Noah Wyle is sitting in a corner booth at the Smoke House, a classic Hollywood haunt across from the Warner Bros. lot that he began to frequent when he was making “ER,” the groundbreaking medical drama that launched his career 30 years ago. After he orders a vodka martini up with an olive and some garlic cheese bread (“Even though it probably will be on the list of things I discuss with my oncologist”), Wyle launches into an anecdote about the time he arrived at the Smoke House with George Clooney, Anthony Edwards and Eriq La Salle, all in costume, with Edwards’ young son, Bailey, in tow.
“Bailey started to choke on a french fry, and the four of us fucking panicked,” he says with a raspy cackle. “A busboy walked over and stuck his finger in Bailey’s mouth and fished it out, and the rest of the restaurant got treated to four guys in scrubs and white coats looking like Keystone Cops.”
For the first time since the end of his 15-year, 254-episode run as Dr. John Carter, Wyle is wearing scrubs again: On the hit Max series “The Pitt,” he plays beleaguered Pittsburgh emergency room physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch. The weekly rollout of the show’s buzzy first season, which concludes on April 10, has proven that a streaming service can sustain a network-style medical drama with a 15-episode count and familiar disease- and injury-of-the-week storytelling rhythms. The show’s engrossing real-time format (each episode unfolds in a single location in a single hour within the same day) and unflinching depiction of ER trauma (physical and emotional) have elevated it to the thick of the Emmy conversation alongside the likes of “Severance” and “The White Lotus.”
The critical acclaim and enthusiastic reception have also placed Wyle at the center of a cultural phenomenon for the first time since the height of “ER” mania in the mid-1990s, when the drama could command upwards of 35 million viewers a week. While Max isn’t releasing audience data for “The Pitt” — the streamer says the show “ranks among the top 3 most watched Max series in platform history” — it has definitively pierced through the chaos of everything in this horrid year with storylines that range from harrowing (teenage fentanyl overdoses, a violently abusive patient, a mass shooting) to hilarious (a stolen ambulance, contaminated face cream, rats on the ER floor).
“It feels similar, except this time I know the circus,” Wyle, now 53, says of the receptions to “The Pitt” and “ER.” “This time, there are no surprises under this big top.”
But as an executive producer and writer as well as the star, Wyle is both ringmaster and main attraction, a position of heightened prominence he’s never experienced in his 35-year career. He’s not accustomed to this much sustained and concentrated attention — he estimates he’s given at least 100 interviews since “The Pitt” premiered in January — and, more to the point, it makes him visibly uncomfortable.
“I love being part of the conversation,” he says, looking away. “I’m not crazy about being the one doing all the talking.”
Even so, during our long dinner, Wyle is never less than a lively, engaging conversationalist, quick to laugh at himself and heap praise on his colleagues and collaborators. The puppy-dog charisma that earned him unthreatening-heartthrob status at 23 has seasoned into a self-effacing, paternal affability. A father of three, he’s the kind of guy who can make his peak dadcore outfit — relaxed-fit blue jeans, a dark blue zippered fleece jacket and a well-traveled backpack — seem cool.
“I watched Noah as a young man go through this complete loss of his anonymity,” says John Wells, executive producer of “ER” and “The Pitt.” “He has dealt with it by becoming open and curious and available to people, which not everybody does. He’s very intelligent, very well read and fantastically empathetic. Honestly, he’s one of the great human beings in my life.”
What Wyle isn’t on this particular evening, however, is terribly observant.
“This martini went straight to my head,” he says roughly halfway through our conversation. “I have no idea what we’ve talked about all night.” He leans toward my recorder and says in a singsong voice: “Plausible deniability!”
It’s not until our interview is winding down, and he excuses himself to run to the restroom, that the reason we’ve been talking — about why he decided to play a doctor again, about how he fostered an uncommonly collaborative set, even about being sued by the estate of “ER” creator Michael Crichton — finally hits him. When he comes back to our table, he’s already laughing.
