Interview: Shawn Hatosy Dances Through the Darkness on ‘The Pitt’

On The Pitt‘s first season, Shawn Hatosy left a seismic impact as fan favorite Dr. Jack Abbot, the attending doctor on the night shift and one of Dr. Robby’s (Noah Wyle) closest confidants. The performance resulted in Hatosy’s first Emmy win in the Best Guest Actor in a Drama Series category.

“It’s just been life changing, the success of The Pitt and how the world is reacting,” he says. “It has definitely changed my life. I really am enjoying watching this show take off in a way that is so wonderful and unexpected. It means a lot to so many different kinds of people. To be a part of something like this, it’s hard to imagine something like this could happen, but here we are.”

This season, Abbot returns to the ER in the 1:00 PM hour, tending to an officer that was injured while he assisted as a SWAT medic.

“I think because the mass casualty event really sort of crystalized his purpose…you got to see a version of him that was just incredibly comfortable in the chaos,” he muses. “So picking up Season 2 obviously, he’s on this quest to do the work that his therapist has convinced him he needs to do and he decides, you know, moonlighting as a SWAT medic is helping him on his path.”

While Abbot’s presence on Season 1 was largely contained to the mass casualty event, Season 2 allows the audience to spend more time with him outside of crisis and get to know him in a leadership capacity. Viewers are also treated to a fuller view of the nightshift as they get to see their day-to-day behaviors and rituals. Hatosy moves through these relationships with an assuredness that keys us in to how he runs things.

“I just love all the characters and the dynamic,” Hatosy says with a smile. “And there’s something obviously contrasting to the way that Dr. Robby’s leadership style and how he’s being leaned on in so many different ways and how he leads. And then to see Abbot…there’s something…I don’t know. They’re chanting, they’re hooahing. There’s something very goofy about it which I really love and there’s…a ‘dadness’ to it that’s a little bit…hokey but in the best way. I think that Abbot is a very positive force.”

That positive force comes into play with Dr. Robby’s gradual mental decline throughout the season. Hatosy explains, “You’re seeing the cracks and the rest of the staff starts to see that. Abbot goes away, comes back, hears things. Because Abbot is in a lot of ways an equal to Robby, nobody else has been able to sort of get through to him. And they share so much in emotional stress in this job that is nearly impossible and it’s really not a place where you can talk about how it is affecting your mental health.”

The arc culminates in another terrific monologue from Hatosy that revels in cracking Abbot open but also utilizing him as an anchor. He fully understands where Robby comes from and can feel the headspace himself, but there is also a semblance of distance from it. Just before, the two perform a resuscitative hysterotomy, a procedure that, for Hatosy, really helped inform how he’d tap into that all-important moment.

“That procedure is something that I think I heard, and I might blow this stat, they do like such a small percentage, like ten percent in a year,” he explains. “It doesn’t happen very often. So for me I was thinking perhaps Abbot had never done one before. And so when he’s checking through the glass and trying to find where Robby is, it’s not that he didn’t feel like he couldn’t handle it, but he wanted to experience it with somebody who he had been around medicine with for so long and this is such an important thing to be able to save them both. I feel like that helped me get to an emotional place with him and try to land the importance of what we’re there for. But also at the same time, let him understand that he’s not alone in his mental health problems and how we have to find away to dance through the darkness.”

Hatosy also stepped back into the director’s chair this season, taking the helm for Episode 9, “3:00 PM.” Not only is Hatosy himself also acting in the episode, but the hour tackles a wide array of tones and cases with varying degrees of urgency. Hatosy blends this all together effortlessly behind and in front of the camera to deliver one of the most memorable episodes of the season.

“It’s such a different style of show that I’ve ever worked on as an actor and as a director,” he admits.
“One of the main components of directing episodic television…is pre-production. On a show like Animal Kingdom, you’re spending a lot of your pre-production out scouting, you’re in a van, you’re picking locations…. All of that goes out the window when you direct on The Pitt. There’s one location essentially. You’re given a very dense script with a lot of technical medical stuff that you’re trying other understand as best you can…. The thing that is most important that I learned on The Pitt is you just need to understand the script as well as you can but you’re not going to be able to plan things the way that you do on other shows and there’s something very powerful in that.”

Hatosy does know he will be back in the director’s chair next season, but other than that we know very little about the season ahead. What we can expect is more work from Hatosy both in front of and behind the camera that is laced with intention and nuance.