Patrick Ball Talks ‘The Pitt’ Season 3 Prep, Being Moved By Fan Reactions And His Own Experience With Recovery From Addiction
It has barely been a year and a half since The Pitt first premiered on HBO Max, but for formerly-struggling theater actor Patrick Ball, who plays senior resident Dr. Frank Langdon on the medical drama, the world has shifted on its axis. “It feels like I’ve all of a sudden stepped into somebody else’s life,” says Ball, who is currently on Broadway, where fans of The Pitt line the stage entrance after each performance of the play Becky Shaw. “After eight months of being luxuriously isolated on the Warner Bros. lot, in our little fluorescent box, you can forget how many people are going to witness what you do that day,” he says. “To feel the energy of an audience, and get filled up by it, it really is an incredible way to recharge the battery.” As Ball prepares for his imminent return to the series, which begins production on its third season this summer, he dissects Dr. Langdon’s return to Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center in Season 2, after a 10-month stint in rehab.
DEADLINE: The Pitt must be such a unique challenge as an actor. First of all, to have that time jump at the start. How did you figure out where Langdon was, in terms of his recovery?
PATRICK BALL: With this show, we don’t always know where we’re going. We get scripts one at a time. I’m currently in this situation for Season 3, where we’re going to go back into production in a month, and I’m having conversations with Scott [Gemmill, series creator]. I don’t know exactly where we’re going to go over the course of the season, but let’s check in and establish where I’ve been.
For Season 2, we had those conversations. “Langdon has been out of the Pitt [the show’s eponymous Pittsburgh emergency room] for the last 10 months. He has been to rehab, he has gotten clean.” You get the basic facts from Scott and then he leaves me a lot of room to fill in the blanks, like, “I have not been at work, which means I have been at home for much of the last 10 months. I’ve been with my family.” You get hints in Season 1 that there’s been a lot of tension within the household, with my wife taking on a lot of primary caregiving duties for our family, while I’m away at work. And now over the last 10 months, I haven’t been away at work.
Patrick Ball and Noah Wyle in ‘The Pitt’.
Warrick Page/HBOMAX
I’ve also been out of the hamster wheel of the Pitt. The Pitt is a train where you have to move fast. You have to keep jumping on grenades, putting out fires. That has a compulsion to it, and when you meet Season 1 Langdon, he has been on that train for the last four years. Now you meet Season 2 Langdon, and he has been off that train for the last 10 months. It offered a very cool opportunity to show that the person that you met in Season 1 was, to some extent, a product of circumstance.
I knew that over the course of Season 2, Langdon was going to have to readjust to the speed of the pitt, and I didn’t know exactly how that re-acclamation was going to happen. You spend the eight months of shooting looking for the opportunities that make you pick up an edge a little bit, this whimsy, this anger and sense of being disappointed, and this sense of needing to go before you’re ready. I knew those opportunities were going to come along. I didn’t know when, or what they were going to look like, but I knew where I was starting the season and I knew where I needed to get by the end.
Some of the greatest successes from The Pitt and this process have been where I haven’t exactly gotten what I wanted… It’s my job as an actor to take what has been given to me, and figure out where my experience meets that, rather than feeling like I’m going to try to shape the story to my experience.
DEADLINE: In those first scenes, he comes in with a little bit of humility and trepidation.
BALL: I think Langdon has had to confront his own shadow. For anybody that has struggled with addiction, whenever you are in active addiction, your mind plays a lot of games to hide that fact from yourself. You can be stealing pills from patients in a workplace, as you see in Season 1, and your mind can do the work to hide that fact from yourself. And that creates a real sense of compulsion, almost a manic speed that you start moving at. And over the last 10 months, Langdon has had to stop and confront the lies that he has been telling himself, the lies that he’s been telling to people around him, and the chaos that he has created. He’s had to take accountability for that fact. That can be a deflating process, and it can be a heavy process. And then it can make it difficult to come back in the door and move with the clarity, speed and confidence with which you need to move to exist in the Pitt.
DEADLINE: There are scenes, many of them, where he’s so zoned in on his job. They’re not part of an emotional arc. Is that a relief for him, to be back and just doing the work?