“It suddenly dawned on me in the bathroom: ‘Noah, I think this is about you.’”
As the world was just starting to retreat into lockdown in 2020, Wyle began getting DMs on Instagram from first responders overwhelmed by the first lethal waves of COVID-19. Some simply thanked Wyle for inspiring them to pursue a medical career with his performance on “ER.” But most of the messages were laced with an unmistakable desperation about the precarious state of the country’s health care workers — and how no one was telling their story.
“They were saying things like, ‘Carter, where are you?’” he says. “‘It’s really hard out here.’”
Wyle, meanwhile, was confronting his own pandemic-fed crisis. “I joke in a way that isn’t funny that in 2020 I was thinking aspirationally about having a nervous breakdown, but couldn’t figure out when to schedule it,” he says. “I just thought the world was coming apart. I didn’t know how to contribute anything of meaning or value anymore.”
In the decade following the “ER” finale in 2009, Wyle’s career happily chugged along largely on a pair of genre shows for TNT, “Falling Skies” and “The Librarians.” “I wouldn’t take a script if it was to play a doctor, even if it was a veterinarian,” he says. “The idea of putting a stethoscope around my neck just seemed like a really bad idea.”
Scrolling through DM after DM, however, ignited a new sense of purpose in Wyle. When he was on “ER,” he’d channeled his personal experiences with Kosovo war refugees into storylines set in Congo and Sudan. “The light bulb that went off for me was, I could use Carter the way I used to use Carter — to talk about how I feel now,” he says.
As he takes another sip of his martini, Wyle expands on a theme he returns to again and again: His bone-deep, lifelong reverence for medical professionals, born as much from his charity work and his mother’s career as an orthopedic nurse as from his time on “ER.”
“These people sacrifice so much in the service of others that I find it absolutely infuriating that their expertise is being called into question,” he says, leavening his irritation with a chuckle, his voice never growing louder than his usual calming timbre. “I find it infuriating that we still can’t come to a consensus that masks cut down on transmission of disease. I find it infuriating that we still won’t acknowledge that vaccines are an important way of eradicating disease. I find it all infuriating that we are where we are right now. So I wanted to make a show that brings back into sharp focus what an objective medical fact is.”
Over the next few years — as Wyle joined the cast of the crime dramedy “Leverage: Redemption” for Amazon’s Freevee — Wyle, Wells and former “ER” showrunner R. Scott Gemmill traded messages and had Zoom calls about the possibility of bringing John Carter back to television. “It would look a lot more like a small character piece centered around Carter 15 years later, dropping in on him wherever he was to make a jeremiad scream from the mountaintop about what was happening,” Wyle says.
Gemmill was particularly keen to take advantage of all the “ER” footage of Carter as a med student as a way to capture the full toll of a life spent in emergency medicine. “That would’ve been a unique show, to be able to see Noah at 23 and then flash-forward to when he’s 52 or 53 and see that dichotomy,” he says. “Whether it would have worked or not, I don’t know. But it would have been a fun experiment.”
The “ER” revival “got pretty close to being a reality,” Wyle says, but it fell apart when Warner Bros. Television couldn’t come to terms with the Crichton’s estate, which was overseen by his widow, Sherri Crichton. But Wyle’s determination to put a spotlight back on first responders hadn’t dimmed, and to his surprise, Max still wanted to make a medical series with him even if he wasn’t playing Dr. Carter. Once the writers strike concluded in the fall of 2023, the team rapidly put together what ultimately became “The Pitt.” By July 2024, they were filming on the Warner Bros. lot.
The next month, Crichton sued Wells, Gemmill, Wyle and Warner Bros. TV for breach of contract. She alleged that “The Pitt” was nothing more than an “ER” revival, “just under a different name” to escape their obligation to give her late husband a “created by” credit, which the suit calls “a shameful betrayal of [Michael] Crichton and his legacy.”
