Noah Wyle
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Our guest today, Noah Wiley, is an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Mac series, The Pit, which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
The Pit has drawn critical praise for its engaging storylines, intelligent dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And it's gained a following of real-life emergency room doctors who praise the accuracy of the show's depiction of medical conditions and treatments. Noah Wiley is a veteran of stage, screen, and television who's no stranger to lab coats and hospital scrubs.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He played a medical student and then a physician on the hit NBC TV series ER for most of its 15 seasons, where he earned nominations for three Golden Globe and five Primetime Emmy Awards. He starred in the TNT series Falling Skies and The Librarians and has appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organization's Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Noah Wiley, welcome to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Thank you so much for having me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, I mentioned in the introduction that your character – maybe I didn't. He's the senior attending physician in this emergency room. And, you know, in addition to treating patients, you're really running this big organization and it's a teaching hospital. So while you're an experienced pro, there are all these others who are less experienced, residents in training and medical students.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
On their first day, I believe, in their rotation as this thing begins – So there's a lot going on here. Tell us just a little bit more about your character, Dr. Robbie.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I play Dr. Michael Rabinovich, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple of years ago. But like many practitioners, post-COVID felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need. And because he's really good at what he does and he really cares about the people he works with, he's kept working. And... It's taken a toll on him.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He's seen a lot and done a lot, and he's been able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And today we are embedded with him for his entire shift on the day that he's no longer able to do that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Right. And he runs into some rough seas. You know, he's surrounded by these young medical students. And I don't think I recognize any of the actors in this, but they are just so terrific.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts of things while doing a procedure and walking backwards. And we had to cast the show internationally.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
We found actors in Australia, we found them in England, we found them on the East Coast, West Coast, but we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And they're great. Well, let's listen to a scene and get a little bit of a flavor of the show. This scene is typical of many where a new patient is being wheeled in by paramedics from an ambulance. And we hear them barking out critical facts as they're rolling them in.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And then you hear this one, two, three as the team coordinates lifting the patient from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital gurney. And then the team gets to work. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And that's a scene from The Pit where our guest Noah Wiley is a star.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Awfully intense. It's tough to get the impact of that clip on radio, but that was a Laforte III floating face fracture, which when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Right. And you don't see it on the radio, but it is dramatic there. But just the audio, I mean, you can hear the intensity of it. And there's all this medical jargon flying by. I mean, did you know all this stuff before you got into this series?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to me. And thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisors on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board certified emergency room physician.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He was a technical advisor and a writer on ER, and he is with us again. And he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling given the circumstances and stakes of the case.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Yeah. I watched this series with my wife who was 25 years as a primary care physician. She gets almost all of it. I get maybe a third of it. But I don't feel like I'm missing much. But I did wonder – you were a writer on the show, I know. I mean do you think about maybe letting up on some of that or is getting all that in critical to the authenticity of it?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack in the show. And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show and we need you to feel sad here because we're playing strings or exciting here because we're using percussion. We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room play.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
be our cadence, and a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing. It becomes the soundtrack and the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes the emotional equivalent of a score. And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
It's competency porn.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, the origins of this show are interesting. As I understand it, during the pandemic, you began hearing from medical providers and first responders who were dealing with all this high-stakes stressful demand on them. Is that right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders. And some of it was, you know, hey, Carter, we could use you out here.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Carter was the character you played on ER, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever did with my life because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives right now. And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here. And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here, even though... We said we'd never do it again.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I might be ready to volunteer. And a couple years later, you know, after we saw how this broke down over socioeconomic lines and racial lines and geographic lines, there was a show to be told here.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
What was it like for you to put on scrubs and a lab coat and get back in a hospital setting again after all those years?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
It was wonderful. Yeah. I think I spent 15 years avoiding, actively avoiding walking down what I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road. And then finally I had an opportunity to come back and was excited about it and slipped a stethoscope around my neck and just felt right at home.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, I should just mention it's been widely reported that there is some litigation around this. The estate of Michael Crichton, who was the creator of ER, has sued alleging that The Pit is an unauthorized reboot of the program. I mean one of the differences between the two shows is that – The pit is the entire 15 episodes are one day in the life of this ER.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
There's an hour – essentially in real time, an hour per episode is one hour of the day. And so you get to see these things develop just over a day. So that's the real distinction.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Very much so. Different city, different character. We had started down a reboot road, and then that became an impossibility. And so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by we have.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You're the lead attending in this emergency room. And in real life, you're also an executive producer and a writer and an experienced actor among a cast which includes a lot of, you know, much younger actors. Were you kind of a coach on the set in the same way you're a medical coach for these people learning the craft?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
In a way, you know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody, myself included, to kick some rust off and to re-familiarize myself with how much has changed in health care, but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be by the time we rolled the cameras.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to him. And then he sort of segregated us where I was off by myself and I ate lunch by myself. Eight together, the R2s and 3s ate together.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
That's fourth-year residents, second-year residents.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Second-year residents, fourth-year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves. And they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know. And the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth. And I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
But it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am considerably older than the rest of the cast or that I've played a doctor before, yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
You know, we listened to a clip earlier that was... an intense moment in which a patient is being wheeled in and the staff is immediately getting to work on him. There are a lot of quieter moments in this series where you are dealing with a patient or a relative and have some tough issues to communicate.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
This is one I want to play now where a man and a woman who are a brother and sister, played here by Rebecca Tilney and Mackenzie Aston, are at the hospital with their elderly father who has pneumonia and The father has left instructions. He does not want to be intubated. And they're talking to you as Dr. Robbie about it. Dr. Robbie speaks first. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Either his pneumonia is getting worse or his heart couldn't handle the fluids that we gave him to treat the sepsis. His lungs are filling up with fluid.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Not without his blood pressure crashing with very bad consequences. So let's just hope the BiPAP works.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Then I would need to know your decision about using a breathing machine. We're still talking about it. Well, we know he expressed his wishes in writing, do not intubate. We're thinking try it for a week. That would be a very painful week. He wouldn't get a lot of rest with all the monitors and all the blood tests. He might need to be sedated.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He might need to be restrained because he'd be in an unfamiliar place with a very uncomfortable tube down his throat. And he wouldn't really know what was happening. Elderly patients can often develop psychosis.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Well, the sooner you decide, the better. I'm really sorry. I wish there was more that I could do. I'm not sure that he has that much time left.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And that is our guest Noah Wiley in a scene from The Pit, which is now streaming on Max. There are a lot of these scenes where you're dealing with loved ones who just can't accept what's happening. And there's another one, two parents who just can't accept the fact that their son who came in with a fentanyl overdose is brain dead. You want to just say a little bit about preparing for these scenes?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare. And sometimes when you only have an hour to tell a story that has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process. So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours, it feels like you can kind of walk through those five stages of grief with these characters. When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons for wanting to keep their father alive, that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes. So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
The other thing that's happening in this story with your character is, you know, I mentioned before that this series kind of the germ of it began during COVID when you were hearing from first responders and the crises they were facing. And in the show, your character, Dr. Robbie. During COVID, lost a mentor, another doctor.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And I believe this day that is the focus of the series is the anniversary of his death, right? We learned that early on. And then you want to just talk a bit about how his flashbacks, his PTSD, if you will, is portrayed in the show?
