Noah Wyle
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Our guest today, Noah Wiley, is an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Mac series, The Pit, which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
The Pit has drawn critical praise for its engaging storylines, intelligent dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And it's gained a following of real-life emergency room doctors who praise the accuracy of the show's depiction of medical conditions and treatments. Noah Wiley is a veteran of stage, screen, and television who's no stranger to lab coats and hospital scrubs.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He played a medical student and then a physician on the hit NBC TV series ER for most of its 15 seasons, where he earned nominations for three Golden Globe and five Primetime Emmy Awards. He starred in the TNT series Falling Skies and The Librarians and has appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organization's Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Noah Wiley, welcome to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Thank you so much for having me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, I mentioned in the introduction that your character – maybe I didn't. He's the senior attending physician in this emergency room. And, you know, in addition to treating patients, you're really running this big organization and it's a teaching hospital. So while you're an experienced pro, there are all these others who are less experienced, residents in training and medical students.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
On their first day, I believe, in their rotation as this thing begins – So there's a lot going on here. Tell us just a little bit more about your character, Dr. Robbie.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I play Dr. Michael Rabinovich, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple of years ago. But like many practitioners, post-COVID felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need. And because he's really good at what he does and he really cares about the people he works with, he's kept working. And... It's taken a toll on him.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He's seen a lot and done a lot, and he's been able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And today we are embedded with him for his entire shift on the day that he's no longer able to do that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Right. And he runs into some rough seas. You know, he's surrounded by these young medical students. And I don't think I recognize any of the actors in this, but they are just so terrific.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts of things while doing a procedure and walking backwards. And we had to cast the show internationally.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
We found actors in Australia, we found them in England, we found them on the East Coast, West Coast, but we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And they're great. Well, let's listen to a scene and get a little bit of a flavor of the show. This scene is typical of many where a new patient is being wheeled in by paramedics from an ambulance. And we hear them barking out critical facts as they're rolling them in.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And then you hear this one, two, three as the team coordinates lifting the patient from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital gurney. And then the team gets to work. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And that's a scene from The Pit where our guest Noah Wiley is a star.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Awfully intense. It's tough to get the impact of that clip on radio, but that was a Laforte III floating face fracture, which when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Right. And you don't see it on the radio, but it is dramatic there. But just the audio, I mean, you can hear the intensity of it. And there's all this medical jargon flying by. I mean, did you know all this stuff before you got into this series?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to me. And thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisors on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board certified emergency room physician.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He was a technical advisor and a writer on ER, and he is with us again. And he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling given the circumstances and stakes of the case.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Yeah. I watched this series with my wife who was 25 years as a primary care physician. She gets almost all of it. I get maybe a third of it. But I don't feel like I'm missing much. But I did wonder – you were a writer on the show, I know. I mean do you think about maybe letting up on some of that or is getting all that in critical to the authenticity of it?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack in the show. And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show and we need you to feel sad here because we're playing strings or exciting here because we're using percussion. We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room play.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
be our cadence, and a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing. It becomes the soundtrack and the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes the emotional equivalent of a score. And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
It's competency porn.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, the origins of this show are interesting. As I understand it, during the pandemic, you began hearing from medical providers and first responders who were dealing with all this high-stakes stressful demand on them. Is that right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders. And some of it was, you know, hey, Carter, we could use you out here.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Carter was the character you played on ER, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever did with my life because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives right now. And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here. And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here, even though... We said we'd never do it again.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I might be ready to volunteer. And a couple years later, you know, after we saw how this broke down over socioeconomic lines and racial lines and geographic lines, there was a show to be told here.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
What was it like for you to put on scrubs and a lab coat and get back in a hospital setting again after all those years?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
It was wonderful. Yeah. I think I spent 15 years avoiding, actively avoiding walking down what I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road. And then finally I had an opportunity to come back and was excited about it and slipped a stethoscope around my neck and just felt right at home.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, I should just mention it's been widely reported that there is some litigation around this. The estate of Michael Crichton, who was the creator of ER, has sued alleging that The Pit is an unauthorized reboot of the program. I mean one of the differences between the two shows is that – The pit is the entire 15 episodes are one day in the life of this ER.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
