Spoiler alert: Do not read until you’ve watched the season finale of Season 2 of The Pitt, which aired April 16.
If there’s a patron saint of The Pitt, look no further than charge nurse Dana. Blessed with the sharpest tongue (“Who throws away a perfectly good baby?”) and the steeliest spine, she is the unflappable heart and soul of The Pitt, capable of juggling cyber catastrophes, abandoned newborns, sweetly naive nurse trainees, and, yes, even the rank Digby. Little wonder Katherine LaNasa earned a supporting actress Emmy for the first season — and is leading Gold Derby’s charts for a repeat performance for Season 2 (though some are clamoring for a promotion to lead actress).
After suffering a punch to the face by Doug Driscoll in Season 1, Dana’s dealing with a punch to the gut this time out when Robby (Noah Wyle) calls her out for arming herself with a sedative. Not to mention that no matter how many times she calls him out on his worsening behavior, she’s forced to watch him helplessly hurdle toward a seemingly inevitable breaking point.
LaNasa tells Gold Derby that Wyle, who also serves as executive producer, pushed her to keep challenging Robby — and having seen the finale, she’s glad she did.
How are you feeling about Season 2?
I just saw the finale, and it was so good. I actually had a big scene with Noah cut, and I realized we didn’t really need it. There’s a wonderful scene with Noah and Shawn Hatosy [Abbot], and then there’s a really great scene with Taylor Dearden [Mel King] and Patrick Ball [Langdon]. And the Digby character [Charles Baker] has a nice surprise. Turns out [executive producer] John Wells knows how to direct — and really knows how to write! [Laughs.] But it was very tense for me watching it, even though I know what happens.
What was your scene that was cut?
It was another scene with Noah. The only thing that was different was we had shifted — it was me telling him, “There’s nothing out there. What are you looking for out there? What are you going to find? What are you going to do?” And again, trying to get him to promise me that he wasn’t going to do anything stupid. But a lot of characters say that, and there’s been a lot with me and Noah, so I didn’t really feel like we needed it. I was very satisfied as a viewer [without] it. Even though that was cut, it didn’t bother me. I felt like it was kind of a perfect episode. I think that Scott really cares about the characters so much. He calls them his babies, and he has a lot of intentionality about landing them, about everyone having a complete storyline.
And where do you think the season ended for Dana? Are you happy with where it ended for her?
Well, it’s funny. Shawn and I, I think we’re such a part of the fabric that that it feels a little more open-ended. They’re there. They’re part of the Pitt. So I don’t think they need so much specificity, necessarily. I think that Dana has lot of unresolved rage. I think about what happened to her [getting punched by Doug Driscoll last season], and I don’t know that that’s been really resolved, and she’s still worried about Robby, but it seems like they came back to a place that feels more friendly between the two of them.
It was hard this season to watch the two of them fighting, because we need our Pitt Mom and Dad to get along.
I can’t have perspective on it. When they asked me to do things like that, Noah really wanted me to go at him. He really wanted me to hit him hard when we were doing those scenes. And I was like, “All right,” because I trust them. I really free fall into whatever John and Noah and [showrunner] Scott Gemmill want me to do. I think they’ve made great seasons of television together for a while, and I trust that they know where we’re going. So I free fall a lot, particularly if John’s directing. I just do whatever he tells me to do. I’ve shadowed him, and he just gives the best notes.
Their head-to-head proves how far Robby has spiraled. If he’s lost the trust of Dana, then it shows he’s really dealing with some serious issues.
That’s probably what Noah was looking for. I think that I will feel my way into something, and then someone else puts words to it. There was that scene where I’m telling him, ” You’re going to smash your head in,” and every time I said it, I would almost burst into tears, and I didn’t know why. Amanda [Marsalis], the director, really wanted me not to have that in that moment. I didn’t really understand where it was coming from. But it’s also almost like if your instrument is so available to you and it’s just doing something, and you really live in the character the way you do, you can trust that it’s coming some from somewhere valid. We had a meeting before we shot the finale with John, talking about where we had been in the last few episodes and how we were looking to land the plane. And we started talking about the trajectory with Noah. And he said, “Where would I be without him there?” He basically pointed to the fact that it was very abandoning, and that is how I felt in the moment. The idea that someone is maybe going to kill themselves that you’re so close to, but they won’t even tell you. You just feel so shut out and like you can’t reach them. But I couldn’t put words to it, but John will put words to it. That’s exactly what it was. I didn’t understand why I felt that way.