BALL: For sure. 100%. And I can say this, as a fellow workaholic and as somebody that currently feels like I’m working three full-time jobs between The Pitt and Broadway and press, that it can be comfortable to stay in motion and to not have to sit with yourself. For Langdon, he finds a lot of comfort in being in the pitt. And I think he finds a lot of identity in being in the Pitt, being a good doctor, having a purpose, being able to help other people, and able to get the attention off of himself. I think that is very therapeutic for him. Not being able to do that, but having to sit with himself, I think that’s a very tough task. It’s a very necessary task.
I also think, having to do that has taught him some things. So whenever you see Langdon coming back and you see him sitting down with Becca [Tal Anderson], and Louie [Ernest Harden Jr.], and a number of these patients, he has been forced to learn a humility that actually allows him to be a better doctor, and allows him to be more present for the patient that he’s across from. I think this process has been something that is going to make him better at his job.
L to R: Katherine LaNasa, Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball and Sepideh Moafi in ‘The Pitt’
Warrick Page/HBOMAX
DEADLINE: How collaborative, if at all, is this? You’ve been open about the fact that you have experience with addiction. So, it’s probably not hard to put yourself in his shoes. Do you have conversations about how Langdon feels or where Langdon’s at with the creators?
BALL: Loosely. I believe the foundation for any successful creative partnership is trust. It’s a recovery adage. I am a worker among workers. I am one of many. The best way for me to be successful as an actor is to trust the people that I work for and work with and know that Scott has been doing this for a long time and has a grand plan that he is working on. Langdon is one small part of that plan. There can be a real temptation to want to write your own story and exert too much. I think that can be a trap. So, I will reflect back if Scott wants to talk, or if Noah [Wyle] wants to talk about things that are coming down the pike for Langdon that might overlap with my personal experience. If they ask about it, I will share.
I know there’s a deep control freak that lives within me, and I’m very cautious around trying to overstep or exert my will or anything like that, because I also know some of the greatest successes from The Pitt and this process have been where I haven’t exactly gotten what I wanted. The job of an actor, it’s an interpretive art. Especially coming from the theater, where you work on Shakespeare, on Ibsen – a script that is wholly written – it’s my job as an actor to take what has been given to me, and figure out where my experience meets that, rather than feeling like I’m going to try to shape the story to my experience. So, I try to make sure that I don’t try to write my own story and accidentally give myself everything that I want.
DEADLINE: Do you rehearse on the show?
BALL: We move fast. We have medical rehearsals. Whenever we have a big trauma scene, we’ll have a medical director come in right before we start shooting, and we’ll have about 15, 20 minutes where they show us the procedure. “OK, you’re going to hand this EKG here, you’re going to hand that tube here, that tube is going to go down this pipe, and then you’re going to check this monitor.” And we have about 20 minutes for a medical director to make sure that everything we’re doing is as accurate and authentic as possible. And then they bring the cameras in and then we shoot. But for a lot of the break room scenes, or the scenes between me and Robby [Wyle], the scenes between me and Dana [Katherine LaNasa] in the kitchen, we don’t have any advance rehearsal for that. We come in, we’ll have about one or two read-throughs of it in the room, where we find basic blocking, and then they’ll bring the cameras in and then we’ll shoot it. We move very quick.
Patrick Ball as Langdon and Brandon Mendez Homer as Donaghue in ‘The Pitt’
Warrick Page/ HBO Max
DEADLINE: What stood out to you about Langdon’s relationship with Dr. Robby in Season 2?
BALL: I think Langdon came back, at the top of Season 2, knowing that he had been hurt. He had felt abandoned by Robby, but he had also hurt Robby, and he had been spending the last 10 months doing the work to take accountability for [that]. He came back in with a great game plan to make his apology tour and thought that he was going to go up to Robby, apologize, and rekindle this very close mentorship. He then came in the door and realized that it wasn’t necessarily available. As the season goes on, he realizes, “Robby is not the person I remembered him to be. I remembered him to be this sterling, noble role model that I looked up to in every way and wanted to emulate,” and then I come back in and I’m a little disappointed that he won’t take my apology.
