Patrick Ball spent most of The Pitt’s first season knowing his character only as Dr. Langdon: Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s golden boy, callous and flippant and very, very good at his job. Then the series, created by R. Scott Gemmill and executive produced by star Noah Wyle, threw him a curveball. Not only was Langdon stealing medication to fuel his secret opioid addiction—but his first name was Frank.
“That was a shocker,” Ball admits on a recent and rare day off from shooting the show’s third season. “I really was moving through most of the first part of season one under the assumption that I was a one-namer, like Beyoncé.” That said, the show’s decision to hold back on this reveal also makes narrative sense. As Ball puts it, “Season one, you get Langdon. Season two, you get Frank.”
The 36-year-old came into his own during the show’s second round, in which Langdon—Frank—returns to the emergency department after rehab, chastened and without the blind confidence that once made him fearless. The season earned a staggering 25 Emmy nominations earlier this summer, more than any other series—including one for Ball’s performance. “It’s a really surreal thing to wrap your head around,” he says, especially for an actor who’d never been a series regular before he was cast on The Pitt. “But I feel super lucky to be at work already—you know what I mean? All the bright lights and carpets and stuff can be a lot to navigate. And we’re in the middle of making a really good season of television right now, so that’s my main focus.”
Just before final-round Emmy voting began, we caught up with Ball about Langdon’s journey on The Pitt, the show’s enthusiastic fandom, the viral saga of paying off his student loans, and the reality of making a network-TV-style hit in the post-peak-TV era. “We shoot eight months out of the year, and then after we wrap, the show is coming out,” he says. “And so you never really clock out of The Pitt. It’s just this freight train that just keeps on going.”
Vanity Fair: Tell me about Emmy nomination day.
Patrick Ball: I was shooting that morning. We had just finished a scene, and Scott came over the God mic and read off the list of all [25] nominations that we got. And we all got to celebrate together, which was really special.
Were you watching the announcement itself?
No, I was at work!
When we meet Langdon again in season two, he’s in recovery. This is his first day back at the hospital. He has confrontations with Santos (Isa Briones) and with Robby (Wyle); he doesn’t know if he should really be there. The episode that you submitted for the Emmys was the one where he does a spinal adjustment and saves a patient from getting paralyzed. Take me through that scene.
Season one, you’ve got a Langdon that’s very sure of himself. He’s always the first one to jump on the grenade. And you realize about halfway through the season that he’s been stealing drugs, and that confidence is being propped up by something. You also see a Langdon in season one who has been on the freight train kind of nonstop. And he has become the kind of thing that you have to be in order to survive this environment.
And then season two, he’s been out of that environment for 10 months. And not only has he had to confront his own shadow and confront the lies that he’s been telling himself, but also he’s been away. So he’s not sure of himself. He comes back very timid and very ashamed. He’s walking into a work environment full of a bunch of people who he’s lied to and disappointed and is trying to apologize to. And he realizes that his trusted mentor doesn’t want anything to do with him. He knows that it’s his job to repair that relationship, but Robby doesn’t want anything to do with it. That really puts him on his heels.
Then he ends up in a do-or-die situation. You got to move fast, you got to be confident. And if not, this person’s going to die.
I was really afraid he was going to screw it up. I was like, This is going to be the last nail in the coffin.
Yeah, me too. Because you also think, I’m not qualified to do that procedure. That is probably a real insurance problem if that had gone wrong. But Robby knows that whether it’s by the book or not, this is what needs to happen. He comes at Langdon hard. He says, “Wake up! Doctor up!” It’s the tough love that Langdon needs.
In the moment, it feels a bit like an attack. But it is the jolt that he needs to get out in front of his doubt, and he pulls it off. Right after he walks out of the procedure, he has one second of being like, “Man, I still got it.” Then Dana [Katherine LaNasa] comes in and is like, “You forgot your drug test.” And that moment of victory is very, very short-lived.
There are so many intense moments throughout the series, and the show can get very graphic. Has there ever been a scene that has been too much even for you?
No. You really get desensitized to it pretty quick. We are doing gore every single day, and we’re seeing these incredible prosthetics every single day. You just get morbidly fascinated with it. You just lean in and love it.
I’ll also never forget season one medical bootcamp. They brought in an actor for us to practice doing some procedures on. I remember being a little timid and saying to Noah, “Man, we really get up in people’s business.” This is an actor, and I’m up in his mouth and his groin. You get really personal really quick.
You did a play on Broadway this spring, Becky Shaw, after having done a few seasons on the show. How did it feel to return to the stage after having become a TV star?
Oh man, it’s great. I love it. I love being onstage, and it is just a different kind of satisfaction being able to go out there and take the journey from beginning to end every night. And it was really nice doing a comedy. It was one of the most responsive audiences I’ve ever had.
Your costar Isa Briones was on Broadway this spring as well, and she posted a couple times on social media about unruly audience members shouting at her while she was onstage. Did you experience anything like that?
No, not really. I was safely behind the proscenium arch. Isa’s show [Just in Time], she was in the middle of the audience, and so she was a lot more exposed than I was. But I was really excited about how vocal our audiences were.
At this point, you’ve been playing Langdon for a relatively long time. Do you feel like you can read a script and say, “Oh, Langdon wouldn’t say that,” or, “I don’t think Langdon would do that”?
