“It’s just the worst possible shift, but he steps up at the most important moments,” says Gerran Howell, who plays Whitaker on the Max medical drama, of his important moment with co-star Noah Wyle.
Leave it to Whitaker to give Dr. Robby a much-needed pep talk, after Robby did the same for him at the start of the season on The Pitt.
Thursday’s new hour of the Max medical drama picked up right where the previous installment ended, with Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch in a fetal position on the floor of a pediatrics room mid-breakdown. Already on edge throughout the day, he reached his breaking point after doing everything he could to save his stepson’s girlfriend from a bullet wound from the Pittfest shooting, and still losing her.
In the new episode, it’s Gerran Howell’s Whitaker who goes looking for Dr. Robby for help, walking in on him in pieces, before shaking him out of his breakdown and urging him back to work.
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“We need you out there,” he told him, before reaching for his hand. “If you don’t [come out], we’re f–ked,” Whitaker adds, helping him off the ground before being pushed away by Wyle’s character. With that, Robby got back out on the floor.
Toward the end of the hour, Robby thanked Whitaker for his support in that moment, admitting he felt like he was “drowning.” It’s then Whitaker reminded him of something Robby told him at the start of his shift, after losing a patient: “A wise man once told me you learn to leave it and to accept it and find balance if you can’t.”
“It was lovely because I wasn’t warned about it. It’s just nice when Whitaker gets a win in any way,” Howell told TooFab about finding out he’d be Robby’s lifeline. “But for it to be a full circle moment and for me to mirror what Doctor Robby says to me, yeah, it felt really special.”
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“It just kind of showed that Whitaker, you know, his character goes through so much and it’s just the worst possible shift, but he steps up at the most important moments,” he added, after Whitaker not only lost a patient, but has found himself covered in bodily fluids throughout the day. “That was also reassuring for me. That it doesn’t always matter how good of a doctor you are, sometimes it’s just about being there for people and it was a very nice moment.”
Of filming with Wyle, Howell said “it’s always going to be horrible seeing Noah in that state.”
“We all witnessed this happening very gradually to Doctor Robby and bubbling under the surface. And Noah’s incredible at that, keeping all that emotion right under there,” he added. “When I first walked in, it was just genuinely horrible to see him like that curled up in the corner.”
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According to Howell, the pair didn’t rehearse the scene much together, with the actor saying he believes Wyle “really likes to sort of play quite a lot and just see what happens” on set.
“I just walked in and did it. It’s a bit of a blur, to be honest. It was so horrible,” he told TooFab. “But there was some nice moments where Noah does the push away, which is not in the script at all. That was a really sort of lovely moment. He just makes it so easy.”
“But yeah,” he concluded, “It wasn’t pleasant to see him like that.”
New episodes of The Pitt drop Thursday nights on Max, with one debuting later this evening, before the Season 1 finale next week.
