Interview: In ‘The Pitt,’ Veteran Actress Katherine LaNasa is the Beating Heart of the ER
If you watched The Pitt earlier this year and were completely taken over by feelings of love for nurse Dana Evans, you aren’t alone.
Katherine LaNasa, who plays Dana, feels the same way. The Pitt, an HBO Max medical drama that positions each episode as one hour of the longest shift imaginable in a Pittsburgh ER, sees Dana at the center of everything. She keeps up with everyone there, patients and staff alike, making efficiency her sole business during her shift. She’s a character that’s clearly burnt out experiences of the past, most recently the influx of inconsideration, stupidity, and death brought in by the COVID-19 pandemic.
After a storied career in television that spans stints on Justified, Judging Amy, NYPD Blue as well as two previous hospital shows—House and Grey’s Anatomy—LaNasa has earned her first Emmy nomination for her performance in The Pitt, which takes Dana through a shift that sees emotional turmoil, getting punched in the face, and a mass casualty event.
I hopped on the phone with LaNasa to talk about auditioning for roles, her surprises about medical professionals, the realism of each episode, and what she learned during filming.
Tyler Doster: How did you start by approaching playing a medical professional that’s kind of slightly worn down by her profession and the experiences of it?
Katherine LaNasa: Well, I am kind of slightly worn down by my profession and the experiences of it. (laughs) To be honest, COVID was really hard, I think for the journeyman actors, I would say were really well served by being able to go into rooms and a lot of us and audition and a lot of us were able to get that odd really great part because we could go into a room and we were often, for me, I was often in a very small group of people, 10 people or 15 people, because I’d given good auditions for 20 years.
So the casting director, if they were going to open it up to have a session with a director for people that weren’t like a name, like an offer only people, and I was right for it, I would usually get in that room. And so that’s how I got my role in Billy Bobs Thornton’s Jayne Mansfield’s Car. That’s how I got The Campaign with Jay Roach and Will Ferrell. So my biggest and best parts were gotten, even the part on Katy Keene on the CW were gotten because of being able to audition, they wanted a star, they wanted a big name. I got that because I went into the room. And so we just ended up in this kind of big pool. It was almost like you went back to a cattle call. So it’s kind of like either you’re a big name entity or you were back in just the masses when you started out in your twenties. So I’m saying all that to say that it was a really, really hard period for me career wise from the beginning of COVID on. And so I was pretty worn out. I’d also had cancer and stuff like that. So I really just really felt like somehow I understood her insides and
I didn’t need to be a medical professional to understand her insides. And I think being a mother, being a mother my whole life, my daughter really should be my granddaughter. I have a 34-year-old and I have an 11-year-old.
And so to be a mom and a wife, it’s a lot of service really. And so there was something about all of that kind of insights I think matched up. And I have a certain amount of grief from certain experiences in my life that aren’t the same as Dana’s. She lost a parent really young, but I felt like Dana held a fair amount of grief. And so, I don’t know, sometimes parts take a lot of analyzing and sometimes parts just arrive to you, a really beautiful suit that you can step into. And I have to say, other than the accent, I think it just walked into Dana.
TD: Do you find that these roles are few and far between where you step right into the character?
KL: Well, they’re definitely special. I do think there’s great roles out there for women, but they’re definitely special. And often I kind of have a feeling about them before I get them. No matter what the odds are, I have a feeling that they’re my part. I remember on Katy telling my friends, I had this audition for this other show, and I was like, “eh, maybe that’s the show, but I like this other show a lot, but I’m going to have to move to New York.” My friend’s, like, you haven’t even auditioned. And I literally thought whatever. And I got it. And with this show, even though I was having a really hard time getting a job, I thought I was special for the part. Something in me thought if they see this, if I’m able to connect with them or get in front of them, I think that they want me. I think I’m who they want. It’s like a level of confidence that’s not coming from the ego. It’s just some intense marrying of your instrument with this material where you’re like, oh, this is just, I know what to do with this. It’s just a special feeling. So it’s definitely special.
TD: What’s surprised you the most in your education because of the show, including the types of personalities that medical professionals deal with every day?
