By: Izumi Hasegawa September 19, 2025
HBO Max’s new series The Pitt is completely addictive—I couldn’t stop watching once I started. It feels like 24 meets ER, and it’s brilliantly done. It’s no surprise the show took home Emmy Awards.
When I visited the set, I was struck by the lighting. Every selfie I took looked perfect, and it became clear why the camera can glide so seamlessly through every corner of the show.
Audiences watched Noah Wyle grow—both as an actor and through his character, Dr. John Carter—over 15 seasons of ER. Now, in The Pitt, he returns as a seasoned doctor while also serving as an executive producer. How did the idea for this show first come about, and what does it take for him to guide the young actors portraying the next generation of doctors?
Q: How did this show’s discussion start?
Noah Wyle: The pandemic changed everything, you know, and I was getting a lot of mail from people, first responders, that was also confessional about how difficult their daily lives were and who was getting sick and who was getting treated. And I pivoted a lot of that to John (John Wells, Executive Producer, Director) and said, “There’s something happening here that’s probably worth talking about again.” And even though we didn’t want to do this again, if you ever did want to do it again, I’d volunteer. And then we all had lunch and got scared of the idea and went away for a year and then came back together a year later and then had to wait because there were 192 day labor strikes. And then we got together again, and here we are.
Q: In the ER, you started as the younger one, then grew into a leader, and now you’re leading a group of young doctors and young actors. Now you’re teaching them, sharing tips, and passing on the benefit of your experience. Could you talk about that?
By the way, I have a friend from Japan who watched ER and was inspired to become a nurse in the U.S.—she’s now a nurse at UCLA. That show changed her life, and I hope this one will also have the power to change people’s lives.
Great question. We showed up two weeks early to start the medical boot camp on Stage 16, I think it was, which looks out across at Stage 11 where we’d spent 15 years of our life, and that 200 feet felt like 200 years. It felt like 20 pounds. It felt like a thousand miles. It’s really heady. You know, it’s really been rewarding to come back and get to play in this arena again. But one of the most gratifying aspects has been working with this ensemble behind me and watching them go through this for the first time, and not to be going through it for the first time again, but to be able to be available to them as a resource if they want. But to also enjoy watching them on their roads and be sort of a Trojan horse that is allowing everybody to meet, you know, this invading army of talent behind me.
Q: Looking back from the original ER to now, in 2025, how has the show changed for you? What aspects—especially in the wake of COVID—have made you take notice or stand out?
You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. I remember when 1994, ERs were the primary source of health care for most Americans. 22 million Americans didn’t have health insurance. That was part of what went into our show’s popularity, was how relevant it was at the time. And here we are 30 years later, talking about the exact same issues, except the problems have gotten a little bit worse. You know, we are still playing catch up from, you know, the nuclear bomb that was dropped on the medical community in 2020. And it’s going to take a while to right this ship. So I’m, part of doing this was to shine the spotlight back on this community and to hopefully inspire the next generation of health care workers to want to go into these jobs because we are going to need them. And our system is fragile. And it is as fragile as the quality of support we give our practitioners.
Q: I know you’re not Dr. John Carter (one of the characters in ER, played by Noah Wyle), but you’re just as likable as Carter. Do you feel any similarities between your role in this new show and John Carter?
This is a totally different acting exercise. You know, this is building a pressure cooker hour by hour, degree by degree, ingredient by ingredient, you know, playing with levels of fatigue and an ability to compartmentalize things that need to be compartmentalized. This has been a wonderful sort of psychological examination of one guy having one of the worst days of his life, and the presence required in just that exercise. I haven’t even thought about similarities or differences to the other character.
The Pitt is streaming on HBO Max.