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, he had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival. And then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should have stayed home. But today he went to work. And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him. And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And she came over for breakfast last Sunday, and she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode. in that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the four-year-old.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names. And she's, you know, getting teary-eyed. And she finishes, and I said, my goodness, Mom... I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that. And she said, well, that wasn't real. I said, well, this one wasn't either.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And she said, but it felt real. And it brought all that up for me. Isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the four-year-old, when was that? She said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time. I think that's why it hit me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And then I thought to myself, oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night and you helped us with our homework? Wow.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
And she's carried that painful memory for all these years.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
That's 35 years it's been in there.
Fresh Air
Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
It came out last Sunday. Well, Noah Wiley, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been fun. Oh, this has been a pleasure. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons for wanting to keep their father alive that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes. So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID, he had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival. And then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should have stayed home. But today he went to work. And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him. And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And she came over for breakfast last Sunday, and she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode. in that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the four-year-old.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names. And she's, you know, getting teary-eyed. And she finishes, and I said, my goodness, Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that. And she said, well, that wasn't real. I said, well, this one wasn't either.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And she said, but it felt real. And it brought all that up for me. Isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the four-year-old, when was that? And she said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time. I think that's why it hit me.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then I thought to myself, oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night and you helped us with our homework? Wow. Yeah.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
That's 35 years it's been in there. It came out last Sunday.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
That's as hard as it gets. We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure, meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger. But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger. So what do you do? I did my residency at a big charity in New Orleans. And day one, I got a kid, five-year-old boy, accidentally shot by his brother, playing with dad's gun, worried he was gonna get in trouble.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I play Dr. Michael Rabinovich, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple of years ago. But like many practitioners, post-COVID felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need. And because he's really good at what he does and he really cares about the people he works with, he's kept working. And it's taken a toll on him.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
right up until he coated and died. Then I asked myself, like, what do I do with this kid? Where do I put this feeling? And I found myself walking all night. I was walking and walking and walking, and I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery, and I'm looking at all those mausoleums and those crypts, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, that's what I need.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Okay, everybody, let's get back to it. Just remember the employee assistance program is available, as are Kiara and myself, if anybody needs to talk.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, we had a bit of a mandate. Let's not be too biased. You know, the fastest way to get people to turn the channel is if they feel like we're preaching to them or we're being dogmatic. So what we wanted was accuracy and realism. We wanted to just be presentational with what emergency rooms look like. I wrote that episode and I couldn't resist.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Just taking one stance, which I thought was fairly benign, which is to talk about the efficacy of masks in cutting down the transmission of disease and germs, which shouldn't be a political statement and shouldn't even be called into question. And yet it has been the last couple of years. And it's a great statement.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
sort of metaphor for uh for all the distrust that's been uh seeded between uh us and our doctors and um it's really i think incredibly unfortunate and i don't know if by the time this airs how much worse the situation is going to get but there was so that 20 of the nih was just laid off we're going to be seeing the tale of that decision making for years and years and years to come
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, that was what was so funny. We wrote these episodes almost a year ago. And so when we did a storyline about neurocystic sarcosis, we had no idea that RFK Jr. was going to be diagnosed with neurocystic sarcosis. Nor did we think when we did a measles storyline that it was going to be as topical as it is right now. Nine months ago, it wasn't.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
But it wasn't hard to look into your crystal ball and see what was going to happen if vaccine rates continued to drop. And we live with an international community that travels all the time. Like we are as vulnerable as the next incoming flight.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Oh, I'm glad. I've gotten some mail from Philly that didn't appreciate it. I know. I meant it as sort of a compliment because when I grew up, I grew up from L.A. And, you know, when the Lakers would play the Sixers or when I would see Rocky or the Broad Street Bullies, like, you guys were tough. They were tough. Yes.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So I just thought that's almost an homage to Philly to say it's the tougher of the two.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He's seen a lot and done a lot. He's been able to compartmentalize a lot of that. And today we are embedded with him for his entire shift on the day that he's no longer able to do that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, it actually circles back to what you mentioned before about trying to put as many details about Pittsburgh into the show. And in doing our Pittsburgh research, we came across this incredible story that is now starting to get told about the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which was a program started by Dr. Safer, who invented CPR, where he recognized that up until that point, if you lived in
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
at any neighborhood and you needed to go to the hospital, you had to call the police. The police would come and pick you up and you went into a paddy wagon and they took you to the hospital. But if you lived in the black neighborhood, that didn't happen. So the mortality rate in the black neighborhoods was just terrible in the late 50s and early 60s.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And so this was an attempt to train high school, college age, young black men in lifesaving techniques for the first time, deploy them in the field with that training and ambulances that could go to these neighborhoods and pick up people and bring them back. And it was the very first ambulance service, the very first 911 system in the country. It was incredibly successful.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The mortality rate dropped considerably, and it got the attention of all of the city fathers who looked at this and thought, my goodness, what a great program. We should fire all these young men, replace them with white drivers, and make this a national standard, which is what happened. And all those original drivers lost their jobs.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Some of them stayed in health care and worked in health care and actually got to meet a couple of the surviving members when I was in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. And so we brought in a patient who was depicting a guy who had been one of the original drivers so we could just shed a little light on it.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
That is a real thing. And I've seen films of it done, and it's just as moving as we've depicted it, if not more so in real life. It's really beautiful.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts of things while doing a procedure and walking backwards. And we had to cast the show internationally. We found actors in Australia. We found them in England.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
What was your childhood like? What kind of kid were you? Eclectic. You know, I'm one of seven children spread over a couple of marriages. At the most, we had six under one roof sharing a bathroom. That's a lot of kids at the table. That's a lot of vying for attention.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
We had all sorts of, you know, we've had academics, we've had athletes, and I was trying to find my identity in the midst of all that, and I ended up the storyteller.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I did. I went to a boarding school, the oldest boarding school in California, a school called the Thatcher School, founded in 1889. And when I was there my sophomore year, I auditioned for a play kind of as a joke, intentionally to go and kind of make fun of the process and ended up getting cast. And I just... took to it. I enjoyed the process more than that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I enjoyed somebody telling me that I was good at it after the show. And that feeling of being told I was good at something was enough to make me want to continue doing it.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Also, growing up in Los Angeles, an acting career didn't seem like a foreign concept. You know, I knew that roadmap fairly well. So it all seemed within grasp.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, but how, I mean, in retrospect, how long was that period of time for me? So short. So short that it's almost ridiculous that I could have been impatient. The truth is I started when I was 19, and when I was 22 or 23, I did the pilot for ER and never looked back after that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I'm really incredibly grateful to George, Anthony, and Tony. They were all 10 years older than I was and really took me under their wing like big brothers. To a certain extent, Sherry and Julianne as well.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I'm talking about the cast of ER, George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, Eric LaSalle. So they were mentors and tutors to me in the early years. And I don't know how I would have handled all the success and the workload if I hadn't had such incredible role models around me showing me how to be professional.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
