Adam Patla
Mackenzie Astin is no stranger to show business. Hailing from a family of actors, Astin has been working since his debut at the age of nine. Despite being a Hollywood mainstay, he’s still able to find projects that make him feel lucky.
The latest project to do so is his recent guest appearance on HBO Max’s The Pitt as Jereme, a man at odds with his sister (Rebecca Tilney) over the decision to prolong their dying father’s life.
“It’s a good show, right?” he gushes almost immediately. “First of all I count myself lucky to have been able to get on board. They assembled a pretty fantastic group of people stem to stern.”
At the top of the stem is executive producer, writer, and star Noah Wyle who set the tone for the whole series with a note in the auditions. “He mentioned Altman,”Astin recalls. “In the spirit of Robert Altman, everything is always happening. Maintain the reality no matter what. Even if you were four rooms away, you were always in character.”
The committed and collaborative tone of The Pitt continued once Astin stepped on set. “Noah set a tone that was reverent to everyone’s experience. He’s an actor, he understands the actor’s experience and so he was certain to make sure that the experience of all the actors, but particularly the guest actors who had the limited time frame…were given deference to be in the place they needed to be to perform what they needed to perform. The directors that I worked with Amanda Marsalis and Damian Marcano they were also deferential and made us comfortable. And then you gotta go do your job.”
That particular job required Astin and Tilney to explore a heavy storyline that juggled a lot (grief, end of life care, and complicated parental relationships) over the course of three episodes. In spite of the weight of the story, Astin remained undaunted in his approach to the character because of its universality.
“Staving off that fear of death is the foundation for a lot of human behavior,” he says. “So to prepare for something like what Jereme and his sister are going through is not hard because it’s human. We all go through this. We’re all worried about our folks getting old, we’re all worried about our folks passing…. It wasn’t impossible to find the stuff in my own life that I was able to apply to the character.”
The emotionally riveting storyline stands out among many incredible guest spots due to the meticulous and moving collaboration between Astin and Tilney. Despite the limited screen time, the actors present a palpable and layered dynamic as they navigate mourning a father each of them had vastly different experiences with.
“Rebecca and I talked about this, about how different their experiences were and how frustrating and almost unfair it may seem to the sister that she didn’t get to have the that Jereme got to have with his dad, but that’s…life,” he says about their collaboration. “…[W]e had the good fortune of a lot of stuff being on the page already pretty clearly illustrated,And then she’s got a tremendous theatre background which is really, really perfect for this style of showmaking because…the intention is for it to be as real as possible. So you have to do the backstory stuff before the camera’s rolling. She just as a professional had done a ton of work before she got there and I had done the work that I had done and so we did start off from a decent point of being prepared. But then as you get to know somebody that you’re supposed to have known your whole life other stuff develops.”
Like many plot lines on The Pitt, Jereme and Helen’s journey struck a chord with audiences with its poignant and compassionate portrayal of a painful, yet common moment that isn’t often seen in mainstream media. For Astin, that’s the biggest reward.
“My original take was that it was a real gift to the people who lost folks during the height of the pandemic and when the hospitals were completely overrun,” he says fighting back tears. “It was an opportunity for the people who didn’t get a chance to say good-bye to their parents in person to see somebody else say good-bye to their parents in person and have that experience because that’s how we process stuff…. There’s something absolutely beautiful to me about giving audiences…the opportunity to experience someone doing what they weren’t able to do because of the conditions that hospitals were under at the time.”
Season one of The Pitt is available to stream on HBO Max. You can watch all of Mackenzie Astin’s brilliant and moving work in episodes two, three, and four. Check out Astin’s entire conversation with Awards Radar below.
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