When I ask Wyle about the suit, his eyes dim. He’s silent for a long time, stabbing his fork into his salad. “The only thing that I can legally speak to,” he says finally, “is how I feel emotionally, which is just profoundly sad and disappointed. This taints the legacy, and it shouldn’t have. At one point, this could have been a partnership. And when it wasn’t a partnership, it didn’t need to turn acrimonious. But on the 30th anniversary of ‘ER,’ I’ve never felt less celebratory of that achievement than I do this year.”
Wyle stresses that once an “ER” reboot was a nonstarter, “we pivoted as far in the opposite direction as we could in order to tell the story we wanted to tell — and not for litigious reasons, but because we didn’t want to retread our own creative work.”
Since the blue-blooded and diffident Dr. Carter came from extreme wealth and privilege, they decided Dr. Robby would be a self-assured, working-class Jew with a biting temper. Since “ER” employed elaborate, cinematic camerawork and a propulsive score, “The Pitt” unfolds like a no-frills docudrama under unforgiving fluorescent lighting and with virtually no music. Most crucially, the real-time structure of “The Pitt” sets it apart from just about every other medical TV series, past or present.
“We really wanted to find something new for ourselves,” Wyle says. “And in some ways, that’s what was so disheartening about the whole thing. We really felt like we’d done it.”
There is at least one aspect of “ER” that Wyle did strive to re-create on “The Pitt”: the camaraderie he built over hundreds of episodes with his cast and crew, something that can only happen on a long-running drama series with more than 12 episodes per season. “We see each other fall in love, get married, have children, get divorced,” Wyle says. “Those relationships transcend the screen and become palpable to an audience who wants to be part of that family. I’ve tried to create it in every job I’ve gone on, but with varying degrees of success.”
As an executive producer from the start, Wyle could for the first time establish the environment of his show from the ground up. Along with their audition sides, prospective actors received a “mission statement” Wyle wrote about the caliber of performers he was seeking. Isa Briones, who plays the cocky intern Dr. Trinity Santos, remembers Wyle’s note as a kind of challenge. “‘This is a very specific type of show,’” she recalls reading in the mission statement. “‘It’s intense. It’s fast-paced. It’s like theater. We are a group of players. If you can be a team player who is ready to lock in with a family, then this is the place for you.’ I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this is the first I’m really getting to know of this man. And already I love it.’”
“Noah’s coming in as, really, the cast boss,” Wells says. “He sets a level of professionalism that he wasn’t in a position to do when we were doing ‘ER.’”
The nature of the production on “The Pitt,” which was shot almost entirely in continuity, demanded everyone remain ready to be on camera at any moment, no matter where they were on the set — an exacting approach that Wyle embraced. “You might be the star of the show, but you’re going to spend three hours being a fuzzy blob in the background of somebody else’s scene,” says Patrick Ball, who plays Robby’s protégé, Dr. Frank Langdon. “Noah set the tone for that. We stayed on set pretty much all day. I feel very lucky for the guidance that he gave me.”
Before production began, the cast spent two weeks learning how to perform intricate emergency medical techniques for the camera with the convincing speed and facility of actual professionals. “The doctors training us would say, ‘Noah, do you want to get up and show how you do it?’” Briones says. “But then Noah would also always say, ‘If someone else has a great idea, I’m stealing it.’ One time, I was like, ‘I’m going to try this version of faking the compressions.’ And he was like, ‘Wait, that’s really good.’ And I was like, ‘I win!’”
Even speaking the word “mentor” to Wyle, however, causes him to roll his eyes with startling intensity.
“It presupposes that I am a mentor to these young performers,” he says. I tell him that’s pretty much exactly how Briones and Ball characterized him to me. “Neither one of those performers need mentors,” he says with not a little exasperation. “Neither one of those performers should look to me as anything other than their scene partner. They’re doing fine!”
Briones also singled out Wyle for his generosity with the background actors. Because cellphones were banned from set, she says, Wyle “would always go around and be like, ‘What are you reading right now?’” The show even started a lending library next to craft services, to which, Briones adds, Wyle donated a bunch of books.
So I ask Wyle about it.
