Playing Dr. John Carter on ER made Noah Wyle a household name, but not necessarily an Emmy winner. At least not yet. Still, the actor logged one of the longest gaps in Emmy nominations — 26 years, to be exact. Finally, this June, the actor returned to the ballot, this time for The Pitt, the HBO Max breakout that’s dominating conversations in 2025.
“I’m a different person and it’s a little sweeter to have it as a second chance — a second act,” Wyle tells THR. “It feels really gratifying to be doing work that’s resonating with so many people again. The first time around, you don’t really have the perspective of knowing how rare that kind of success is. People could say, ‘This is amazing, how popular this show is. This doesn’t happen.’ But you don’t have a frame of reference for that kind of statement. So you just think, ‘This is my normal.’ ”
It took Wyle “a few decades” to recognize that the beloved NBC hit, which ran for 15 seasons, was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. “It’s very rare that lightning strikes twice in the same place or in the same life,” he says. “And it has for me, so this time around, I’m trying to be present and enjoy it.”
The Pitt, which received a whopping 13 nominations, has been lauded by critics for its realistic portrayal of health care workers in underfunded emergency rooms. Wyle stars as attending physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch during a single 15-hour shift at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, where he and his colleagues (portrayed by Patrick Ball, Tracy Ifeachor, Katherine LaNasa and Taylor Dearden, among others) face staff shortages and insufficient resources.
“In the middle of a hospital drama, we were going to tell the story of a deconstructed hero,” says Wyle, who’s no stranger to scrubs, of preparing for his character. “I like any depiction of the human comedy, and all that is entailed in that. You get a lot of that kind of polarity in hospitals,” he adds of returning to a medical drama. “You get life and you get death, and you get people doing noble, angelic work, but in order to do it, they have to have a dirty sense of humor and foxhole mentality. So you get a great snapshot of what modern life looks like in that environment.”
The drive for accuracy trickled down from the show’s production design, storylines and lack of a soundtrack all the way to Wyle’s performance, often followed by a handheld camera in a documentary-style approach to portray the chaotic environment of the ER.
“I have nothing but respect for people working on the front lines in our hospitals and in our ambulances,” says Wyle. “What they’ve been doing since and during COVID has gone celebrated but unsupported. And the intention of this show is to put a spotlight back on that community, to hear their cry for help and for reinforcements but also to hear their warning that this is a very fragile system — as fragile as their mental health.”
Noah Wyle stars as Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch alongside Katherine LaNasa in HBO Max’s The Pitt, on which he also serves as executive producer.
Warrick Page/MAX
In a few instances, storylines on the show are mirroring what’s happening in real life. Not only does Robby beg hospital admins for more resources, at a time when Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill cut Medicaid for millions of the poorest Americans, but an episode in which there’s a measles outbreak debuted the same week in April when cases of measles started accelerating in the U.S.
“We got lucky a couple of times,” admits Wyle. “We meet with all sorts of experts from every different sector that you can imagine. And we end those interviews by saying, ‘What isn’t on TV that should be?’ … We didn’t know that measles was going to be in the news, but we knew that if we looked at vaccination rates dropping the way they are, that certain things were potentially going to come back. And we chose correctly. Events on the ground are changing so quickly that we’re scrambling a little bit to stay au courant, and we’ve got all of our feelers out to try and see with these cuts in Medicaid and closures of rural hospitals, what would that look like in 16 months in a city like Pittsburgh? The answers are terrifying, and to try to figure out how to dramatize that, or weave that into the narrative in a way that’s reflective of reality but also somewhat prescriptive to a way out … it’s really challenging.”
His performance was filled with challenging moments, too, ranging from navigating a mass casualty event, to a teenager overdosing on fentanyl, to a young girl drowning in a pool. But for Wyle, episode 13, in which Robby has a panic attack on the ER floor, struck a chord.
“I was so looking forward to that release both for myself and the character,” he says. “The whole season has been building to that point — I was so excited to shoot it. I came to work … that was one of my better days.”
In fact, to perfect his performance, Wyle stayed in it as much as possible. “I was really asking a lot of my family during those latter episodes, to be very patient with whatever mood I was going to come home in, because it was easier for me to stay in it than try to come out of it and be normal and then go back to work and get back in it,” he explains. “I just didn’t leave it until we finished, and then as soon as we finished, my wife sent me off for three days to go sit on a beach.”
Wyle wears many hats on The Pitt: He executive produces the drama alongside John Wells and series creator R. Scott Gemmill, both of whom he worked with on ER. (Michael Hissrich, Erin Jontow and Simran Baidwan are also EPs.) Together, they developed The Pitt after the end of the writers strike in 2023. One of their initial ideas was to mute any music, with only the sounds of heart monitors, rolling carts and fluorescent lights as the soundtrack.
“That was one of the most fought-for [concessions], and one of the last ones that we got before we aired, because it was such a speculative idea,” Wyle says. “Scott had written two episodes of ER back in the old days, where he took out the soundtrack. He knew that it was very effective, and had the confidence that it would work. But really nobody else did. … Taking the soundtrack out doesn’t tell you how to feel about the scene, but makes it interesting and forces you to engage and evaluate it on its own merit.”
Wyle is currently in production on the highly anticipated second season, which will shift forward 10 months after the events of season one, and will debut in January. As if starring in the lead role and executive producing the show weren’t enough, Wyle says he plans to take on more responsibility, including writing and directing some episodes.
“This is a show we’ve all been dreaming about working on for a while,” he says, “and when you know this is a unicorn opportunity to shoot 15 episodes in Los Angeles on a lot … this is old-school television that is affording us all the quality of life to go home and have dinner with our families and be present on weekends and not have to fly back from Toronto, Vancouver, New Orleans, Albuquerque, Atlanta. It engenders a sense of gratitude and buy-in that you can’t put a price tag on.”
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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