I mean, not really. Again, coming from the theater, I come from a world where the script is wholly written. Tennessee Williams wrote what he wrote. And it is my job to interpret that. I think Samuel Beckett says every word is an interruption of an otherwise perfect silence, or something like that. [Editor’s note: In a 1969 Vogue interview, Beckett said, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”] Whatever the writers have me saying and doing, I meet them and follow them. And luckily they’re very good at what they do.
I’m also wondering what it’s like working with Noah when he wears so many hats on this set. He’s your costar, but he’s also your executive producer, and sometimes your director and sometimes your writer. Is your relationship similar at all to Langdon and Robby’s?
Yeah. Robby and Langdon, I think these two guys understand each other. I think they see each other. And I think there’s a friendship there that extends beyond mentor-mentee. I feel the same way with Noah. Noah and [executive producer] John [Wells] and Scott took a huge risk in hiring me. Langdon is an incredible part that they had incredibly big plans for, and they hired me with basically no experience. They took on the responsibility of training me and guiding me through this whole process.
Noah has been really amazing about that, both in terms of how to make television and also just navigating this new space where strangers on the internet know who you are. It’s an incredibly blessed moment that I’m in, but it’s also a lot. It’s a big change.Noah has really been there to offer guidance.
Were you surprised by any of the backlash to his character last year, from fans who were upset that Robby was not as nice as he was in season one?
I haven’t read that much about it. But I think it’s really interesting. When you’re growing up, your parent is not a person: They’re just an accessory to your growth. That is their sole function in the world. And then as you become an adult, you realize, Oh no, my parents are people. They have problems. They have considerations.
I think Langdon, over the course of the season, sees Robby not just as a mentor, but as a person who is also struggling. And he realizes that Robby is not just there for Langdon’s healing journey, but is on a journey of his own that has nothing to do with Langdon. He’s imperfect, and he never claimed to be perfect. I think if the audience is feeling some sort of way about Robby being imperfect, good. Great! That’s the story that we’re telling.
What do you think about people who want Langdon and Mel, Taylor Dearden’s character, to be romantically involved?
[Laughs] I think that’s great. I’m so glad everybody’s having so much fun. The fandom has taken on a life of its own, where everybody has gotten all these spin-off fan fiction things that they’re writing. They really want Langdon and Mel to get together. They seem to really want Robby and Whitaker [Gerran Howell] to get together. They really want Robby and Abbot [Shawn Hatosy] to be a thing. And so that is great. That has nothing to do with me, but I’m glad everybody’s having a lot of fun.
Season three ends with that great karaoke scene between Mel and Santos. Were you jealous that Langdon didn’t get to do karaoke?
Not at all. Not at all. I hate karaoke. I hate singing. They definitely got the right people for the job, and I’m praying that they don’t ask me to do it.
This spring, you spoke about paying off your student debt thanks to your salary from the first season of The Pitt. The story really took off. Did you expect that reaction?
No! I’m glad it did, but I have no idea why it did. That’s something that I’ve talked about before. But yeah, it was a big thing.
I spent a lot of years being very, very financially insecure, and wondering if I was ever going to be able to be married and buy a house and have a life. And I went to grad school with the hope of maybe being able to teach one day. Then I ended up coming out of grad school with about $80,000 worth of debt. I graduated into a strike, and I couldn’t get a job as a teacher. And so I went right back to doing regional theater. Now I had even more debt, which was very, very scary.
Very few actors actually ever get to be a series regular and get the big paycheck. A vast majority of actors are living paycheck to paycheck, and have to do day jobs in between.
There are fewer and fewer series like The Pitt—15 episodes a season, a new season every year. Would you like to see more shows like this: that are not only entertaining and good art, but also give an opportunity for more people in the industry to have a steadier living?
It’s amazing. I’ve arguably got the best job in the world right now. We shoot in LA; we shoot eight months out of the year. We’ve got a very large cast and crew that stay steadily employed and at home with their families. And that is just an unbelievable privilege.
I hope we can do it for a long time, and I hope more shows emulate it. I think it’s really cool that Mariska Hargitay is hosting the Emmys this year, because I’ve always looked up to her. Law & Order is an institution in New York. Every early career actor in New York gets their start on Law & Order.
Including you.
Including me. [Editor’s note: Ball’s first TV credit is playing a MrBeast-esque social media impresario who gets arrested for manslaughter in a 2023 episode of Law & Order.] And Mariska takes that responsibility very seriously. She sees herself as sort of a host for so many people trying to get their start in this industry, and keeping so many people employed. I think she’s just unbelievably gracious in how she holds that office. I hope that The Pitt gets to serve a similar function.
There’s a storyline in season two about AI being employed at the hospital, then screwing everything up when the system goes down. Do you have opinions about AI in your industry?
It all just feels incredibly doomy and scary. And all the powers that be try to put a sense of inevitability on it. “Get on board, or you’re going to find yourself the last horse salesman when the Model T comes around.” Which, I don’t know, maybe that’s true.
It also feels like maybe we do have some say in the matter. I don’t think that AI is going to replace human storytelling. Maybe AI will be able to make the big box office superhero movies quicker and cheaper, but I don’t think AI is going to make Sentimental Value. You know what I mean? Hopefully it’ll just get the film industry to relearn what makes film great—not bigger, flashier, badder, but truer and more honest and more human.
Yeah, that’s well put. Do you have anything lined up after you wrap season three?
I’ve been promising my girlfriend [actor Elysia Roorbach] a vacation. We haven’t gone on one the last two years.
But isn’t she shooting a TV show now too?
She is! She’s in Nova Scotia, shooting season two of We Were Liars. She gets a five-month vacation in Canada. So really, I want a vacation.
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