No, I think it's very true. Well, the work was being recognized as groundbreaking and it lasted a long time. I took for granted how well run the show was and how smooth it was produced and produced. how well cared for I was in that ecosystem.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
We found them on the East Coast, West Coast. But we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then I spent the next 15 years trying to recreate something that I thought was an industry standard without realizing it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And then I've been blessed by having lightning strike twice.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, I left and I called it a divorce with visitation rights.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I left a certain amount of episodes in the balance knowing that I wanted to stay part of the narrative and also having had John Wells tell me that he wanted me to be part of the finale, that John Carter coming back to the emergency room as an attending seemed like a really lovely bookend to the whole experience from where the pilot began. So I wanted to be part of that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Your medical student, first day of his rotation in the emergency room.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Become a drug addict, fall in love, almost become a father.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, sure. During that period of time and subsequently, I was approached by a lot of different charities and organizations, a lot of them medical-based, to use my celebrity to raise awareness or money for them. And I got very selective because you want to pick and choose.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You want to make sure that when you go out and stump for something, it has some resonance in your own life and you can speak intelligently about it, passionately about it.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then I got approached by this group called Doctors of the World that was an American-based version of Doctors Without Borders, which is French, that was doing frontline triage medicine in different war zones around the world. And I was really moved by – it's a purely volunteer organization.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Doctors, GPs from America would go and volunteer their time to go halfway around the world and practice wartime MASH medicine in very harrowing circumstances. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And I had an opportunity to go during the war in Kosovo and be in a refugee camp in Macedonia and watch firsthand the heroic efforts of these doctors trying to treat this refugee population and came back really galvanized about helping this organization and ones like it do that kind of humanitarian aid thing.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And it was catalytic for us doing the storylines in Darfur and the Belgian Congo that we eventually did on the show.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, I wasn't, but it was sort of an all-hands-on-deck situation there, too. A bus would show up with maybe... 50, 60 refugees of varying ages, mostly young children and old women, because any man that was of fighting age was fighting. So a lot of people had been on the road for a really long time. They were wearing everything that they could carry.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So there was a lot of dehydration and a lot of malnutrition and a lot of fear, you know. And it began with taking people off buses and doing basic medical assessments. And then also there were lawyers and psychiatrists who would go and do interviews with the refugees and ask them about their experiences.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And those became testimonials that were later used in the war crimes tribunal trials with Milosevic. But I saw in that moment the sort of hand-in-hand medical psychological tandem treatment that was having an effect, both treating the body but also treating the psychological damage of the trauma.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And that led me to another organization called Human Rights Watch, which is a legal-based advocacy group that – Does exactly that kind of work. They go around and they take testimony to try and affect social change. So those two organizations kind of defined the 90s and early teens for me in terms of activism.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It's been a long time since I've been in contact with them. I've been involved with a lot of other grassroots medical organizations over the years, ones that do anything from feeding people in disaster zones domestically to international stuff. Obviously, the cutbacks in U.S.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
aid and a lot of the NGOs funding that we're seeing are disastrous to the communities that I've become close with, and it's very, very troubling.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I tend to align myself with anything that involves human rights or civil rights. I'm right now extremely concerned about our health care system and its fragility to the next pandemic. I'm extremely concerned about the burnout rate of our practitioners and the overburdening that the nursing shortage and the boarding crisis is causing.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, I can't express enough how interdependent we are as a population, how much we need each other. And yet it just seems like every day the seeds of division are being sowed to greater and greater degrees. And it's unsustainable. It really is.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I don't think it is. I like to think that we're part of a lighthouse kind of light that's going to keep everybody – reminding everybody about what kind of country we really are at heart and how amazing – the people that do this kind of work are. And that's the irony.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, you can cut Medi-Cal and you can take 80% of California's population off those rolls and you can kick people out of assisted living homes or out of old folks' homes and you can force emergency rooms to close. The practitioners will still take care of sick people. The aged will still be cared for.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Children will still be cared for because these people won't let those patients fall between the cracks because that's who they are, which is why it's so infuriating to watch them be taken advantage of or worse, taken for granted.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Awfully intense. It's tough to get the impact of that clip on radio, but that was a Laforte 3 floating face fracture, which when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to me. And thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisors on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board certified emergency room physician.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He was a technical advisor and a writer on ER, and he is with us again. And he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling given the circumstances and stakes of the case.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack in the show. And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show and we need you to feel sad here because we're playing strings or exciting here because we're using percussion.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room be our cadence, and a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing. It becomes the soundtrack and the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes... The emotional equivalent of a score.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about. It's competency porn.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The rehearsals are extensive, especially for the medical scenes. We often rehearse those 24 hours in advance of shooting them so we can come in with it pretty well in our muscles already and then figure out how we want to photograph it on the day we shoot. In terms of how the dialogue is overlapped, that's intentional because that's real.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, you've got four or five people in the room all are working simultaneously trying to do their own thing and record their own thing in the medical record. So a lot of times the sound is really cacophonous.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders. And some of it was, you know, hey, Carter, we could use you out here.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever did with my life because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives right now. And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here. And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here, even though... We said we'd never do it again.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I might be ready to volunteer. And a couple years later, you know, after we saw how this broke down over socioeconomic lines and racial lines and geographic lines, there was a show to be told here.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It was wonderful. Yeah. I think I spent 15 years avoiding, actively avoiding walking down what I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road. And then finally I had an opportunity to come back and was excited about it and slipped a stethoscope around my neck and just felt right at home.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yes, yes. Ironically, I'm 20 years older than Anthony Edwards was playing The Attending 30 years ago. So that makes me sound ancient.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Very much so. Different city, different character. We had started down a reboot road, and then it became an impossibility. And so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by we have.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
In a way, you know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody, myself included, to kick some rust off and to re-familiarize myself with how much has changed in health care, but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be by the time we rolled the cameras.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to him. And then he sort of segregated us where I was off by myself and I ate lunch by myself. Eight together, the R2s and 3s ate together.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Second-year residents, fourth-year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves. And they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know. And the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth. And I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
