was very intelligent and wise about how we needed time and perspective to really figure out what the story was going to be. So even though the inclination was there, we needed to see how things were going to shake out socioeconomically, regionally, ethnically, to see how this pandemic was really, how we could dramatize it. And then the first initial idea was, well, let's figure out what Carter's been up to and let him scream it. And then that became less interesting to everybody to have it be a scaled-down version of the show, and then the concept of a reboot got bigger and bigger to the point where it really became almost self-defeating in its weight.

47:55And then out of that was, well, what did we want to do? What was the intentionality behind the idea? And what would happen if we pivoted and just created another hospital, another guy, another set of circumstances, and told the story without any of that attendant baggage or IP? I think because, obviously, it's some of the core people from ER, John Wells, Scott Gemmel, and yourself, they're initially, before we got to see the show, people assumed that it's, you know, kind of a reboot, as you say. But, I mean, it's pretty clear once anyone starts watching it, just in so many ways, it's a totally different animal.

48:40And I wonder if you can talk about, I mean, just— I don't know that John Wells has ever repeated himself with anything he's ever done. And I don't know that he ever will. So that was never going to be in the cards. Even if it had been the same IP, it would have been a very different look and feel to it. Because of where he is now as an artist and man, where I am, where Scott is. We wanted to do and say something very different. You know, Scott had just put to bed like 7 ,000 episodes of NCIS Los Angeles. And was still hungry to do something creatively. And I found that really interesting. Like, this is not a man who needs to work.

49:16And same with John. Their reputations are intact. The only thing they really stand to risk is the quality of their own legacy. So the bravery to go and put yourself out there and say, no, we're going to do another medical show. The guys that brought you the one that's the most heralded of all time, yeah, we're going to try and do it again. We weren't doing that lightly. It scared us so much we didn't talk to each other for a year after we had the initial meeting sent us all home for a year where we didn't speak of this or to each other where we just thought about how much if we fucked this up we could ruin.

49:53Do you recall, was it out of that period that some of these defining things about The Pit, the hour-by-hour season being a day, the different approach to—you've described it as a different form of masculinity totally between Carter and Robbie. Scott was responsible for the format. He picked the real-time format and the aggregate tension of showing one shift. He initially wanted it to be, as did I, a 12-episode series to match a 12-hour shift. hbo 1 to 15 hours so we've been figuring out how to massage them since um he also had the idea of no music which was i thought brilliant that's exactly what i want to ask you next because so that's a key key distinction right between certainly your two emergency room shows but also almost any other big show like this i mean you guys there's no the cues of how the audience should feel are not being forced down their throat by music.

50:51It maybe highlights the dialogue even more, right? Scott had done two episodes of ER where he pulled the musical score out and only played it with kind of an ambient soundtrack, the bells and whistles and machines, the breathing. And he felt that it, in a weird way, increased the dramatic tension when you weren't being given a clue on how to feel it. You were forced to engage and look for clues, which made it more of an active viewing experience. And these days when you're trying to get eyeballs out of phones and up onto a screen or even just to get a show to break through the competition and the noise, you're always looking for things to differentiate it.

51:27And I thought those two in particular were really, really revolutionary. And they were hard to fight for. They weren't easily given to us because they were speculative. But he gets all the credit for that. I guess the other thing that separates your show from most others that I don't think that are not fantasy genre shows is just the size of the ensemble is massive, right? I'm writing episode three of season three right now, and I'm thinking to myself, my God, there's a lot of characters in this. Yeah. I mean, I'm wondering how you guys must have to chart it out. I'm a man on a mission. I want every working actor in Hollywood right now to get a job.

52:10I want everybody to get their health insurance in 2026. So I got to write them in. Amazing. And we'll just also note that you wrote season one, episode four and nine. And then for season two, wrote episode three and 14 and directed episode six. Interesting thing, though, in the center of this whole ensemble, obviously, is Dr. Robbie. and you've said that he is the character that you've played that comes closest to yourself. What do you mean by that? I mean I'm playing him closer to who I am than I've ever played a character before. I'm bringing more of myself to this part than I think I have invested before.