KL: Yeah, I think one of the things that really struck me the most was when I was, well, two things happened. So I had cancer and just was done with my treatment about a year before the show, and then was in and out of the ER for other sort of weird symptoms and complications and things that were happening up until about six months before the show actually. So not that long. And I can remember being admitted and spending the night there and being on a floor with a person that was just screaming over and over again, not unlike the Kraken in the show,
and really feeling like, oh my God, these people are just, what crackpot hospital am I in? They don’t even care about this poor guy just screaming down the hall, like someone going to go attend to him. And then realizing, doing the show, not only on the show and the storylines that we had, but when I went to the hospital, seen a guy, he was one of their, they call him frequent flyers that goes in all the time, and they’re like, oh, he’s probably going to die soon. He has lost a hundred pounds. And he was having some type of psychological problem. He was a little, having an episode, I guess, of sorts. And they had people there, they had security there in case they needed it. And there was just a real matter of fact way that they talked about ’em that wasn’t uncompassionate, it was still compassionate, but it was very matter of fact. And that shined so much light on the experiences that I had in the hospital because I think before doing the show and getting the education that I got doing the show, I would’ve thought that people that weren’t having a big dramatic reaction to someone else’s trauma were uncompassionate or didn’t care. You know what I mean?
And then I realized that they have to have real efficiency with their emotions in order to be able to serve those people. And B, the whole department, all the people with all the trauma they need to be able to move from this thing to the next. They can’t get hung up and have a big emotional response to everybody’s issues. They just can’t. So they’re probably compartmentalizing a lot and bottling stuff up a lot and having probably a lot of feelings about it later. And that’s kind of what the show’s about too, right? It is a psychological toll. So it really just kind of made a lot of that stuff that I didn’t really know about before coming to focus for me.
TD: That must’ve been eye-opening just to be able to see that experience. Did the episode structure of the season, the episode per hour of the shift, give you a deeper sense of a moment-to-moment realism that you were able to portray?
KL: Yeah, I think definitely. I think you are experiencing people’s traumas and worse nightmares in real time. And to play the part, well, you have to open up your imagination to reacting to them as if they’re actually going through these things. So yeah, I think it helped a lot. I think also the way that we shot helped, because we just shoot in real time and we go from one thing to the next and hold on, lemme turn off, I’m getting some dings. We go from one thing to the next in that it just stays very alive and very, I hate to say it sounds really strange, but it’s very relaxed because we’re all just kind of there moving as one unit, and there’s a lot of stiffness built into the regular way of shooting where you come in and then they measure everything so that your exact focus marks and all your marks are right. And then you get marks on the floor and you have to hit those marks. And if you’re off of them by five or six inches, you’re not in focus and they have a lot of lights in front of you, and maybe the set is actually this teeny tiny piece of something. It doesn’t feel expansive. You don’t even feel like you can breathe or move. And to imagine a larger space when you’re really in a teeny tiny space, it’s all a lot more constricting. And so the whole nature of the thing, the moment to moment thing, the real time, the space itself, the way that we shoot it, all added to the realism of the show, but also the relaxation that it allowed the actors. And I think that relaxation really led to that very real feeling of work that we were doing.
TD: Speaking of how you shot and your mention this isn’t shot like a normal show, how was it adapting to the fast-paced choreography of the camera?
KL: I really loved it. For me, I get a lot of joy out of being able to make things work physically. I think because I was a dancer. And so I really enjoy the physical aspect of it. Like, oh, well, let’s speed up to go over here and then we’ll walk around here, and then we do at the camera, and then you step in. There’s something very exciting about it. It feels like it’s live. I mean, it is live because doing it in life, but there’s something, the shots are very long often,
And they’ll go from one thing to another thing. When we did a shot today, let’s see, I come around where the lockers are, I end up by trauma two, I talk with Noah. Then we take that around the corner, we meet some guys coming in from the ambulance bay, then we turn the corner, he turns and talks to them. I walk away behind my desk and he turns around and talks to me again behind my desk, and Spy comes in behind him. Then they talk in another place in the hub, and then they exit. And we did it all in one take. So in order for the take to work, they really need everybody to be able to make all that stuff work all in the same cake. So there’s an excitement to it, there’s a freshness to it, and it wakes you up in the best way. The best acting is moment to moment. So you just get very awake by the actual method by which we make the show.
TD: It’s live, like you said. Speaking of going deeper into the physicality, and I wanted to go back to this because earlier we were talking about, you said it felt like you were stepping into a suit with Dana except for the accent. And I wanted to ask, how much work did you put into Dana’s accent?
KL: Let me tell you, Mary, that was some hard work. (laughs) That was a lot. I like to say a lot of tears. A lot of tears. I had done something that sounded vaguely East Coast, the audition because I needed to put an audition down. And then I got the call back and I was still working with the same thing. And I realized that if I didn’t learn the accent, I was going to sound vaguely East Coast or I was from New Jersey. And being a southerner, everybody gets our accents wrong. They’ll do a Cajun accent in Atlanta, they’ll do some dead accent that maybe you’d hear in Charleston for everywhere else. It’s just like there’s a lot of specificity to the different southern accents, and there’s a lot of ’em that don’t sound like us, and they’re doing the New Orleans accent out place or the Cajun accent out of place. It’s so off.
And so I find it insulting, and I am insulted by movies that don’t do their research about the specificity of the place. It’s insulting to the people that live there. I know it’s insulting to me. And so I just thought, this is a blue collar woman that comes from a blue collar background of a certain age. From what I can tell, she would have an accent, and I just needed to try to get it. And so I was working with someone that wasn’t quite equipped to get me where I needed to go, was super frustrated, didn’t know who I could find. I was listening to Mare of Easttown, and it’s not the exact accent, but they were doing a great job. And at the end, I was listening to it literally just on repeat, and it ran out and I was in my bathtub and it ran out and it went on to the extras, and the extras came on and they started talking about the accent, who knew?
And then the dialect coach came on. And from that, I called her on, looked her up on IMDB Pro, I connected with her. She connected me with the person that had actually worked with most of the other actors and who was from Pennsylvania. And I’m like, that’s the person that I want. Because she would know all the different Pennsylvania accents. And she was able to differentiate me from Philly. And it’s just only really you’re going to get that, but someone that’s very well versed in accents of that region. And so I put my all into it, and I still work with her. I try to work with her on every episode just to keep me in shape to just not let me get too far, remember sounds that you can easily forget all of that.
TD: How relieving was it to finally find her?
KL: It was very relieving, actually. I was really very scared for a while. I didn’t mention to anybody that I was doing it, and nobody said anything to me, so I was just kind of like, did I know what I’m doing? I mean, I don’t know if they know, maybe they know. I didn’t want to tell anyone – I had insecurity about it because I didn’t want to shine a flashlight on it. So I just kept going and I really didn’t end up talking about it at all until probably the fourth or fifth episode.
TD: So you were just keeping it to yourself.
KL: Yep. It was really important to me that I do it, but I don’t know. I think actually the accent was the thing that just kind of placed me, I don’t know, sometimes it’s like how somebody walks or this or that, and that’s the thing that really just feels like the right suit. I just knew she needed that sort of blue collar local accent.
TD: How did you work with Noah to create Dana and Robby’s bond?
KL: Gosh, I dunno. I think we just naturally clicked, to be honest with you. And I think I had a clear understanding of what my role was with him. So I kind of run the ER, but he’s the head of the medicine of it, so he needs to be all right and he’s not having an all right day. So there’s a lot of focus from me on him and in support of him, and even kind of got him under a microscope a little bit. So I think that there was that, but also he has a lot of grief from his mentor dying. And my own son had his father die as a young man. And I think that I really related to that kind of protective feeling that I had about my son at that time, and I was able to, I just transferred that really over to Noah. It wasn’t cerebral, but it just happened. I think we fell into those relationships pretty easily.
TD: There’s a scene where Dana farther into the season, Dana gets punched by someone from the ER. And I just wanted to ask you what your emotions were going into shooting for that. Were you excited?
KL: I had complete denial about it. I looked at it and thought, oh, and there’s a stunt. It’s like they might’ve just written “STUNT” across it. And I just thought of it as a stunt. And it wasn’t until I got there and I have this big guy Drew Powell Mock punching me in the face and I’m falling on the concrete that I was like, wow, I have to process this. But I think in a way it was really good because I just was processing it fresh. I didn’t pre-plan a response to it. I didn’t think about what the other side of it would look like for me, to be honest with you. The scarier part was really episode 10 where I have to come in after the punch because you can’t practice that. You don’t really practice that. You get there and they bloody you up, and you have to on that day, put your full imagination into what you’ve just come from and then walk in and it’s got to be full. You know what I mean?
It’s not a half measure. It has to be really full in your body. Your body has to read. You just got punched, and your psyche has to be in a place of, I just got punched, and it’s not a little swipe. Do you know what I mean? It’s not a jig, it’s a full on. It’s a full ballet. You got to go for that. And so I was scared of that, to be honest with you. And I was very relieved when we were done that it had gone so well. But every retake, every time I had to walk back into the hospital or sit down in that chair when they’re all checking me out, I had to go back out to the lobby onto the ground and start from there and get up and come in just to have the breathing and the neck and the face and the whole feeling of that, of having just been knocked out. I had to begin again. Every time I tried one time when they were on no or something, they had moved off me a little bit and I was like, well, this is crap. I tried marking and it was total crap. And I was like, I can’t do it. I got to go every time I got to start again.
TD: And the body definitely keeps the score. How was that? Trying to just separate from the physicality of someone that’s been dealing with stuff like this?
KL: To be honest with you, that whole little run of 10, 11, 12, was it? Yeah. And then 13, 14, that whole little run was at 10, 11 maybe, where the post-punch stuff before she quit, and even part of 12 in there, we’re getting into the trauma. So it takes her away from it. But that whole section of the season for me was really living in the place of a person psychologically that was having kind of an existential crisis
And was kind of processing in real time, what just happened. And so for people that were really watching closely, I just kind of get angrier. I just could kind of edgier and I don’t leave. I don’t want to go home. I think on a subconscious level, I know that if I go home, I have to deal with it. So it was keeping alive a very, very painful, humiliating place. And so the weeks that we did that, the month, month and a half that we did that were really intense. They were very, very intense. I was glad that my family was not there. Every day I’m having to live in a person’s psyche that feels really humiliated and broken. So you are living in it. I mean, that’s the baggage of being an actor. I mean, it’s great because it’s a craft, right? It’s sort of like master storytelling is really what we’re doing. So it’s great when you get a complex thing to do. You want to get to do these complex things, but they also have their side effects. So I was ready when it was time in 13 and stuff when I was just moving people around. That was good. I was ready to back up.
TD: Is there anything that you learned during or before season one that you are bringing into season two with you?
KL: Well, I really learned that it helps to take excellent care of yourself when you’re shooting a drama, to really get enough sleep and to just balance the intensity of the psychological material that we deal with every day by whatever that means for you, if that’s going to the spa. For me, it’s yoga, it’s hiking, and my family’s with me as being with my child. But just a kind of counterbalance to get outside of it.
We spend all day in a fake hospital dealing with fake trauma. So to just completely check out, check into this other place, getting into nature and stuff like that really helps. But I think that that applies to a lot of our stressful jobs. And I think it’s hard sometimes when we get run down to remember to remember self-care and that our self-care to whatever degree is in our hands, and to really make that paramount in our life, to put our mental health at the top of our priority list and on our physical health. And I think I learned on the show too, to not do so much for whatever reason because the show was kind of rigorous where I would go to work every day and stand up most of the day, all day. I stopped making myself do all the things I would usually do as a mother, go home and then cook, and then, you know what I mean? I let myself off the hook and it actually taught me to do less. You know what I mean? When I’m doing more, so often we’re doing more and then we do more because we can’t slow down, right? And it was like, go to bed at eight. You know what I mean? Buy some food on the way home and go to bed at eight. You know what I mean?
TD: You gotta take care of yourself.
KL: Yes, take care of myself. I think I learned about taking care of myself.
Katherine LaNasa is Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for the season finale episode “9:00 P.M.” of The Pitt.
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