But it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am considerably older than the rest of the cast or that I've played a doctor before, yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, to a degree. I mean, I don't stand on ceremony when I work and I try to create as much of an egalitarian and democratic environment as possible. And so I try to erase numbers on call sheets and I try to erase barriers between foreground and background or cast and crew and try to call the whole thing company and get everybody to buy into the same thing. And it's very hard to do that.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It's very rare that you're successful. This one was the stars aligned beautifully. Everybody just jumped in. Which made it a real pleasure.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Either his pneumonia is getting worse or his heart couldn't handle the fluids that we gave him to treat the sepsis. His lungs are filling up with fluid.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Not without his blood pressure crashing with very bad consequences. So let's just hope the BiPAP works.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Then I would need to know your decision about using a breathing machine. We're still talking about it. Well, we know he expressed his wishes in writing. Do not intubate. We're thinking try it for a week. That would be a very painful week. He wouldn't get a lot of rest with all the monitors and all the blood tests. He might need to be sedated.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He might need to be restrained because he'd be in an unfamiliar place with a very uncomfortable tube down his throat. And he wouldn't really know what was happening. Elderly patients can often develop psychosis.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, the sooner you decide, the better. I'm really sorry. I wish there was more that I could do. I'm not sure that he has that much time left.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare. And sometimes when you only have an hour to tell a story that has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process. So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours, it feels like you can kind of walk through those five stages of grief with these characters. When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
That's as hard as it gets. We do these debriefs to try to give a sense of closure, meaning to difficult cases so that they won't linger. But trust me, the kids you'll lose will linger. So what do you do?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
I did my residency at Big Charity in New Orleans, and day one, I got a kid, five-year-old boy, accidentally shot by his brother, playing with dad's gun, worried he was gonna get in trouble, right up until he coated and died. Then I asked myself, like, what do I do with this kid? Where do I put this feeling? And I found myself walking all night.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
I was walking and walking and walking, and I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery, and I'm looking at all those mausoleums and those crypts, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, that's what I need. I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
This is a classic thing that I would keep. I know. I would keep this, even if I found it, I would keep it. Even if it was not even my grandfather's hammer or had no sentimental value. I'm holding in my hand a broken hammer. The wood is sort of shorn off in half, but there's a lovely aesthetic to it. Yeah.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Weißt du, was ich jetzt möchte? Ich habe diese Dinge gesehen. Sie nannten sie Blutvinyl. Die Sowjeten drückten in den 80ern X-Rays. Wenn sie nicht Vinyl drücken konnten, würden sie tatsächlich Plastik-X-Rays aus Krankenhäusern nehmen. Und sie könnten ein Album auf sie impfen. Und das waren russische Albums aus der Black Market.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Aber du willst einen davon? Ja, ich will einen davon. Ich gehe auf einen Jagd und mache einen tiefen Dive. Und dann muss ich es anfassen und es haben. Ja, richtig. Aber du bist kein Vinyl-Typ? Nein, ich habe jedes Album, das ich je gewohnt habe. Ich habe sie mit mir durch jedes Wohnzimmer, jedes Haus. Und jetzt habe ich alle meine Vater-in-Las-Alben. Er war ein großer Jazz-Fanatik. Oh, wirklich?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Wenn du aus aspirativen Wünschen aufhörst, Dinge, die du nicht erlaubst, sobald du Geld erstellst, gehst du auf die tiefe Seite und jetzt kannst du all die Dinge haben, die du nie bekommen konntest. Und dann die Erfindung des Internets, plötzlich kannst du diese Dinge anbieten.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und ich musste durch all das kommen und bemerken, dass es die Suche und die Erfindung ist, die wirklich am wichtigsten für mich ist. Wenn es nur durch die E-Mail kommt, kriege ich keinen Dopamin-Hit auf das überhaupt.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I was never good enough at taking advantage of somebody's innocence. I can't do it. I would always want to pay something fair for it, even if it was way undermarked. And you realize very quickly that value is arbitrary and really it's only what someone's willing to pay you on the day you need to sell it. That's what it's worth.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Oh, es ist so unterschiedlich. An einem Punkt habe ich angefangen, Dinge zu sammeln, wie alte Gehäuse, die als andere Dinge verdoppelt wurden, oder Waffen oder Pfeifen oder Flaschen oder all diese Sachen. Und dann habe ich 30 von denen. Hast du sie? Die sind nur in der Tür? Ja, und dann sammle ich alles. Bücher, Albums, Päne, Watches, alte Schuhe. Was denkst du, was es ist?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Because that's not a story. I obviously was a hobo in another life who ate a lot of tinned beans and dreamt of having all the suitcases in the world. You collect suitcases? Old ones. Your wife must be going nuts. I collect all these books and I'm panicked about if my house ever burned down, what would I do? So I have all the suitcases above the bookshelves in case I need to...
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Everything goes in the suitcases and then we go.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
That's the truth, though. When push comes to shove, you get paralyzed by what is valuable, what you would really take, and you end up taking nothing.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I did not. I'm up in Los Feliz. Oh, you're right here. My mom lives right next to Rendon Canyon, so I had to get her out rather quickly as the hill behind her house was on fire.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
We were supposed to have the premiere for our TV show that night. We canceled it in good taste and out of safety. And so I was going to have dinner with my mother and I drove up her hill and looked up and saw the hill on fire and called her and she had no idea. I said, Mom, you got no time. I'm coming. Get out. Get out now. Yeah. And how long did she have to stay out?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
They went back the next morning. They stayed at our place that night. Then we watched on TV a helicopter do a water drop right on that hill and put it out. Like miraculous what those guys did that night.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
He had a lot of great stuff to say, and then he went... Well, he just went a little nuts.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Do you? I would say I aspirationally intend to read them all. I read a little bit of all of them at one point or another, otherwise I wouldn't have them. But there are many that I haven't read. The ones I just have for comfort, the ones I have for reference, the ones that I intend to get to.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ich bin ein taktiler Typ. Ich liebe es, es in meine Hand zu halten. Wenn es um Bücher geht, wenn ich es mag, dann kaufe ich es in Triplikat. Ich kaufe einen, den ich in Doggear und Markup kaufen kann. Einen, den ich auslösen kann, weil du es nie wieder bekommst. Und einen, den ich prästiniert habe, den ich auf dem Schilf behalten kann. Echt? Was war der letzte Buch, mit dem du das gemacht hast?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Let's see. Well, the first one that comes to mind was that book, Shantaram. I really liked that book, David Gregory Roberts' book. Is it a novel? Yeah, a big, thick novel. Good? Yeah, great. Autobiographical, somewhat autobiographical, great story. Bought three of them? I bought three of them. I bought several for other people, but I bought three for myself.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Du bist hier geboren? Dritte Generation Angelino. Ist das seltsam? Um dritte Generation Angelino zu sein? Ja, wir sind wie Unicornen. Und deine Großeltern waren hier? Meine Großmutter wurde hier geboren. Meine Großmutter hat das Craft & Folk Art Museum auf Wilshire Boulevard auf der Straße von der La Brea Tar Pits gegründet, das ist jetzt das Kalifornische Kontemporäre Kunstmuseum, glaube ich.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
And what's in that place? Well, she founded it in 1965, believing that there was something unrecognized about indigenous art, about folk art. So she became the earliest pioneer to really turn it into a recognized art form. So like native art and American art? Textiles, things that are done with... found objects.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
She called it the most democratic form of art because it didn't require any actual training and it was coming from the spirit of the artist. So her house must have been pretty cluttered. It was very eclectic. No, I come by my... Pathology, honestly. We found the source. Grandma's got cool stuff.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Yeah, and then Grandpa collected all the little things, the pocket knives and the keychains and the gadgets. That was her husband? No, my mother's father. Oh, your mother. Really, just going as a kid, going to houses and being like, cool stuff. And going to swap meets and going to garage sales. With your grandfather. With my mother, with my partner. That was our family outing.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Das ist so, wie junge Leute, du hast über Barter gesprochen, ich fühle mich, als ob diese jüngere Generation das wiederentdeckt hat. Und sie sind alle auf Bord und handeln mit einander. Ja. Es ist lustig, ich war früher in Storchen, um Kleidung zu bekommen, und ich liebte es. Ja. Jetzt gehe ich in diese Storchen und ich kann nicht auf den Geruch stehen. Ich bin alt genug, dass es nur riecht.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Es ist ein bisschen schmutzig. Schmutzig. Aber jetzt sind meine Kinder total in das Thriften. Sie sind? Ja, das ist die nächste Generation. Danke.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I'm not there yet. Hoarding has an emotional component to it that I think comes from this feeling of lack or scarcity. It's really hard for me to let go of stuff. Unless I'm giving it to somebody who I think is going to appreciate it, it's really hard for me to let go of it.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I think it's trauma-based. Really? Yeah, I think I've always liked nesting environments, bookstores, junk shops, places that, to me, the ideal environment was Fred Sanford's house on Sanford and Son. I used to watch that show, not so much for the comedy, but for the decor.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Agreed. And sometimes you can believe that an object holds a little bit of energy from the people that have touched it. So historical artifacts, things that were at that place when that happened, I actually feel that they have some kind of...