52:53Does that feel scary? Well, if you're going to take the music out and you're going to turn the lights on and you're going to tell everybody that this is as close to reality as you can get in an emergency room. You know, the idea of stripping artifice away and playing as close to your own honesty, your own, you know, physical makeup, emotional makeup, I think the better. So, you know, that's the mandate in the writer's room is you don't get to write these characters at arm's length. We don't have the luxury of writing arm's length characters. We have to write these characters the way we would write and describe ourselves and our families and our friends.

53:29And whatever they're doing, whatever we're doing to get through a day, that's what they're doing. You know, this is one-to-one. And I think that that's part of what is resonating is the degree to which we're willing to open our own veins for this creative process to mine it for what's relative, I think comes across as honesty. People, as you, I'm sure, hear every day, people that actually work in medical field and emergency rooms say this is the most real thing they've ever seen on TV. And I know that's not coincidental. Can you just talk about some of the people who you guys consult with and the people who are even, I think, surrounding the actors physically on the show who help to bring that flavor of authenticity?

54:16I just left one of the biggest ones, Dr. Joe Sachs. You know, he's really been a touchstone on both shows, ER and the pit. He, as a discipline, probably has done more for television medicine than anybody else ever has or will. He is a board-certified emergency room physician. He's also a very gifted writer. and he writes a lot of our storylines and a lot of the technical mumbo-jumbo that we all spout. A lot of that comes from Joe, as it does also come from Dr. Mel Herbert, who is a legend in his own right, and Josh Troak, a physician that we brought on to the writing staff this year. We also have on the set three rotating, actually four rotating ER physicians.

55:03Every episode there will be one on set to answer questions, And then a lot of trauma nurses in and around those trauma scenes are borrowed from other hospitals. So everybody, there's a lot of expertise around. And you guys, I believe I read, you and the other people that work in the EHR on the show were almost like went through a boot camp or something. Is that right? Yeah, we wanted to, you know, when you have to start people off at a high level of proficiency on a TV show. And, you know, you've never held that instrument. You've never said that word. And you don't know the difference between an R1, R2, or R3.

55:35energetically or educationally, that's going to be a problem on day one. So how do we get everybody up to speed and how do we get everybody to be successful? So we decided to have a two-week boot camp, which was really condensed medical school where we'd go over all the procedures and pronunciations of everything we were going to be doing in the first few episodes. We'd drill it. But really the interesting thing that John did because he directed the first episode was he arranged us energetically. So I sat by myself. Occasionally, I would talk to Patrick or Tracy Ifacor, who were my fourth years.

56:09Very rarely would I interact with my third years, which was Fiona or Taylor. I never talked to the med students. And they sat behind me when we ate lunch, and we always had our stations separated. So that when we began filming, I had a little bit of a rapport with certain people. Other people were more strangers to me. and we began the creative experience, you know, in the roles in which we had been rehearsing. I understand that going back to ER, you were kind of known for being very good at performing fake operations and things on, or dissections or whatever we would call it. Is that true? And does that apply as well to the pit?

56:52Are you still sort of the guy who, like, I mean, and the other thing. I wonder if it gets a little blurry sometimes because you really did, I know, late in the ER run, which helped to shape the final seasons of ER. I think you were volunteering with actual doctor ER or not just doctors in Africa, right? And things like that where you might be able to actually do some of these things. I don't know. Well, I think I know what you're referring to. I never practiced any medicine. Let's be clear about that. But I did have an opportunity to be around a lot of physicians who were practicing what I would call frontline triage medicine.

57:36During the war in Kosovo, I was with a group called Doctors of the World, which was an American-based version of Doctors Without Burters, which is French. But basically, it was a group of GPs who had left their own practice to go over and do card table medicine on refugees. And I went over to watch the work they were doing, and try and raise some money for him. And that storyline of what I was watching sort of fed into a lot of Carter's activism in that last season when he went to Darfur and to the Belgian Congo. That's where those storylines came from. But, yeah, I guess I'm sort of deluded. I'm a very proppy actor.

