Noah Wyle knows some “The Pitt” fans came down hard on his character, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, given how the character’s personal struggles caused him to lash out at some of his colleagues in Season 2. But he tries not to pay attention to the online discourse.
“The blending of the line between actor and part that I sometimes see, where an actor is blamed for the behavior of a character, or where a character’s dialog stops being representative of the character and starts being representative of the creative team — as if they’re saying something that they believe through this particular vehicle — I think gotten a little blurry as viewers have sort of conflated character message and character,” he tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. “It doesn’t necessarily have an encoded message because somebody’s saying it. Other than the dramatic tension within that one scene, it’s not necessarily trying to be representative of anything larger.”
Wyle says he believes it’s still just a small but very vocal portion of the viewership that is piling on — but he prefers not to be engaged with the more negative conversations that might be out there. “My skin is is too thin to really engage anything that might be coming at me, so I tend to want to say live and let live, and I’ll go do my job, and you can take what you want from me.”
Wyle does say that his son would sometimes warn him when the backlash against Dr. Robby got very heated online: “My son is the one who calls me and goes, ‘Dad, they’re really mad at you.’ He’s my firewall. He’ll go, ‘Dad, you might not want to go to the market today unless you start treating Dr. Mohan better!”
Wyle understands that the vitriol that came at Dr. Robby this year “was disappointment that he was acting less heroic than he presented himself last year. But when we’re at our most desperate, we’re not always our most graceful. And we were trying to show somebody who was going through a mental health crisis and was behaving irresponsibly, unprofessionally and out of character for himself as he was asking people to see him in his moment of plight and potentially stop him from doing himself harm. That did get misinterpreted by some people as him just being misogynistic or cruel. I think there was a much bigger picture at play.”
On this edition of the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast, “The Pitt” star, executive producer and director Noah Wyle — Emmy-nominated three times this year — discusses the wild fan reaction to Season 2 and Dr. Robby’s storyline, as well as how “The Pitt” is showing how to keep production jobs in Los Angeles. But first, the Roundtable looks at the TV Academy’s decision to move five categories out of the Emmy telecast and the debate over whether this will make a difference in producing a more entertaining ceremony. Listen below!
Wyle has been a big advocate of bringing production back to Los Angeles, and “The Pitt” — shot locally here on the Warner Bros. lot — has put him front and center in the conversation. “I’m looking at it from the standpoint of somebody who has grown up in and around this industry and befriended people who are generations deep in this industry who’ve watched it really crater over the last couple years,” he says. “There is still an abundance of talent here, and ‘The Pitt’ is is proof of what you could do with that talent when you when you apply it. That, I feel, is being grossly overlooked in the pursuit of tax credits or to circumvent union protections, as work not only leaves the state but leaves the country.
“I think ‘The Pitt’ economically has proven that it’s still cost-effective to shoot in Los Angeles if you keep your footprint small and you make certain considerations at the outset that in the event of a success, a rising tide lifts all boats,” he adds. “When we started shooting the pit on the Warner Bros. lot, it was a bit of a ghost town. The only thing that was happening there were the tours going through empty sound stages, talking about the work that used to be done there. And now it’s a fairly buzzy place, so I’m hoping that there’s a trend.”
Despite some of the rougher discourse we mentioned above, Wyle says he’s pleased that most of the reaction about Dr. Robby’s mental health journey in Season 2 has been positive. “We hoped that once you got past the architecture of the protagonist having a nervous breakdown in a mass casualty event, the aggregate toll of an average shift in the average life of an average career would be compelling enough television,” he says.
“And Season 2 was a bit more speculative than one because of that, and more gratifying to see the response, because it reaffirms that there’s a narrative here that doesn’t necessarily need to revolve around a stunt, like an air show disaster or something massive to really keep viewers’ attention.
“It’s incredibly gratifying to be on a show that has resonance and is being spoken about at all,” he adds. “It’s also really gratifying to be involved in a show that’s saying something that sparks conversation and of an intimate nature. You want to be a water cooler show. You want things that people have differing opinions on, so that those ideas and debates can happen in the marketplace, and people can arrive at consensus and hopefully find commonality in that process. I think a lot more bridges have been built through this show than have been burned.”