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Yeah, I grew up in the Hollywood Hills, up in those canyons, and it was always part of our reality.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Living in Hollywood, I used to always look at the people that lived in Malibu and think, you're crazy. You're crazy. There's one road in, one road out. It's either on fire or getting mud slitted out. Why would you ever live there? And then I lived there. And I loved it. I loved it. I loved the isolation. I loved the beauty. I loved the community. You're not there anymore, though. No, no.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Well, it was too isolated. You have a meeting at 10 and one at 3 and you'd be just driving around in circles. Yeah. But I understand why people want to live out there, even with the risks. You choose where you're happiest, I guess. What did your folks do? My mom worked at a hospital in Hollywood called Kaiser for years, orthopedic nurse. My dad was orthopedic. Oh, our nurse as well.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
My dad has done a million different things, a lot of different businesses, computer business, biomed science, all sorts of things. Are they around? Yes, all four. Stepfather is in our movie business. He's produced movies and worked in studios and my stepmom is an educator, teacher.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I had breakfast with my father and stepmother and I'm going to have dinner with my mother and stepfather today. I'm knocking them all out today.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Are we all so adult and grown up now? Well, things start to fade, I think, a little. You would hope. I, you know, you go back and I would change nothing. I would change nothing. And I'm an advocate of two happy houses are better than one unhappy house. Yeah. And I have been greatly influenced by my step-parents. Yeah. And the more the merrier. You have kids? I have three. Three? How old are they?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
22-year-old son, 19-year-old daughter, 9-year-old daughter. Wow. Wow. Whole second time around, huh? Second act. With a little wisdom and maturity. This one's gonna work. No, they're all wonderful.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
And my son is a huge admirer of yours and really psyched I'm on your show.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
He's in college. He's at Boston University. That's where I went. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Well on his way. Was studiert er? Was will er tun? Er ist in der Kommunikationsschule. Ich bin sicher, dass er etwas machen wird. Denkst du das? Ich sage ihm immer, dass es ein großes Umbrella ist. Wir haben Fahrradfahrer und Lehrer.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
You know, you're only as happy as your least happy kid, and today I'm feeling pretty good.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Totally. You know, you don't grow up in Hollywood and not be aware of it. I went to Gardner Street Elementary, which is on Sunset Boulevard, and I used to walk Hollywood Boulevard, and I used to put my foot over Noah Beery Jr. 's name, over the Beery part, and fantasize. I always was enamored by this business.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
In the late 70s, early 80s, it was worse. It was way worse. Hollywood was, you know, just rampant with runaways and prostitutes. It was a pretty scuzzy time. It was really the 1984 Olympics that kind of cleaned up the city. Prior to that, it was more like Times Square in New York.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I think I did. My stepdad worked at Universal when I was a kid. So you went to the lot and stuff? Went to the lot, got to go to screenings and got to be around people that were working in it. And it was that... When you get to go to the circus, you can enjoy it or you can get to peek backstage and see how the guys that are in the circus are hanging out. I loved watching the guys hang out.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ich arbeite wieder bei Warner Brothers, nach all diesen Jahren. Und es ist immer noch mein Lieblingsspiel im Weltraum, auf dieser Straße zu fahren und über all diese Soundstage zu gehen. Wir sprechen über Geschichte.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
In diesen großen Warehäuschen. Wie sind diese Prop-Warehäuser? Phänomenal. Every once in a while they'll have a sale and I go crazy.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
When I tell you about the things I've missed out on. Really? The gun that Rod Steiger pulls on Marlon Brando in the back of the car on the waterfront. That came up for auction once. And they wanted nothing for it. And I just missed the auction by a day. I think about that all the time. Like how much? They wanted like $300 for it. Come on.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Yeah, and the stories behind that particular gun about how they had agreed that it wasn't going to be part of the scene. So when Steiger pulls it, the look of disappointment on Brandos face is him going, come on, I thought we cut that shit. Yeah. And, you know, the fact that Steiger had to do his close-up to the script supervisor because Brando left early. Like, I know all about that scene.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Oh, I once bought a series of letters back and forth between Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando. Oh, my God. Tennessee writes to Brando asking him to star in Rose Tattoo with Anna Magnani. And Brando writes back about why he won't. And Tennessee writes him back about why he's a coward. A coward? Oh, the language is unbelievable. And you have those? I do. Yeah. And what else?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Du nennst es, ich habe es. Ich habe so viel. Als das ER beendet war, habe ich gesagt, ich nehme diese Tür und schneide die Flügel für mich, bitte. Und ich nehme das CPR-Maschinen und ich nehme das Exit-Signal. Ich habe alles genommen. Es ist alles in meinem Haus.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
It's just out? It's just out. It's the door to the library. It's your door.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I don't see that in my future, but maybe for some more canes. Maybe...