“What outside sources have you been speaking to, Adam?”
Well, who started the library?
“I don’t know,” he says, slowly shaking his head. “Some incredibly noble and generous person. I can’t even imagine who would think of such a thing.”
So did you start it?
“The variety of books was astonishing,” he says, ignoring my question. “There was everything from the classics to modern releases. One woman kept the entire anthology of ‘Harry Potter’ inside of her pregnancy belly.”
OK, can you at least talk about the titles you donated to the library?
“I remember thinking if I was going to bring books in, I was concerned about anything that could introduce conflict or acrimony into a harmonious set,” he says. “So I went with books that I thought would be enjoyed by the most amount of people.” He stops himself and smiles at me. “If I did it, but because that would be foolish for me to do, I didn’t do it.”
I regard Wyle for a beat as he takes another sip of his martini and tries to avoid my gaze. Of everything I’ve asked him, why is this the topic he seems to find the most embarrassing to talk about?
“You’re asking me to take credit for something,” he says. “I don’t like taking credit for anything.” He leans toward my recorder again. “You’re not getting me on the record. It wasn’t me, officer.”
The first season of “The Pitt” reaches its climax in Episode 13, as Dr. Robby oversees a torrent of critical patients from a mass shooting at a local music festival. The pressures that have piled onto him all day — especially his unresolved PTSD from the pandemic, when he had to take his mentor off life support — finally reach a breaking point, and in an aria of uncontrollable anguish, Robby’s face flushes and he crumples onto the floor, overcome with ragged, heaving sobs. It is a breathtaking feat of high-wire acting, and, to my surprise, Wyle lights up when I tell him so.
“I don’t like speaking immodestly, but occasionally I know that I’m good at something and I want to give myself the credit for the technique I’ve been able to build up over the last 35 years,” he says. “That’s when I feel like Kobe Bryant. I get giddy when I’m given an opportunity to show off like that.”
Then, just as quickly, he redirects the spotlight back to his mission for “The Pitt,” to the first responders who still share with him their vivid horror stories of those unspeakable months in the spring of 2020.
“That breakdown scene was why I wanted to do the show,” he says. “I wanted to make a show about a health practitioner that we invest a tremendous amount of trust and belief and admiration in. And when the shit hits the fan, we are expecting that white knight to come charging in on his horse. Then the horse comes in without its rider, and we don’t know where the hero is, and it’s because …”
His voice breaks. “He’s on the floor,” he says, dropping to a whisper. “He’s on the floor. And how do we get off the floor? How do we admit the fact that we break? How do we rebuild?”
Those are questions Wyle hopes to examine in Season 2. He’s already in the writers’ room, and will start shooting again in June for a January 2026 premiere — Max intends for “The Pitt” to return every year. The current plan is for Season 2 to take place roughly ten months after the events of Season 1, when Dr. Robby “no longer is able to pretend to himself that he doesn’t need help,” Wyle says.
Just don’t expect Robby to suddenly be well adjusted either. “In a perfect world, this show goes several seasons, so we don’t have to rush this process,” Wyle says. “It’s a really interesting road that he’s about to embark on.”
Could Wyle see “The Pitt” running as long as “ER” did?
“I don’t know whether we can go 15,” he says. “What would that make me? 68? ‘Dr. Robby, you have to retire!’”
Styling: Maryam Malakpour/The Only Agency; Styling assistant: Yurga Juozapa; Grooming: Johnny Hernandez/Fierro/Dior Backstage; Look 1 (cover) Blazer and trousers: Lardini; Shirt: God’s True Cashmere: Tank: Amiri; Shoes: Churches; Look 2 (in elevator): Full look: Saint Laurent; Look 3 (green overshirt) Over shirt: God’s True Cashmere; T-shirt: Frame; Pants: Sunspel; Look 4 (red sweater): Jacket and pants: Sunspel; Sweater: Frame; Shoes: Churches; Look 5 (elevator with sunglasses) Full look: Saint Laurent; Sunglasses: Oliver Peoples
From Variety US