58:13I like props. I like working with stethoscopes, and I like working with scalpels. I like the business of the medicine, so I'm invested that way. And it was really exciting to come back and play with those tools again and have the muscle memory be that familiar. So I kind of leaned into it a bit. As to whether or not I had a reputation for being really good at it, you know, I think that's revisionist history. And I guess, though, to what you're saying with being tactile, it goes back to that audition, right? We were talking about with the pencil on John Levy. Physical comedy plays, physical plays.

58:46That's right. I look for that in the actors we cast. You know, there is a tendency for film and television actors, especially if you're young, to not to know what to do with your body. You're used to big shot and either a medium shot or a close up. So you're thinking about your emotion and you're thinking about your delivery. But you're not thinking about how to express either one of those or your subconscious in your body physically. And it's just a technique that is rarely taught to young performers. And yet those who could do it immediately, you know, jump leaps and bounds above those who can't.

59:21So when we started this show, I put on a kind of a primer of what kind of performer we were looking for. And I said, they have to be really adept at learning a lot of language, a lot of difficult words, and rattle it off as if it's second nature and you've done it a hundred times. While you're walking backwards down a hallway, you know, and lifting a very heavy person off of a bed, you have to be good with props you have to be comfortable working in an ensemble where you're not going to be the primary focus of a scene or a day's work or even an episode at times but come to be part of an ensemble be part of a company bring your creativity bring your enthusiasm leave your ego and buy in and you'll never work this way again and everybody that showed up it was like calling all pros and the pros turned out last few things if i can one of them I have to ask you about I mean all of season one was of course feels like building up to episode 13 where Robbie has this breakdown in the makeshift morgue of the hospital that itself felt like kind of a master class and I just wonder going into that is that one of those scenes that as an actor you are kind of looking forward to or wanting to push off no totally looking forward to yeah totally looking forward to it like a graduation like a like um like a release you know i went to work absolutely giddy that we got to shoot those scenes because that feeling that attendant feeling what was inside waiting to come out had been present with me for so long nurturing it kindling it like a little flame to make sure that it was there every day whether we were shooting or not just to make sure and then that day was the day I got to pull the top off of it.

1:01:08It was great. I wonder for you, it had been 26 years since you'd last received an Emmy nomination. You'd had five in a row right out of the gate on ER, but then 26 years, and you get another one for the pit. By the time it happened, I think it was kind of the whole world knew it was going to happen. But for you, symbolically, I wonder what it meant, and if also in the intervening years, You'd perhaps ever, if your confidence had been shaken at all, that maybe this was the, I don't know, that this was achievable again, this kind of work and recognition. You know, when you're that fortunate to be recognized that consistently, you get a sense of hubris that these are very smart people, the people that vote on this.

1:01:59They really know good work when they see it. And then when you don't get nominated, you have it said, it's all full of shit. What is this, a popularity contest? That's not why we do this. What are we in this for trophies? It's all a rigged game, and I'm not even interested in watching it. And then you get nominated again. You're like, they're geniuses again. Oh, my God. But the truth is, over 26 years of that not being my reality, you develop a sense of validation, self-validation that's not external. It's more internal and you get more process oriented than result oriented just because that's what's in front of you.

1:02:37And it turns out that that's a really rewarding way to live. And to chase trophies and accolades is a really empty and unsustainable way to live. Although nice to get them as you did for both best drama and best actor. But they become gravy. They become a cherry on a cake as opposed to the point of the exercise. with season two it the whole season I think you've talked about and clearly it seems like this is a in a way a cry for help for from Dr. Ravi I mean he doesn't seem to embrace help but he clearly needs it and hence that this is not going in a good direction I wonder if you can just talk about how you shade something like that in a performance it's so it's not in your face but building all the way up to that incredible season finale, which I'll just remind people, he's cradling the abandoned baby girl, reveals that he too had been abandoned when he was eight, but he's promising her and perhaps himself, everything's going to be just fine.

1:03:45But this is the culmination of, you have to kind of, I imagine, map this out in a way literally or not over 15 episodes. Can you just, the season two challenge versus season one, if you can talk about it. Sure. Yeah, it's really, you know, season one, you're watching a guy who's drowning that doesn't know he's drowning. Season two, you're watching a guy who knows he's drowning not want to accept a life preserver. So, who actually has convinced himself that it might be easier to drown. and and yet as the shift goes on the idea of leaving all of his fellow shipmates you know stranded or in an environment that's that's not set up for success is increasingly difficult for him as is the the decision to to leave so structurally it's really about you know coming in with one resolute idea which is i'm excited to go on the sabbatical and i'm this is my last day and I can't wait to get out of here.