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ich kreditiere meine Highschool-Jugend. Ich habe auf einem Lark mit einem Mann gespielt und habe die Partie von Anfang an bekommen. Das war das erste Mal, dass ich so etwas jemals versucht habe. Ich fühlte mich nicht so gut, wie bei anderen Sportarten. Was für eine Sportart?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
One of my best friends in elementary school was Henry Winkler's stepson. So I knew Henry really well when I was a kid. I actually watched Happy Days at the Fonz's house a few times. Amazing guy. So great. He wrote my college recommendation letter. He did? Yeah.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Kind of a Reibold-Piece for high school. Kind of a hip piece, yeah. Hip piece. Yeah, and you nailed it? I played a 65-year-old British man with a pillow in my shirt and a bad Peter-Old-Tool impression. You know, I loved it.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ich habe ein Sommerprogramm gemacht, das die Northwestern-Universität für Highschool-Junioren sponsoriert. Sie nennen es das Cherub-Programm. Das waren Kinder aus dem ganzen Land, die Theaterkinder waren. Being inspired by those kids and holding my own with those kids really kind of solidified my decision to pursue it. And then, you know, I didn't go to college. I started right out of high school.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
But did you train? Yeah, I was fortunate enough to start with a teacher named Larry Moss. I heard of that guy. Yeah, Larry's famous now. So was Meisner, that was the angle? Nein, es war mehr wie, es gab ein bisschen Meissner dazu, aber Adler war Skriptanalysist, er wusste, wie man den Skript in Transitionen und Beats brechen kann und Arcs für den Charakter versteht.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und dann einiges von emotionalen Zugangskraft, um sicherzustellen, dass man alles, was man brauchen sollte, schafft. Aber nicht so viel Methodie, nicht dein eigenes Leben zu nutzen, sondern mehr deine Vorstellung zu bauen, um dich von der Skripte zu bringen. Von der Skripte? Von der Skripte, die Verhältnisse von der Skripte zu bringen, um dich zu einem Ort der Emotionalität zu bringen.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und das funktioniert für dich? Ich bin jetzt ein Hodgepodge. Ich habe eine Technik, die ich nach 35 Jahren, ich bin stolz darauf, dass ich es in einem Backpack nehmen kann. Ich kann es überall in der Welt machen. Ich mache es in der Mitte der Nacht, in der Mitte der Regen.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ja, ja. Ich bekomme manchmal Musik oder manchmal ist es viel Atemarbeit. Und das Atmen ist der schnellste Weg, um da zu kommen. Wirklich? Ja. Wie genau? Well, I got fixated on relaxation being the sort of key to being able to build everything up. When you first get on set and they call rolling, everything tenses in you and you immediately stop breathing and then you start acting.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und die Idee, dass es keine Unterschiede gibt zwischen dem, wer man ist, bevor und nach dem Rollen, dass man in einem Platz ist, in dem man sich entspricht. Aber die Entspannung passt den Charakters Entspannung. Die Atmung passt den Charakters Atmung, die Herzrate und so weiter. Also wenn ich da sein kann, dann kommt die Emotionalität und alles andere effortlos. Wow.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und es ist einfach, es ist ein bisschen, du weißt, es dauert nicht lange. Das ist großartig. Das Ding, das ich jetzt mache, ist so... It all takes place in real time. Every hour of the show is one hour.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Every hour I'm adding a little bit more attention, a little bit more fatigue, a little bit more anxiety, a little bit more, you know, less of a filter. So I have a sort of checklist I go through to not only do what I've already done, but to get to add to it so that it will progress over the course of the show.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Manche Leute interessieren sich nicht. David Mamet sagt, es gibt kein solches Ding wie ein Moment vorher. Ja, aber hör nicht auf diesen Mann. Ich denke, Momente vorher sind sehr wichtig. Ich denke, du führst, wo du warst, in das, wo du bist. Und halb davon, wo du bist, ist, wo du hingehst.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Well, Stella Adler had a great expression, it's not the lines, it's the life. And I'm a firm believer in that, that we often don't say what we mean. In fact, we often say just the opposite of what we mean. But you can convey what you're thinking underneath what you're saying and communicate on two levels or more. Do you think about that scene for scene?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ich versuche nachzudenken, ob meine Charaktere... In diesem speziellen Show hat diese Charaktere ein Geheimnis. Die Pitze. Ja, die Pitze. Meine Charaktere gehen durch einen nervösen Ausbruch, der sich jede Stunde um die Stunde triggert, bis er am Ende des Rockbottoms schlägt. Es ist also ein Tag, den er weiß, dass er wahrscheinlich kommen wird, aber er will es heute nicht sein.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und es ist der Tag, an dem man sich nicht mehr kompartmentalisieren kann. Und er war schon lange auf der Arbeit. Been off work, but this is the anniversary of the passing of his mentor, who during the height of COVID, he took off life support to give a better chance of survival to another patient. And then everybody died. And he's not dealt with that grief or that guilt.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
He's just sort of marshaled on. And today it just gets triggered all day long.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ich habe ein bisschen Zeit gebraucht, als mein Sohn geboren wurde. Aber ich habe die ersten 11 Szenen, ein bisschen 12, und kam zurück und machte den 15. Aber bevor das, hast du Rollen gemacht? Große Rollen?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I got the agent before the acting class. My agent actually got me into the acting class and she paid for my first two months. That's how great of an agent she was. Are you still with her? Of course not. Of course not. I rewarded that loyalty with betrayal. Is she still around? And I've made amends, yes.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
She's around and I called her actually last year and said, hey, I think I owe you a long overdue apology and a big thank you. Oh, really? And how'd she receive it? To her credit, she beat me up a little bit before she forgave me and let me know that it did sting and I respected her for that.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Das ER war ein sehr patientenzentriertes Show. Die Fälle kamen ein, wir behandelten die Patienten. Und dann kamen wir ein wenig in die persönlichen Leben der Ärzte. Aber es war nicht so, dass es ein practitionerzentriertes Show war. Es geht wirklich darum, die Menschen zu schauen, die Erste-Responder sind.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und du bist mit ihnen verbunden für einen Schiff, wie du mit einem Armeen-Unit im Krieg oder einem Cop-Ride-Along bist.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ja. Ein kleines Charaktersgeheimnis. Mein Charakter hat zwei Tattoos, die du wahrscheinlich nie sehen wirst. Einer ist Memento Mori und der andere ist Amor Fati. Erinnere dich, dass du sterben wirst und liebe deinen Tod.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Wie kam das zusammen? Es fing im Jahr 2020 an, während der Pandemie. Warst du Teil des kreativen Prozesses? Ja, ich war auf der Schriftstelle. Ich habe zwei von den Skripten geschrieben. Ich habe die Mail von den ersten Responderinnen bekommen, die mir geholfen haben, eine Karriere in der Erkrankungsmedizin zu machen. Sie haben mich geholfen, sie kontinuierlich inspiriert zu machen.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Aus dem Krankenhaus? Von der ER, aber es war auch, sie waren sehr konfessionell. Sie wollten mir wirklich wissen, wie hart es war. Warum warst du mit ihnen in Kontakt? Sie wollten einfach ausrechnen, was Dr. Carter für sie bedeutet, entweder in ihrem medizinischen Training oder in ihren aktuellen Karrieren. Ich war ein Touchstone-Charakter und sie wollten mir wissen, was da los war.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und es war wirklich schwer, all das Mail zu bekommen. Also ich... Kind of pivoted the compliments to John Wells, our executive producer, and said, you know, I know you don't want to redo the show. I don't want to redo the show. But there's a show to be talked about here about what's happening in healthcare. And if you ever want to do it again or some version of it, I would sign up.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