There's an hour – essentially in real time, an hour per episode is one hour of the day. And so you get to see these things develop just over a day. So that's the real distinction.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Very much so. Different city, different character. We had started down a reboot road, and then that became an impossibility. And so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by we have.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You're the lead attending in this emergency room. And in real life, you're also an executive producer and a writer and an experienced actor among a cast which includes a lot of, you know, much younger actors. Were you kind of a coach on the set in the same way you're a medical coach for these people learning the craft?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
In a way, you know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody, myself included, to kick some rust off and to re-familiarize myself with how much has changed in health care, but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be by the time we rolled the cameras.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to him. And then he sort of segregated us where I was off by myself and I ate lunch by myself. Eight together, the R2s and 3s ate together.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
That's fourth-year residents, second-year residents.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Second-year residents, fourth-year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves. And they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know. And the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth. And I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
But it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am considerably older than the rest of the cast or that I've played a doctor before, yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, we listened to a clip earlier that was... an intense moment in which a patient is being wheeled in and the staff is immediately getting to work on him. There are a lot of quieter moments in this series where you are dealing with a patient or a relative and have some tough issues to communicate.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
This is one I want to play now where a man and a woman who are a brother and sister, played here by Rebecca Tilney and Mackenzie Aston, are at the hospital with their elderly father who has pneumonia and The father has left instructions. He does not want to be intubated. And they're talking to you as Dr. Robbie about it. Dr. Robbie speaks first. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Either his pneumonia is getting worse or his heart couldn't handle the fluids that we gave him to treat the sepsis. His lungs are filling up with fluid.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Not without his blood pressure crashing with very bad consequences. So let's just hope the BiPAP works.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Then I would need to know your decision about using a breathing machine. We're still talking about it. Well, we know he expressed his wishes in writing, do not intubate. We're thinking try it for a week. That would be a very painful week. He wouldn't get a lot of rest with all the monitors and all the blood tests. He might need to be sedated.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He might need to be restrained because he'd be in an unfamiliar place with a very uncomfortable tube down his throat. And he wouldn't really know what was happening. Elderly patients can often develop psychosis.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Well, the sooner you decide, the better. I'm really sorry. I wish there was more that I could do. I'm not sure that he has that much time left.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And that is our guest Noah Wiley in a scene from The Pit, which is now streaming on Max. There are a lot of these scenes where you're dealing with loved ones who just can't accept what's happening. And there's another one, two parents who just can't accept the fact that their son who came in with a fentanyl overdose is brain dead. You want to just say a little bit about preparing for these scenes?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare. And sometimes when you only have an hour to tell a story that has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process. So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours, it feels like you can kind of walk through those five stages of grief with these characters. When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons for wanting to keep their father alive, that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes. So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
The other thing that's happening in this story with your character is, you know, I mentioned before that this series kind of the germ of it began during COVID when you were hearing from first responders and the crises they were facing. And in the show, your character, Dr. Robbie. During COVID, lost a mentor, another doctor.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And I believe this day that is the focus of the series is the anniversary of his death, right? We learned that early on. And then you want to just talk a bit about how his flashbacks, his PTSD, if you will, is portrayed in the show?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, he had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival. And then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should have stayed home. But today he went to work. And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him. And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And she came over for breakfast last Sunday, and she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode. in that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the four-year-old.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names. And she's, you know, getting teary-eyed. And she finishes, and I said, my goodness, Mom... I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that. And she said, well, that wasn't real. I said, well, this one wasn't either.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And she said, but it felt real. And it brought all that up for me. Isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the four-year-old, when was that? She said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time. I think that's why it hit me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And then I thought to myself, oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night and you helped us with our homework? Wow.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And she's carried that painful memory for all these years.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
That's 35 years it's been in there.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
It came out last Sunday. Well, Noah Wiley, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been fun. Oh, this has been a pleasure. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons for wanting to keep their father alive that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes. So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, he had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival. And then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should have stayed home. But today he went to work. And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him. And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And she came over for breakfast last Sunday, and she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode. in that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the four-year-old.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names. And she's, you know, getting teary-eyed. And she finishes, and I said, my goodness, Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that. And she said, well, that wasn't real. I said, well, this one wasn't either.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And she said, but it felt real. And it brought all that up for me. Isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the four-year-old, when was that? And she said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time. I think that's why it hit me.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then I thought to myself, oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night and you helped us with our homework? Wow. Yeah.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
