Noah Wyle gets interrupted during our interview when someone from his team walks in with a prosthetic leg. It’s the one used in the sixth episode of The Pitt’s second season, which the actor directed, when a guy has a motorcycle accident that rips open his leg. As he holds it up to the camera so I can get a good look, a big smile spreads across his face.
It’s just another day in the life of Wyle, who not only stars as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch on the hit HBO series, but is also one of the creative forces behind the series—producing, writing, and sometimes directing.
When we speak, he’s deep in the writing process for season three. “What’s the opposite of fresh as a daisy?” he jokes about his current state of mind. He’s playing hooky from the writers room to talk to me, but the show is at the forefront of his mind. “Storylines are going up on the board. We have a good concept for everybody’s story arc and we’re about to break episode three, which I’m going to write,” he says.
It’s been a nonstop marathon for Wyle since The Pitt became a breakout hit with its first season, which won five Emmy Awards, including two for Wyle as lead actor and an executive producer. While Robby was a hero of the first season of the tense medical drama, the character became more controversial in the second as he struggled with mental health issues and lashed out at staff. Some fans didn’t love it. But as Wyle tells Little Gold Men, he has a clear vision for how Robby’s story moves forward and sees that arc happening over five or six seasons.
Wyle seems comfortable working at this breakneck pace—and being back in scrubs, years after playing Dr. John Carter on ER for 11 seasons. Robby fits him like, well, a doctor’s glove at this point. “After a while, I looked forward to getting back into costume and into character every day, because that was more of a comfortable groove for me to be in than trying to be Noah,” he says.
Wyle spoke in depth on Little Gold Men about how he’s dealt with the criticism of Robby in season two and how much medical knowledge he really has, even teasing a bit about what we can expect from season three.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Vanity Fair: How did you decide how to push the story forward after that phenomenal first season?
Noah Wyle: The big question was, will audiences be engaged with this show if you take the architecture of the protagonist having a nervous breakdown, and you take the mass-casualty shooting for the last five episodes out, and you just say, “This is a day-in-the-life experience,” and the aggregate toll of the job on these practitioners lives is the thesis of the show going forward. There’s no sweeps week; it’s just a shift. So [executive producer] John Wells really encouraged us to stay true to the original thesis and to not fall into the temptation of going bigger, badder, faster, funnier, bloodier, but just to sort of do it again and be honest.