Adam Patla
Throughout the course of The Pitt, myriad patients enter the ED, serving as vessels to explore complicated and timely issues both in and out of the healthcare system. Some of those patients come and go quickly. The severity of their ailments range from the silly side to life or death scenarios.
Enter Brittany Allen‘s Roxie, a hospice patient initially admitted due to an injury sustained during a seizure. However, as her stay continues, the conversation pivots to her decision to either return home and continue hospice care or pass away in the hospital.
“It was a journey to carry that heaviness at that time but it was also a gift,” Allen admits during our interview.
Throughout our conversation, Allen almost speaks of her character with the reverence of a friend who’s come and gone. It’s clear this experience was more than a simple acting job for her. There was a major sense of responsibility in taking on this story.
“Every character I play I do a deep level of commitment,” she explains, “I’m always trying to bring the truth to every moment, but in particular for this one I felt okay if I don’t hit that mark anyone watching who has been through this will see through something that’s fully there.”
But doing this character justice wasn’t just an opportunity touch and support a large audience. It also provided an internal moment of growth for Allen. She says, “Death and mortality is something we all avoid as much as possible until we lose someone close to us. In particular our own death is something we don’t really want to admit will happen to any of us. But I also think it’s extremely wise to try to wrap your head around that to give perspective…. To do justice to the character as well as to deepen my own relationship with life and with death, I thought, ‘Okay this is a really good opportunity to meditate on this scary universal thing.'”
Roxie is one of the rare patients we spend an extended amount of time with. Allen appears in seven of the fifteen episodes. This tenure, coupled with the fact that The Pitt shoots chronologically, presented, “unique challenge to chart that and carry it over such an extended period of time. I felt like throughout the months of filming I kind of had this…sadness in me, but it was not a sadness that brought me down. It was just like she was there with me…. I felt like every time I left that room I was leaving Roxie…. It makes me emotional to talk about it now because I’m able to go home and be with my family and live my life but this woman is still in that room.”
Allen’s profound connection with the character of Roxie trickled inward as well. “I remember one moment in particular when I was lying in the hospital bed as Roxie and I was fiddling with the ring on my finger,” she recalls. “It’s so beautiful when you really start to connect with a character because your thoughts just merge with theirs and I was looking at this ring and just thinking ‘this ring will outlive me….’ It’s humbling.”
Despite the humbling and heavy pieces of Roxie’s storyline, she’s not steeped in tragedy. Allen and every performer involved in Roxie’s story found paths for the light to trickle in, infusing the scenes with nuance and grounding them further in reality.
“When we’re faced with something so extreme…all the bullshit goes out the window,” she says. “Working with the actors, working with Taylor Handley, who was just such a beautiful, open, loving human and John [Getz] and Bonita [Friedericy] who played my parents…and the boys, Banks [Pierce] and Emmett [Moss], there was so much beauty exchanged between…. It’s so sad but at the same time you’re so aware of how alive you are….”
The real magic of Allen’s performance, though, comes from her exercise of restraint. The Pitt is a bustling machine, steeped in chaos, but Allen houses Roxie in the quiet. Yet, for as quiet as the performance is, Allen never strips Roxie of her agency or power. It’s an impressive tightrope that Allen walks with astounding ease.
“….[W]hen she arrives at the hospital there is this kind of building anger and frustration and feeling trapped by…not feeling like she really is not to have a voice,” Allen says. “Because I was trapped in this bed…I had to hold that focus while they were setting up the cameras around me…. I really had to find a different way of preparing for each scene. The prep in advance is it’s own thing, but the moments before where I may otherwise have been behind the set listening to my music, doing some body movements, I was having to be very still and I had to go inward and I had to hold on to a really intense focus in this chaos…. I think that’s where a lot of the power came from.”
In a season loaded with incredible, dynamic performances, Allen stands out as an eye in a frivolous storm. She expertly crafts these honest and intimate moments that not only allow her to shine as a performer, but also unleash the fullest impact possible from Roxie’s story. She brings power and light to a woman who could so easily become a flattened tragedy. Allen understands the rich complexities of life, holding space for beauty and pain and holding it all with precision and grace in what will go down as one of the standout performances of the year.
You can watch all of Brittany Allen‘s beautiful work on The Pitt Season 2 on HBO Max now. New episodes of The Pitt air Thursday at 9:00 PM ET on HBO Max. Be sure to check out our full conversation with Brittany below.
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