As for next season, the show is moving to November — a chilly month that will provide a bit of contrast to what we’ve seen so far. “We wanted to play with a different season,” Wyle says. “We just came off of hot July 4, so it seemed appropriate to plot it a little into a different season. We wanted Robby to have been away from the hospital for a little while, and so both of those things felt like fall would be appropriate. Everybody’s turning on their heaters again. The first rains caused slick roadways, different kind of cases, different asthetic.”
Wyle’s first appearance in Variety was on Feb. 9, 1990, for the NBC miniseries “Blind Faith.”
“Given my level of participation in that event, my grandfather watched both segments and said, ‘I had to watch an awful lot of Blind Faith for a little bit of Noah,’” Wyle recalls. “The real story is that somebody had told me that you had to say seven words to get a SAG card, and my line was five words long. It was ‘What’s going on down there?!’ I spent all morning trying to figure out how to stretch it to seven. And when the director said action, I said ‘Excuse me, what’s going on down there?!’ And then I found out it didn’t matter. I didn’t have to say seven words.”
10 QUESTIONS WITH NOAH WYLE:
1. Childhood nickname: “‘Wile E Coyote,’ from ‘Road Runner,’ I got called Wile E. Coyote a lot growing up, or ‘Noah’s Ark,’ obviously.”
2. Something you loved as a kid but can’t believe you were into it now: “Oh my goodness, I’m still into everything I was into as a kid. But I had an unnatural obsession with ‘Grease 2.’ I know every word to ‘Grease 2,’ and sometimes alone in my car, will do renditions of ‘Cool Rider.’ I’ve befriended Chris McDonald, who played Goose, he was the tall T-Bird, and I’m sure he’s so annoyed with how many times I bring that movie up.”
3. Go-to Karaoke or sing-in-the-shower song: “It’s a massive phobia that I’ve been grappling with for most of my life. I got shamed young and scared to sing publicly, so it’s been one of my great desires to be able to have confidence. Even the mention of the word ‘karaoke’ makes me break out and sweat. Because it usually means I’m being forced to do something I’m not comfortable with. But I’m working on it. I usually warm up slow with something that Rex Harrison could handle.” [What about alone in the shower?] “That’s when I go full ‘Dreamgirls’ cast album.”
4. Give me an alternate title for your show: [Not asked]
5. What’s your secret talent?: “Acting. Don’t tell anybody. It’s my only talent.”
6. Favorite ice cream flavor: “I like McConnell’s mint chip ice cream a lot, but I also like peanut butter and chocolate ice cream from Haagen Dazs. That was when I got in my youth a lot. And I was part of the ’70s sherbert craze.”
7. The one item you couldn’t live without: “My wife. I’m not calling my wife an item. I’m just saying that I really, really depend heavily upon her.”
8. What TV show in all of history do you wish you were a cast member of?: “‘Deadwood,’ without hesitation. I’ve always wanted to do a western, and I loved that show. David Milch’s writing was poetry punctuated with profanity, and I would have given anything to have been in the room with Ian McShane and Tim Olyphant and Keith Carradine and some of the actors on that show. I just loved it. We had Brad Dourif, who played the doctor on ‘Deadwood.’ He’s the father of Fiona Dourif, who plays Dr. McKay. I got to tell him how much I enjoyed his performance, which I thought was so flawless. That man could put more intention into a syllable than anybody I know.”
9. Fictional character you most admire: “I most admire Atticus Finch, probably. It’s infused with Gregory Peck’s performance. I saw it at a formative age, and there’s that moment at the end when up at the balcony, Jim and Scout are told to stand. ‘Stand up, Jim, your father’s passing.’ And the quiet dignity and heroism of Atticus always loomed large for me.”
10. Your favorite piece of advice: “The first one that comes to mind is George Clooney early on saying, ‘Take your work seriously. Don’t take yourself seriously.’ That was a big one. I remember I saw an interview once with former Boston Celtic great Bill Russell — and I don’t like giving any credit to anything Boston Celtic, but Bill Russell is not your average Boston Celtic — and he said that he learned later in life that it was far better to understand than it is to be understood. And that we spend so much time trying to get our own personal points of view across, and so little time trying to listen to everybody else’s, that we sometimes do ourselves a disservice. So I latched onto that one too.”
Variety’s “Awards Circuit” podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay, Emily Longeretta and Michael Schneider, who also produces, is your one-stop source for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each episode, “Awards Circuit” features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives, discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines, and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts.
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