Even as someone who’s behind the scenes and knows how the proverbial sausage is made, do you ever find yourself shocked by some of these grisly injuries when you’re filming a scene?
Yeah, and most of these things hang out in the hall. There will literally just be, like, a bunch of heads on a table, or vaginas — I mean, you name it, it’s all out there. And the little room where they keep a lot of this stuff is right at the bottom of the stairs where I come down from my dressing room if I’m gonna go to craft services! [Laughs] There’s just all kinds of cut-up body parts on a dolly.
One time, when I was shadowing John Wells [executive producer and director] . . . I think it was for the first episode of season two, they opened up that guy’s chest cavity, they were gonna twist his lungs around or whatever. I can’t remember what organ it was they were twisting. But sometimes when I shadow John and I go with him to a technical meeting, I just stand back and observe from a distance. He saw me doing that and he said, “Oh, Katherine, you can come up here and take a look at this.” And inside I was dying. I was just screaming inside, “No!” Because it’s so unbelievably graphic, even without the rest of the person’s body attached to it, even without all the fake blood in it.
And it’s not shocking in a Halloween, throat-gets-slashed sort of way. It’s because of the insane level of detail they put into each organ and limb . . .
Oh, it’s layers of fat and tissue. I had an experience last year where there was a fellow who had a gunshot wound. He was sitting on a gurney, it was in between takes and he was right in front of me. I was looking at him and I couldn’t see the “work,” you know what I mean? I couldn’t see where it attached. I actually didn’t even know how they did it. It was only then that I realized that the whole front of his body was fake and they literally had pulled through little tiny hairs [all across the prosthetic]. The work is so meticulous. People don’t know.
There was a woman that was playing a pregnant woman this year and I was like, “Wow, they just hired someone with cankles to play a pregnant woman.” And it turned out that they had somehow put some kind of fat ankle on her, but you could see all the way up the rest of her leg. You can’t even see where these guys attach the part. It’s incredible.
How does the real-time aspect of the show impact your experience and your process as an actor — embodying a character moment to moment, hour to hour, instead of over a period of days, weeks or years?
I think there was a little bit of a balance that had to be struck with that in season one, for me. I was aware of it — like, I’m only getting to know these people on this one day, but at the same time, I think for the story to be satisfying, you have to take a journey with each other that probably, in reality, might take a little more than a day. Like the relationship I had with Mel [Taylor Dearden], say . . . Dana might’ve been like that on day one, but I think we certainly felt like these people went on a journey, right? A lot of the characters I’ve known a long time, but with some of the newer ones, I had to keep that in the back of my mind.
But I like the parameters of it, because I think that good acting is always grounded in physical truth. And so, you always have that to focus on, like, “Does my back hurt? How long have I been standing up?” There’s something very pressing about the fact that it is hour to hour, right? There’s always some truth that you can really pinpoint. If you were doing a show where you’re coming home from work the following day and [the viewers] weren’t with you at work, it might be nebulous how much your back hurt or whatever. But these shows, they’re going through every minute with us. We have to hold all those things, those agitations — physically, emotionally . . . I like the task of it, because I think it sort of grounds us all in the same reality.
The mentoring aspect of the show feels like something that makes it stand out from other hospital dramas — teaching younger doctors and nurses under life-and-death conditions. Do you feel like Dana is, in her head, constantly weighing, “When do I step in, and when do I let the rookies figure it out themselves?”
I mean, I have children that are 35 and 11. I’ve been mothering my whole life. So, it doesn’t feel like that aspect of the character is much of a reach for me. I think it comes to me very instinctively. It’s a very big part of mothering — when do you micromanage and when do you let them find their way? When have you given them enough examples for them to find their way? And certain things, people have to figure out on their own, right? So, yeah, it’s a lot of mothering in that charge nurse job.
Does the explosive, instant success that The Pitt achieved compel you to look back on other shows you’ve been on over the years that were great, but didn’t quite connect with audiences and wonder, “What was the magic formula with this one?”
Well, I think if you’ve been in the business a long time, you’ve seen it happen to shows that you’re on and to shows that you like that just, for whatever reason, don’t make it. And I have been, because of being in the business — I think it’s over 35 years now — just brutally aware of that. It’s funny, you know, over the years it’s always these pilots and everybody gets all verklempt about it. Everyone’s all worked up. “Oh, this is the pilot. This is the one you gotta get.” And it’s never the one. They take themselves really seriously and they see 9,000 people for every role, and it’s gonna be the biggest deal in the world. They go through casting directors and they fire actors . . . and inevitably, you never see that project [laughs].
It’s always something like The Pitt, that seems like it could just be ordinary, where everything works out. I think it’s magic when it happens. I think it’s ephemeral. I don’t know why it worked, I really don’t. I do think that the writing was really well architected and the actors worked really well together, and I think John and [creator R. Scott Gemmill] and Noah [Wyle, star/producer] gave us a really clear thesis of what they were going for, and we just all aimed at that and worked together really well. So, that was lovely. I’ll be rooting for those kids for the rest of my life. It was a really special experience.
Finally, Dana was assaulted by an angry patient at the end of last season. How has she wrapped her mind around that? How has that trauma redefined the Dana we pick back up with months later, in season two?
I think it’s coming into play in the fact that she’s so hypervigilant, and so protective of [new nurse] Emma [Laëtitia Hollard]. And so ticked off at the hospital just trying to glaze over all that by sending donuts — pun intended — [but] none of the real issues facing nurses have been addressed, as we’ve seen with the striking nurses in America.
I think her rage about all that is partially due to the fact that she didn’t press charges [against the patient who accosted her]. And it’s really interesting that she’s now got this sexual assault victim that she really hopes presses charges, you know what I mean? While she doesn’t want to push the patient, in a way that’s a projection of herself; I think there’s grief about the whole thing.
I like that it’s kind of messy. I like that Scott Gemmill colours outside the lines — that Dana can be incredibly warm and loving to Emma and to [homeless patient] Digby [Charles Baker], at the same time being incredibly on edge, and be heroic and be not very well knit together. I just like that they’ve been unafraid to let a kind of heroic character like Dana be on tilt.
The Pitt, streaming on Crave
MEMORABLE ROLES:
While the Louisiana native didn’t find her signature role till the indelible Nurse Dana, anyone who’s been watching television over the past four decades has seen plenty of Katherine LaNasa, all across the dial. Some highlights include a two-season run leading NBC’s extended-family sitcom Three Sisters; a stint as Charlie Sheen’s mommy-issue-inducing paramour Lydia on Two and a Half Men; personal shopper Gloria Grandbilt on Riverdale spinoff Katy Keene; slippery con artist Sally on Imposters; and savvy podcaster Noa Havilland on crime drama Truth Be Told, opposite Oscar winner Octavia Spencer. That’s in addition to prominent guest appearances on Seinfeld, Longmire, Justified, Big Love, Judging Amy and, just recently, season one of Daredevil: Born Again.
CURRENT GIG:
The Pitt reunites ER producer John Wells and star Noah Wyle for a different sort of doctor drama — each season portraying, in real time, a 15-hour shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. Having just clocked out of its second pulse-pounding season, the show’s earned Emmys aplenty, including one for Katherine LaNasa as charge nurse Dana Evans — who, along with fellow Emmy winner Wyle’s Dr. Robby, serves as a key leader in the trenches of this thrillingly unpredictable hospital.