My intentionality came from wanting to put a spotlight back on this community that for the first time since ER came on the air, they weren't matching all the candidates at all the places that they needed them. So we have a nursing shortage. And we have a great, great need for these people to be in their jobs, especially if we, God forbid, have another pandemic. Right.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
So ER was great at inspiring a generation of people to go into this discipline. And then the pandemic kind of made that discipline seem really unappealing. For a lot of reasons. For a lot of legitimate reasons. Yeah, and for political reasons. That if you don't have the support. Those people have been in those jobs now for five years without a break. And it's taken a toll.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
It's taken a toll on their morale. It's taken a toll on our system. And the ripple effect is, you know, you get to spend less time with your patients. You have to spend more time on their chart. You have to spend more time making sure you don't get sued. And patients are waiting longer. They're getting angrier. And, you know, the system is really fragile. Why Pittsburgh?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Because it's not New York, it's not San Francisco. I love Pittsburgh. I do too. I love it. It's not an overshot city. I wanted to sort of show a part of America that hadn't really been seen, although a lot of stuff is shooting there now. In Pittsburgh? Yeah, believe it or not. Really? Yeah. Are there tax incentives in Pennsylvania? Yeah, they're not bad.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Es ist eine große metropolitische Stadt, sie hat eine gute Übersetzung der Ethnizität, einen großen sozial-ökonomischen Schwung und sie ist umgekehrt von Ag-Land, sodass man eine Übersetzung von urbischen und ruralen Fällen bekommt. Und es hat sich in den letzten 10-15 Jahren in einem Medikamentenzentrum verändert.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Oh ja, und medizinisch, das ist, wo Dr. Safer, der CPR-Trainer war, und das ist... Wir kommen später in die Saison rein, aber die Friedenhaus-Ambulanz-Service ist eine unglaubliche Geschichte, die jemand erzählen sollte. Es ist die erste Ambulanz-Service.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Es waren alle junge, schwarze Fahrer, die trainiert wurden von Krankenhäusern und lebenslänglichen Techniken, damit sie in die unterbewerbten Nachbarschaften gehen konnten und Leute holen konnten, die die Polizisten nicht holen würden. Denn in den alten Tagen, wenn man ins Krankenhaus ging, rief man die Polizei. Ja.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
So the very first ambulance service was all these young guys and they changed the face of ambulatory care. And it's a great and tragic story.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Yes, it is disturbing. And yet I look at those people and think, you know, they're rock stars. These are high performance athletes. These are people who are, you know, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, fourth quarter, you're down by several. They want the ball. They live for these high pressure moments. And they get adrenalized by things that would terrify the rest of us.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
So I'm just incredibly in awe of... Yeah, what do you think that's driven by?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Warum nicht zu? All diese Verhältnisse, die früher sagten, dass das zwischen dir und deinem Doktor, das zwischen dir und deinem Priester, das zwischen dir und... Sie haben alle in den letzten paar Jahren in Frage gestellt, sodass es eine generelle Verletzung von Unvertrauen ist, die sehr beruhigend ist.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
You don't want to live in a society where when somebody is on the ground having chest pains, you're afraid to jump in and help them because of the litigious aspect of what if you did. And right now I think we're very close to being in a culture where people don't want to get involved. It's almost not worth the risk. I've heard doctors talk about that.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I think that people will stay in those jobs with a little bit of acknowledgement and a little bit of validation that what they do is difficult.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Yeah, we spent a lot of time down at... We have a lot of relationships in the community, obviously, and they allow us access. Here at County, down at SC especially, which is, you know, treats a population that nobody else will treat. It's right on the edge of Skid Row. People that are down there working, you know, are doing heroic duty day in, day out.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
We spent a lot of time with medical personnel. We had them come into our writing room. We spent a lot of time going to them. To get things right? Right. Basically to say we want to do it right and more than that, what isn't being told on TV from your perspective that should be? What is it that you're up against that you really want people to know about? And what were some of those answers?
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Oh, it varied depending on who we were talking to. There was a woman doctor in Pittsburgh, black woman doctor, wonderful woman, who just talked about the experience of being a black woman doctor in Pittsburgh. Because there aren't a lot of black women doctors in Pittsburgh. Right.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
In der Tat, für alle Pittsburghs Pluses, ist es statistisch der schlechteste Ort, um zu wachsen, wenn du eine schwarze Frau bist. Für viele, viele Gründe. Und sie hat uns dazu eingeladen, was diese Gründe waren. Und dann hat sie uns informiert, wie wir bestimmte Charaktere und Situationen geschrieben haben.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
It's limited acting, but you're always so grounded in your work. I love your work. I've watched every episode of GLOW. I've watched everything you've done. I can't wait to see this movie. I read the script. You did? How'd you get that thing? My daughter auditioned for it. Oh really? Funny, right? It's great. It's great. You're talking about Meisner Technique. That scene killed me.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Cleansing of your own ego in the service of accomplishing that. There's a great quotation, supposedly Michelangelo, before he began any work of art, would turn his eyes to the heavens and say, Lord, rid me of myself so that I may please thee. And I use that little incantation before takes, where right before they say rolling, I say, Lord, rid me of myself so that I may please thee.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Just get me out of my own fucking head and let me just play this moment. And I just roll from that point forward. You go into your little fugue state and whatever comes up, comes up.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Stell dir vor, dass ein Charakter, wenn er auf jemand anderes Problem konzentriert ist, am glücklichsten ist. And when he doesn't have somebody else's problem to concentrate on, all he's left is with his own. So that's the most uncomfortable, is when he's not busy and not in service of distraction.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
It's a tough thing to attend everybody's worst day all day long, right? It's the worst moment in your life when you go to the emergency room. You're at your worst or you're almost scared. And you extrapolate that times four an hour all day long for these people. So this guy is having a breakdown. It's being triggered as the day goes on. Yeah, one thing after another.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