That's 35 years it's been in there. It came out last Sunday.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
That's as hard as it gets. We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure, meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger. But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger. So what do you do? I did my residency at a big charity in New Orleans. And day one, I got a kid, five-year-old boy, accidentally shot by his brother, playing with dad's gun, worried he was gonna get in trouble.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I play Dr. Michael Rabinovich, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple of years ago. But like many practitioners, post-COVID felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need. And because he's really good at what he does and he really cares about the people he works with, he's kept working. And it's taken a toll on him.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
right up until he coated and died. Then I asked myself, like, what do I do with this kid? Where do I put this feeling? And I found myself walking all night. I was walking and walking and walking, and I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery, and I'm looking at all those mausoleums and those crypts, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, that's what I need.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Okay, everybody, let's get back to it. Just remember the employee assistance program is available, as are Kiara and myself, if anybody needs to talk.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, we had a bit of a mandate. Let's not be too biased. You know, the fastest way to get people to turn the channel is if they feel like we're preaching to them or we're being dogmatic. So what we wanted was accuracy and realism. We wanted to just be presentational with what emergency rooms look like. I wrote that episode and I couldn't resist.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Just taking one stance, which I thought was fairly benign, which is to talk about the efficacy of masks in cutting down the transmission of disease and germs, which shouldn't be a political statement and shouldn't even be called into question. And yet it has been the last couple of years. And it's a great statement.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
sort of metaphor for uh for all the distrust that's been uh seeded between uh us and our doctors and um it's really i think incredibly unfortunate and i don't know if by the time this airs how much worse the situation is going to get but there was so that 20 of the nih was just laid off we're going to be seeing the tale of that decision making for years and years and years to come
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, that was what was so funny. We wrote these episodes almost a year ago. And so when we did a storyline about neurocystic sarcosis, we had no idea that RFK Jr. was going to be diagnosed with neurocystic sarcosis. Nor did we think when we did a measles storyline that it was going to be as topical as it is right now. Nine months ago, it wasn't.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
But it wasn't hard to look into your crystal ball and see what was going to happen if vaccine rates continued to drop. And we live with an international community that travels all the time. Like we are as vulnerable as the next incoming flight.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Oh, I'm glad. I've gotten some mail from Philly that didn't appreciate it. I know. I meant it as sort of a compliment because when I grew up, I grew up from L.A. And, you know, when the Lakers would play the Sixers or when I would see Rocky or the Broad Street Bullies, like, you guys were tough. They were tough. Yes.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So I just thought that's almost an homage to Philly to say it's the tougher of the two.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He's seen a lot and done a lot. He's been able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And today we are embedded with him for his entire shift on the day that he's no longer able to do that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, it actually circles back to what you mentioned before about trying to put as many details about Pittsburgh into the show. And in doing our Pittsburgh research, we came across this incredible story that is now starting to get told about the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which was a program started by Dr. Safer, who invented CPR, where he recognized that up until that point, if you lived in
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
at any neighborhood and you needed to go to the hospital, you had to call the police. The police would come and pick you up and you went into a paddy wagon and they took you to the hospital. But if you lived in the black neighborhood, that didn't happen. So the mortality rate in the black neighborhoods was just terrible in the late 50s and early 60s.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And so this was an attempt to train high school, college age, young black men in lifesaving techniques for the first time, deploy them in the field with that training and ambulances that could go to these neighborhoods and pick up people and bring them back. And it was the very first ambulance service, the very first 911 system in the country. It was incredibly successful.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The mortality rate dropped considerably, and it got the attention of all of the city fathers who looked at this and thought, my goodness, what a great program. We should fire all these young men, replace them with white drivers, and make this a national standard, which is what happened. And all those original drivers lost their jobs.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Some of them stayed in health care and worked in health care and actually got to meet a couple of the surviving members when I was in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. And so we brought in a patient who was depicting a guy who had been one of the original drivers so we could just shed a little light on it.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
That is a real thing. And I've seen films of it done, and it's just as moving as we've depicted it, if not more so in real life. It's really beautiful.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts of things while doing a procedure and walking backwards. And we had to cast the show internationally. We found actors in Australia. We found them in England.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
What was your childhood like? What kind of kid were you? Eclectic. You know, I'm one of seven children spread over a couple of marriages. At the most, we had six under one roof sharing a bathroom. That's a lot of kids at the table. That's a lot of vying for attention.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