1:04:46And then as the day goes on, you just start to chip away at that resolve and show that the more, the closer you get to the door, the closer you're coming to face your own mortality. And as people get more and more desperate, they get less and less graceful. So I wanted his behavior to seem a bit more erratic, sometimes volatile, sometimes petty, sometimes mean, sometimes challenging. but very out of character for him where you could reverse engineer all of that pathology and go, oh, look at that. He didn't know how to ask for help, but he's screaming, somebody stop me. Somebody ask me about my behavior.

1:05:26Somebody put me on a hold, you know. And then ultimately, you know, everybody tries. Langdon tries, Abbott tries, Dana tries, and they do begin to kind of, I think, get through to him that this is a community of people that really have a vested interest. and him staying alive and being part of this community and then what we've been sort of building to i'm not being very articulate about this is that the original wound that we've shown in season one this loss of mentor that he died during covid that was the catalyst for his breakdown was not the original wound he's predisposed to abandonment because of how he He was wired young and went into this line of work because he wanted to save people he couldn't save.

1:06:16And so here you are in the room where you lost your mentor, where you lost your son's girlfriend, and you're holding another abandoned innocent who's about to face a very similar road that you faced. And in that, what is your advice to this innocent? That they should get a motorcycle and not a helmet? or, you know, hang on, there's going to be some beautiful things to see and some things worth hanging around for. Does it feel differently now than it did when ER hit? Are you, or is, or, you know, how would you, how are you processing the fact that you're back in the center? The need for this show is greater than the need for ER was.

1:06:59So the way that this show hits people is way more intense and emotional. so the way that they come up to me and engage with me is way more personal than I really like your show you know or you know I hear George Clooney's a great practical joker it's a lot more you know I lost my mother last year or you know COVID was really hard for me or I work in an emergency room and now my family have contacts for what I do well you and you've gotten that from your own family right 100 yeah you mentioned your mom was a was a nurse yeah my mom you know for years, never shared with us her war stories and watched the pit and remembered a whole bunch of them and shared them with me.

1:07:39And it opened up a whole new mode of communication for she and I, where I could both appreciate the mother that she was who didn't burden her family with the things that she was seeing and doing, who still showed up and made dinner and helped us with her homework and drove us to practice. And I could respect the professional who, you know, was really capable and took on a lot, took in a lot, and never really had any place to put it except with her colleagues. Last question. We are sitting here back at, on the Warner Brothers lot where... Where it all began. It all began. And where it's all... And it'll probably all end.

1:08:14Where it's still going strong. You're not in production now. You are in the writer's room, and I don't think I've given adequate attention in terms of my questions to the fact that it would be an impressive enough thing if you were just acting on the show, but you're writing, directing executive producing all of this and i wonder if you can just talk about it makes it all the more impressive that i i guess that you've taken on so much and it's all firing on all cylinders just what's it what's it like i guess you're never off right this is always going for you no i seem to have i've really done it to myself this time um and and intentionally so this is my favorite dream factory the fact that i get to drive into that gate that i once was allowed and then not allowed to drive through, and I'm allowed to drive through it again, and I get to park in my parking place and to play on a soundstage here.

1:09:07This is exactly what I want to do with my life, and the fact that I have an opportunity to weigh in on so many aspects of production is really a dream come true. I love the people I'm working with. I love the story we're telling. I think it's a really important story to tell right now. It feels great. Best show on TV. It's not close. Thank you so much for doing this. Great questions. Thank you.

1:09:39Thanks for listening to Awards Chatter. We really appreciate it and would really appreciate you taking just a minute more to subscribe to the podcast and to leave us a rating and review on your podcast app and to follow us on Twitter and Instagram where our handle is at Awards Chatter. On those platforms, we announce upcoming guests and provide details about special live recordings of the podcast that you can attend. Until next time, thanks again for tuning in.

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