Adam Patla
On season one of The Pitt, Dr. Samira Mohan emerged as an embodiment of empathetic care, taking the time to make sure her patients were heard, seen, and understood. She also centered her entire life around her work, leaving little room for anything else outside the walls of the ED. Supriya Ganesh rose to the occasion, creating a complex portrait of a doctor pushing against a system not designed with her in mind while navigating the severe loneliness stemming from her choices.
When we return to The Pitt, Mohan perhaps undergoes on of the bigger transformations amongst her peers. Her personal life bleeds into her professional life and throws us into unexplored territory with Mohan. Ganesh doesn’t retreat to familiar comforts. Rather, she uses this to reshape Samira without sanding down her edges in a way that only a performer with remarkable clarity can do.
“It’s less so removing something, it felt more like adding things on,” Ganesh explains regarding their process for season two. “I felt like I was adding on more layers. I feel like last season there wasn’t really a lot of her you saw outside of her interacting with the patients. This season you see a little more of that and you see a little more of her personal life filter into her work…. I think I wanted to make sure there was a reason she didn’t have any friends. I didn’t want her to be the most affable, kind person ever because then as an audience we kind of go ‘Wait, why does she not have friends? Why does no one in this hospital really like hang out with her?’ So I wanted her to feel a little prickly with some of these social interactions that she’s having that have nothing to do with work.”
Ganesh also “wanted to add in the idea of her being more relaxed” this season, paving the way for a lot of internal exploration and conflict for Mohan.
“Season 1 it was a lot of she was very rigid, she was really tense,” she says. “It was because she was worried about whether her boss was going to tell her she was a bad doctor at any point in time. I think I wanted to show that some of that has gone away at the beginning of Season 2 by leaning more into furniture and relaxing more and feeling more at ease in the environment. But I think as the shift progresses you almost get back to season one Samira at the end of it.”
One pivotal arc that continuously sees Samira reverting back to season one state of being is her contentious relationship with Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle). Ganesh transforms her physicality ever-so-subtly as each interaction chips away at her confidence.
“I think she knows what she did wrong, but it’s just like the magnitude of the response is something that is really surprising to her in hour ten,” Ganesh says. “I think there’s this weird hot and cold thing that’s happening and I think what’s hard for her is…I don’t really know how to fix this. I’m really trying my best, I’m really doing great as a doctor and yet I’m not really getting the straight road to approval from this character.”
All of these pressures compound in one of the season’s and Ganesh’s most memorable scenes where Samira has a huge panic attack in the middle of the lobby. The moment pushes Ganesh as a performer, allowing her to explore depths of Mohan that haven’t been highlighted before. The performance is arresting, jarring, and nerve-racking as Ganesh crumbles beneath the anxiety little by little.
“I think I had to do things in my body to differentiate my panic attacks from Samira’s panic attacks,” Ganesh explains while breaking down the scene. “There were things that I saw that other people went through versus things that I experienced and I had to create that differentiation physically for myself. I think what was the hardest for me was the breathing because you literally could work yourself up into hyperventilating…. It was definitely a challenge and I was happy to get it.”
Ganesh continues to flex their acting muscles with another particularly devastating storyline concerning Orlando Diaz (William Guirola), a man who cannot afford the healthcare he desperately needs. However, it was not only a major opportunity as a performer, but also a chance to touch on something Ganesh feels is a major issue facing our country right now.
“I spoke to Scott in between season one and season two and I just said ‘I really want to do something related to health insurance,'” they say. “That feels so important for me to do and I think the writers room was already thinking about it a little bit…. I think that for me, I think a lot about forms of violence that are legitimatized and forms of violence that are not. I think about some of these claims being denied by insurance companies almost by design because they want to save money and not pay for your healthcare. It’s like legitimized death. It’s so awful and it’s so scary…. That was a big thing I had to deal with moving here….. I cannot explain to you how I never had to do that before I moved here. So it was a big shocker to me culturally and I think it’s just something I wanted to explore. We’re doing a show about healthcare. People are literally not calling ambulances because they can’t afford so it just felt like we have to talk about it.”
Ganesh excels as a presence on The Pitt because of her larger understanding and care of the subject matter. There is intention behind every breath, every movement, every single delivery because Ganesh understands there is a bigger picture being painted. There is a reverence for the profession and there is an urgency in the depiction of patients, resulting in a character that feels alive and complex.
You can watch all of Supriya Ganesh‘s incredible work on The Pitt. Both seasons of The Pitt are streaming now on HBO Max. Be sure to check out our full interview with Supriya below!
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