We had all sorts of, you know, we've had academics, we've had athletes, and I was trying to find my identity in the midst of all that, and I ended up the storyteller.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I did. I went to a boarding school, the oldest boarding school in California, a school called the Thatcher School, founded in 1889. And when I was there my sophomore year, I auditioned for a play kind of as a joke, intentionally to go and kind of make fun of the process and ended up getting cast. And I just... took to it. I enjoyed the process more than that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I enjoyed somebody telling me that I was good at it after the show. And that feeling of being told I was good at something was enough to make me want to continue doing it.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Also, growing up in Los Angeles, an acting career didn't seem like a foreign concept. You know, I knew that roadmap fairly well. So it all seemed within grasp.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, but how, I mean, in retrospect, how long was that period of time for me? So short. So short that it's almost ridiculous that I could have been impatient. The truth is I started when I was 19, and when I was 22 or 23, I did the pilot for ER and never looked back after that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I'm really incredibly grateful to George, Anthony, and Tony. They were all 10 years older than I was and really took me under their wing like big brothers. To a certain extent, Sherry and Julianne as well.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I'm talking about the cast of ER, George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Eric LaSalle. So they were mentors and tutors to me in the early years. And I don't know how I would have handled all the success and the workload if I hadn't had such incredible role models around me showing me how to be professional.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
No, I think it's very true. Well, the work was being recognized as groundbreaking and it lasted a long time. I took for granted how well run the show was and how smooth it was produced and produced. how well cared for I was in that ecosystem.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
We found them on the East Coast, West Coast. But we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then I spent the next 15 years trying to recreate something that I thought was an industry standard without realizing it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And then I've been blessed by having lightning strike twice.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, I left and I called it a divorce with visitation rights.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I left a certain amount of episodes in the balance knowing that I wanted to stay part of the narrative and also having had John Wells tell me that he wanted me to be part of the finale, that John Carter coming back to the emergency room as an attending seemed like a really lovely bookend to the whole experience from where the pilot began. So I wanted to be part of that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Your medical student, first day of his rotation in the emergency room.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Become a drug addict, fall in love, almost become a father.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, sure. During that period of time and subsequently, I was approached by a lot of different charities and organizations, a lot of them medical-based, to use my celebrity to raise awareness or money for them. And I got very selective because you want to pick and choose.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You want to make sure that when you go out and stump for something, it has some resonance in your own life and you can speak intelligently about it, passionately about it.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then I got approached by this group called Doctors of the World that was an American-based version of Doctors Without Borders, which is French, that was doing frontline triage medicine in different war zones around the world. And I was really moved by – it's a purely volunteer organization.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Doctors, GPs from America would go and volunteer their time to go halfway around the world and practice wartime MASH medicine in very harrowing circumstances. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And I had an opportunity to go during the war in Kosovo and be in a refugee camp in Macedonia and watch firsthand the heroic efforts of these doctors trying to treat this refugee population and came back really galvanized about helping this organization and ones like it do that kind of humanitarian aid thing.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And it was catalytic for us doing the storylines in Darfur and the Belgian Congo that we eventually did on the show.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, I wasn't, but it was sort of an all-hands-on-deck situation there, too. A bus would show up with maybe... 50, 60 refugees of varying ages, mostly young children and old women, because any man that was of fighting age was fighting. So a lot of people had been on the road for a really long time. They were wearing everything that they could carry.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So there was a lot of dehydration and a lot of malnutrition and a lot of fear, you know. And it began with taking people off buses and doing basic medical assessments. And then also there were lawyers and psychiatrists who would go and do interviews with the refugees and ask them about their experiences.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And those became testimonials that were later used in the war crimes tribunal trials with Milosevic. But I saw in that moment the sort of hand-in-hand medical psychological tandem treatment that was having an effect, both treating the body but also treating the psychological damage of the trauma.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And that led me to another organization called Human Rights Watch, which is a legal-based advocacy group that – Does exactly that kind of work. They go around and they take testimony to try and affect social change. So those two organizations kind of defined the 90s and early teens for me in terms of activism.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It's been a long time since I've been in contact with them. I've been involved with a lot of other grassroots medical organizations over the years, ones that do anything from feeding people in disaster zones domestically to international stuff. Obviously, the cutbacks in U.S.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
aid and a lot of the NGOs funding that we're seeing are disastrous to the communities that I've become close with, and it's very, very troubling.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I tend to align myself with anything that involves human rights or civil rights. I'm right now extremely concerned about our health care system and its fragility to the next pandemic. I'm extremely concerned about the burnout rate of our practitioners and the overburdening that the nursing shortage and the boarding crisis is causing.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, I can't express enough how interdependent we are as a population, how much we need each other. And yet it just seems like every day the seeds of division are being sowed to greater and greater degrees. And it's unsustainable. It really is.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I don't think it is. I like to think that we're part of a lighthouse kind of light that's going to keep everybody – reminding everybody about what kind of country we really are at heart and how amazing – the people that do this kind of work are. And that's the irony.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, you can cut Medi-Cal and you can take 80% of California's population off those rolls and you can kick people out of assisted living homes or out of old folks' homes and you can force emergency rooms to close. The practitioners will still take care of sick people. The aged will still be cared for.