That feels a little bit like, “Why does he hate me? I know I messed up, but please give me some grace.” As the day goes on, you realize, “Wait, he is not doing well in a way that actually is not about me,” and I learn to see him as not just an extension of my healing process, but somebody who has a healing process of his own. He might need care and compassion, rather than him being there as a lighthouse and guidance figure for everyone else on the staff.
DEADLINE: Speaking of the apology tour. To some people the apology feels, and probably is, very sincere. But when it comes to apologizing to Santos (Isa Briones), what happens there? Obviously the two of them still have friction.
BALL: Here’s the thing. I think it’s very important to me, and I think it’s very important to Scott and John [Wells], Noah, and everybody writing it, [to show] that recovery is a lifelong journey. Addiction is a lifelong disease. It’s important to not show that, as much as Langdon wants to come in the door and project to everyone around him that he has done the work and he is healed, that he is not Buddha on a lily pad. He still has a lot of fears and resentment for the person that put him out of work and almost ended his marriage.
I’ve had people come in and tell me that they decided to go to nursing school because of The Pitt. To be able to feel like you’re telling a story that is not just entertaining to an incredibly large audience, but actually has a sense of utility beyond entertainment, is something that you spend your whole life dreaming of as an artist.
As much as part of his mind can say, “I did it to myself,” the other part of his mind is like, “You almost ruined my f–king life. You almost killed me. You almost made me lose my wife and my kids.” Like, “By the way, I was doing a good job, I came in the middle of a mass-casualty event and saved a lot of lives. And I walked out of that mass-casualty event a pariah, having to now be a loser in the eyes of my wife and children, and all of my coworkers, and lose all trust and respect and a community that I feel like I’ve done a lot of work to earn respect from.” So, there is a lot of ego injury there that takes time to get over and it doesn’t happen like that. Langdon didn’t go away and all of a sudden come down from the mountaintop having seen the light. He will continue to be an imperfect person, because this is a cyclical lifelong journey.
DEADLINE: In the past few months you guys have been all over both social and traditional media. What’s the upside of having your presence be everywhere? Has there been a benefit to being able to share so much of yourself, of your own life?
BALL: It’s a complicated experience when, all of a sudden, the world has this parasocial relationship to you where they feel like they know you and feel entitled to your space. I walk down the street now, or I ride a subway, and it’s a regular occurrence that people come up and talk. And for the most part, it’s really exciting, but it can be a lot. I’m very thankful for the platform, and very thankful to be able to walk out to the stage door every day and have people being like, “My dad struggles with addiction, and seeing your portrayal of Langdon has really meant a lot to my family. Understanding exactly what it is that he’s going through has brought us together.” And I’ve had people come in and tell me that they decided to go to nursing school because of The Pitt. To be able to feel like you’re telling a story that is not just entertaining to an incredibly large audience, but actually has a sense of utility beyond entertainment, is something that you spend your whole life dreaming of as an artist. I feel very lucky.
DEADLINE: On a separate note, my parents are medical professionals, and ER seemed to really irk them. But my dad watched the entirety of The Pitt, sharing his thoughts on it. Your parents are also medical professionals, do they feel like it is especially accurate to the profession?
BALL: That’s funny you bring that up. I love ER, and we watched ER growing up in my household. As most people know at this point, my mom is an ER nurse, my dad is a paramedic. When I got the call to do the screen test for The Pitt, I got to read through the script with them and they were like, “Wow, this is so real. This is what I would actually do.” They’re like, “Normally I can’t watch medical dramas.” I was like, “We watched ER. That was pretty accurate.” And they were like, “Yeah, well, even that felt like a TV show.” And this was an amazing gesture by John, Scott and Noah, who were responsible for the incredible success of ER, to come back 20 years later and say, “We’re going to do something even more medicine-forward.” It’s an incredible risk for a television-maker to say, “We’re not going to do any of the things that you’re supposed to do to be a successful, entertaining piece of television. We’re not going to have romantic storylines, we’re not going to have rosy lighting, we’re not going to go home [with the characters]. We are going to prioritize accuracy and the mundane realities of the workspace. Even if it means we don’t get to meet the demands of entertainment, we are going to double down on being truthful.” And the fact that audiences have been on board for that, the way that they have, is really awesome.