The whole show is a pressure cooker that keeps adding ingredients and temperature until eventually it hits a boiling point, which will come.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ja, das ist das, was sie gebrochen hat. Und die Pizze ist eine Art proverbialer Metapher für das, was wir alle in den letzten Jahren gemacht haben, um herauszufinden, wie wir unseren Weg entfernen. Ja. Und Dr. Robbie ist, du weißt, jeder Mann, der nach unten geht, muss seinen Weg entfernen.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Pittsburgh. Du suchst für Dinge, die intrinsisch Pittsburgh sind. Und, ähm. Ein fucking guter Schauspieler auf diesem Show, Junge. Oh Mann. Rebecca, die die Tochter gespielt hat.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Erinnerst du dich an Facts of Life? Er hat das seit fünf Jahren gemacht. Er ist Sean Astons kleiner Bruder. Oh, wirklich? Ja, Paddy Duke und John Astons Sohn. Er ist Hollywood-Royalty.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Zunächst und vor allem ist es ein LA-Job. Es gibt keine LA-Jobs jetzt. Es ist das erste Mal, dass ich in Los Angeles gearbeitet habe in 15 Jahren. Echt? Ich schlafe in meinem eigenen Bett und habe Abendessen mit meiner Familie. Das erste Mal in 15 Jahren, seit dem Jahr endet. Ich habe in Louisiana und Atlanta gearbeitet.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ja, fünf Jahre in Vancouver, fünf Jahre in Oregon, Portland. Was hast du in Vancouver gemacht? Falling Skies, habe Aliens für fünf Jahre da oben getötet.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Ich musste meine Kinder zu mir bringen, wenn ich konnte, und ich hatte immer Abstände, die sie kommen konnten, um sie mit ihren Lehrern umsetzen zu können, um die Schule zu machen, und Tutoren, wenn ich es brauchte. Und meine Frau, mit der ich jetzt seit 14 Jahren bin, sie ist großartig, sich zu Hause zu setzen, in einem Hotelraum. Also, wenn Kinder klein sind, sind sie ziemlich portabel.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
We homeschooled our youngest for a while, which made that easy. But it's, you know, it's life on the road. And that's just part of the gig. I get anxious. So coming back, this is an L.A. job. You know, 250 crew members, lots of background, hundreds of actors. This is a big economic boon to the city to be able to employ this many people in this city.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
after a 192-day labor strike and after a pandemic. And now after these fires, this city is hurting and could use the work here. So there's actually a petition going around now that a lot of people are signing to try and put a little pressure on the governor, a little pressure on studio heads to make more of a commitment to bring work back here.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Sie haben die Incentive von letztem Jahr verdoppelt, aber es ist immer noch ein Lotterie-basierter System, um dafür zu arbeiten.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Wenn du es unter einem bestimmten Niveau machst, kannst du es immer noch machen, aber es ist nicht so einfach und so verfügbar, wie es früher war.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I sent out a little letter to our casting agent, Kathy Sandrich, that went out with all the breakdowns. That was basically kind of a mission statement about what we're trying to do. And I made it analogous to an Altman movie. I said, this is more like Nashville or MASH, where it's a tapestry piece. There's things happening in the deep background, the foreground, and the other background.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
And sometimes the camera's going to be on, sometimes it's not. But you're going to be alive in your storyline all the time. So we're looking for dynamic performers, people that have got... Theater Background, but mostly we're looking for people that want to buy in to kind of an immersive type of working that is not like a normal TV show. It's more like camp or rap. Yeah.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
And so bring your creativity and your enthusiasm and leave your ego and come right.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
If you go back and rewatch, which you don't have to, but if you do, you'll see that the patient we treated in Episode 4 is in the waiting room in Episode 1 and 2 and 3. And they're just background actors until they get called back. But they're there like they would be in a real emergency room waiting.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
And so we've got people that are on the show that stay in that waiting room for eight hours before they get treated.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
None. Yeah. None. None. These scripts have got to be so tight in order to, I mean, there's moments. Just to get the shot. Moments can be improvised, you know, little bits of dialogue here and there, but there's not, this thing is so airtight out of necessity that there's not a lot of room for it. Because every shot is loaded. Loaded. It's a link in a chain.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
And if you deviate, then there's course correction that has to be done later downfield. So you've got to keep it pretty strict. Did you direct any? Not this season. I'd like to next year. Yeah? Would that be a challenge? No, I've directed shows that I've worked on before. I've directed myself before. This particular show, I think, lends itself to being like a... Bill-Russell-Player-Coach.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Du bist auf dem Flur, machst Play-Calls und strategisierst auch vorher. Weil das Show dieses Umfeld nicht verlassen kann, ist die Präparation, es gibt kein Location-Scouting, es ist alles da. Es ist nur auf dem Platz, du bist im Studio. Stage 22. Ist das schön, dass du dich nicht um Licht oder Flugzeuge kümmerst? Oh mein Gott, ich liebe es.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Und Licht, es gibt keine Dollys, es gibt keine Dolly-Tracks, es gibt keine Seestands, es gibt keine Flaggen, alle Lichter sind im Boden. Also kommen wir rein, wir drehen, wir drehen, wir drehen, wir drehen, wir drehen, wir drehen, wir drehen. Viele Leute sind mit Steadicams unterwegs? Nur zwei Operatoren. Eine Frau macht alles selbstständig und ein Mann hat einen Steadicam-Rig namens ZG-Rig.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Das ist ähnlich wie ein Steadicam, nur ein bisschen mehr manövrierbar.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Wir haben drei Kameras für zwei Episoden für ein paar Sachen, die später in der Saison passieren, aber es sind meistens nur zwei. Und was ist mit diesen? Bist du mit dem lokalen Theater beteiligt? For years I ran a company here in L.A. called the Blank Theater Company.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Aber es gibt mehr Theater in Los Angeles als in den anderen Städten.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Wir hatten die schönste kleine Scheißbox auf der Straße. Und was war dein Ziel? Unsere Mission war, sowohl Westcoast-Premieren als auch originale Arbeiten zu machen. Wir waren die Blanken, weil wir keine festgelegte Firma oder Raum wollten. Wir wollten uns irgendwo reinventieren, wo wir wollten. That changed when we got the lease on the second stage on Santa Monica Boulevard.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
But predominantly we were known for two programs. We did a Monday night reading series of new works. That was a stage reading series. And then we did a playwrights festival for young playwrights, 18 years old or younger. Yeah. Wir haben das für 20 Jahre gedreht und mehrere hundert Lieder von Teenager-Wissenschaftlern produziert.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Einer von ihnen wurde Finalist für den Pulitzer-Prize und gewann den Tony für Best Play. Wer war das? Stephen Karam. Ich kenne diesen Mann. Ich sah die Menschen. Ich habe diesen Mann interviewt. Er hat ein Lied namens Sons of the Prophet geschrieben, das für den Pulitzer-Prize gewonnen wurde. Er hat den Tony für die Menschen gewonnen.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
He won when he was like 12, 14 and 16. 12 years old? Yeah. Oh, we had winners that were like nine. It was really cool. We'd fly the kids out. If they were from out of state, we'd cast the plays professionally and put them up at the Stella Adler Theater up on Hollywood Boulevard. And these kids would get to see their words performed by professionals. And it was life-changing for them.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
Whether they went on to a career in the arts or not, it was a seminal experience in all of their lives.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I think it's going to have greater impact and need going forward. I think the more that AI gets invested in and technology and movies become sort of more technologically based, the more there's going to be a need for a temporal, human, live experience. You would hope that there's something in the human spirit that craves that and it doesn't get diminished.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
No, I was a long, long, long chapter in my life. I think about getting back into it, but it'll take a minute. It ended up being just a lot of fundraising, which is not a lot of fun. Do you yourself crave stage acting? Only in the way that I think about going to the gym, where I feel like I need it.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
I don't really want it, but I need it, because it is where you kick off the rust and sort of get back to it.
WTF with Marc Maron Podcast
Episode 1613 - Noah Wyle
It's almost like doing theater. It's really strong. I mean, there's similarities. And it's so physical. Yeah, I love it. I think this, I'd be very happy to do this for a couple more years.