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Children will still be cared for because these people won't let those patients fall between the cracks because that's who they are, which is why it's so infuriating to watch them be taken advantage of or worse, taken for granted.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Awfully intense. It's tough to get the impact of that clip on radio, but that was a Laforte 3 floating face fracture, which when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to me. And thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisors on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board certified emergency room physician.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He was a technical advisor and a writer on ER, and he is with us again. And he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling given the circumstances and stakes of the case.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack in the show. And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show and we need you to feel sad here because we're playing strings or exciting here because we're using percussion.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room be our cadence, and a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing. It becomes the soundtrack and the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes... The emotional equivalent of a score.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about. It's competency porn.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The rehearsals are extensive, especially for the medical scenes. We often rehearse those 24 hours in advance of shooting them so we can come in with it pretty well in our muscles already and then figure out how we want to photograph it on the day we shoot. In terms of how the dialogue is overlapped, that's intentional because that's real.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, you've got four or five people in the room all are working simultaneously trying to do their own thing and record their own thing in the medical record. So a lot of times the sound is really cacophonous.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders. And some of it was, you know, hey, Carter, we could use you out here.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever did with my life because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives right now. And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here. And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here, even though... We said we'd never do it again.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I might be ready to volunteer. And a couple years later, you know, after we saw how this broke down over socioeconomic lines and racial lines and geographic lines, there was a show to be told here.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It was wonderful. Yeah. I think I spent 15 years avoiding, actively avoiding walking down what I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road. And then finally I had an opportunity to come back and was excited about it and slipped a stethoscope around my neck and just felt right at home.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yes, yes. Ironically, I'm 20 years older than Anthony Edwards was playing The Attending 30 years ago. So that makes me sound ancient.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Very much so. Different city, different character. We had started down a reboot road, and then it became an impossibility. And so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by we have.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
In a way, you know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody, myself included, to kick some rust off and to re-familiarize myself with how much has changed in health care, but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be by the time we rolled the cameras.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to him. And then he sort of segregated us where I was off by myself and I ate lunch by myself. Eight together, the R2s and 3s ate together.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Second-year residents, fourth-year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves. And they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know. And the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth. And I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
But it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am considerably older than the rest of the cast or that I've played a doctor before, yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, to a degree. I mean, I don't stand on ceremony when I work and I try to create as much of an egalitarian and democratic environment as possible. And so I try to erase numbers on call sheets and I try to erase barriers between foreground and background or cast and crew and try to call the whole thing company and get everybody to buy into the same thing. And it's very hard to do that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It's very rare that you're successful. This one was the stars aligned beautifully. Everybody just jumped in. Which made it a real pleasure.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Either his pneumonia is getting worse or his heart couldn't handle the fluids that we gave him to treat the sepsis. His lungs are filling up with fluid.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Not without his blood pressure crashing with very bad consequences. So let's just hope the BiPAP works.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Then I would need to know your decision about using a breathing machine. We're still talking about it. Well, we know he expressed his wishes in writing. Do not intubate. We're thinking try it for a week. That would be a very painful week. He wouldn't get a lot of rest with all the monitors and all the blood tests. He might need to be sedated.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He might need to be restrained because he'd be in an unfamiliar place with a very uncomfortable tube down his throat. And he wouldn't really know what was happening. Elderly patients can often develop psychosis.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, the sooner you decide, the better. I'm really sorry. I wish there was more that I could do. I'm not sure that he has that much time left.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare. And sometimes when you only have an hour to tell a story that has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process. So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours, it feels like you can kind of walk through those five stages of grief with these characters. When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
That's as hard as it gets. We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure, meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger. But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger. So what do you do?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
I did my residency at Big Charity in New Orleans, and day one, I got a kid, five-year-old boy, accidentally shot by his brother, playing with dad's gun, worried he was gonna get in trouble, right up until he coated and died. Then I asked myself, like, what do I do with this kid? Where do I put this feeling? And I found myself walking all night.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
I was walking and walking and walking, and I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery, and I'm looking at all those mausoleums and those crypts, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, that's what I need. I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings.