Sepideh Moafi on Playing Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi and the Love She’s Felt From Viewers of ‘The Pitt’ [VIDEO INTERVIEW]

In 2025, HBO Max’s The Pitt burst onto the scene as a massive critical success, earning awards and critical acclaim and maintaining a steady viewership of 10 million viewers per episode. A handful of shows manage to capture the magic of monoculture in today’s fragmented media landscape, encouraging weekly discourse around a singular episode drop in real time.

From the pilot, The Pitt proved that it not only captured an audience but also a certain authenticity lacking in the medical drama sub-genre. All of that considered, season 2 had a lot riding on it—both in maintaining quality and creating new storylines that would captivate audiences again. 

Enter Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi), the new interim attending physician, whose inclusion is an asset in season 2. She’s assertive with a tough exterior, walking onto the scene advocating for generative AI, and sees a few cracks in how Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) runs the unit. On the surface, Dr. Al-Hashimi is designed to shake things up and create tension as someone who wants to prove her position in a new environment. We learn that despite her cool and controlled exterior in earlier episodes, she’s dealing with a flare-up of a previously dormant seizure disorder. 

The highlight of this storyline is watching actress Sepideh Moafi walk the tightrope of playing a character who is desperately trying to stand in her power as her disorder threatens to rip it away.  It’s Moafi’s ability to slowly reveal the cracks in quieter moments and in the subtlety of her range of emotions as the veil is lifted and she makes Dr. Robby present her own case file. That quiet resolve balanced with raw vulnerability is what makes Sepideh Moafi fascinating to watch.

Moafi details the nuance of balancing the character’s emotional inner life: 

“There’s this volcanic inner life interiority to this character, and yet she has to keep it all contained and below the surface. If you’re in a wide shot, you don’t see anything happening, but when you’re in a close-up or an extreme close-up, you can see there’s something happening behind the eyes. That’s the level of specificity and the deep well of trauma, pain, fear, and insecurity — all of that has to live deep below the surface. 

We’re doing everything we can not to show it, but you know, as the actor, it’s your job then to go to these places and to create these openings, so that the world is alive and accessible when you need it…and then from there you kind of try to cover it.”

I sat down with Sepideh Moafi to discuss entering The Pitt universe, the mechanics of filming, and feeling accepted by viewers.

Sepideh Moafi is Emmy-eligible in the category of Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for The Pitt.