He also wasn’t doing right by his patients and the staff. And that was always the thing that was alwayshis true north.
I knew that part. But it was interesting because Noah was so brave in his performance as well. He was just sort of petty and s–tty, and he was unafraid of making his character unlikable and not right. I thought that was really cool. It’s like, “OK, the gloves are off. Who knows where we’re going?” It was very, very wild in a way, working on those last episodes.
As you said Dana’s also got a lot of her own unresolved rage. What’s going on in her own mind?
I think she’s just furious. She’s furious about not being protected by the hospital in terms of patient violence and them doing little to put that at the forefront of their protocols and just sending down donut trucks. And I think she’s just upset. I don’t know if I can do this anymore. People want to beat me up because I didn’t let him back soon enough. There’s a lot of things that are converging at once inside this person. I think she’s a person that’s never dealt with the grief of her mother dying, and she went right away to work in a hospital. I don’t think she came from a psychologically minded family. I don’t think her dad knew what to do when her mother died, and then she went to work in an emergency department, and that’s been her whole life. So she’s always in this trauma situation, so she doesn’t have to face herself.
And I think at the same time, she’s really good at what she does. She was born to do this, and that is a great sense of pride for her. Not everybody can do this. These are special people. It’s a kind of a calling. That’s where she gets her self-esteem from, it’s her ability to serve. She’s worked there a long time, and she has a sense of authority and a sense of place there. And so for someone to take her dignity away in that way, to beat her up in her place where she’s a queen, where she feels in charge, to take her power away, it’s a lot, and yet she’s nothing without the place. Because by being at that place, she can run from all this other stored grief inside herself. So there it’s all kind of coming to a head inside her. But I think for her, not pressing charges because she didn’t want to deal with that guy has now left her with more rage, because she never really sought justice for herself, so it’s like nobody’s given her any justice. And then she’s back here, and she’s got to protect herself, and she’s got to protect these other people, and then when she does what she needs to protect herself, Robby doesn’t have her back.
Is her way of protecting herself keeping that vial in her pocket?
She told Robby that it was left over from the medics, and she was on her way to waste it. I think it was left over from the medics, who knows how long ago? I don’t think she went and stole the medicine. I think she saw it and she put it in her pocket, and she thought about what to do about it. She probably keeps it in her locker. She just never did the right thing with it. She always kind of was thinking about that, and she kept it there. I don’t know if she was clear what she was going to do or not, but for now, she’s still got it in her pocket, and then she needed it. So if it wasn’t me doing that, then Emma would have been the one that was all effed up. So seriously, no one’s protecting me. I protect myself, and now you’re going to come down on me. That’s her point of view. It’s projection of herself — trying to protect herself and protecting her people.
Is that something you want to see the writers dig more into in Season 3, dealing with this lingering issue?
Sure, but I trust what they do. I think they’ve just given me such wonderful stuff to do all along. I never want to ask for anything, because I don’t know what I would be blocking by asking. Maybe their plan is a great other plan. Who knows what their plan is, but it would be fun to play. Noah said at Paley that Season 1 was about patients, Season 2 about doctors and patients…
… and Season 3 was about doctors as patients.
So I’m wondering, are we getting help? Are we all going to get help now? It would be interesting to see. I do think that Dana had taken self-defense classes. She says, go right for the eyes. If anyone even looks at me sideways, punch is my new baseline. So I think she’s taken some classes. I think she needed to do that to feel a little bit empowered to come back. But who knows?
They did give you an incredible storyline this season with the SANE episode about the treatment of sexual assault victims in the ER. What did that mean to you?
It was a really cool experience to get to go to the rape treatment center and the Stewart House in Santa Monica. It was really inspiring that places like that exist that are so patient-focused. I went down there a couple of times to learn from them. I think what it meant to me more was just shining a light on the deep, compassionate care that these SANE nurses provide. These nurses, if you ask them how they feel about something, they don’t think about how they feel about stuff, like actors do, right? They just will tell you what they do. I tried to interview them a bit about stuff, and I couldn’t get anywhere. It was all kind of flat. But then when I had them show me how to do the rape kit, everything that they did had this intentionality towards the patient’s state of being and what the patient had been through. And so in teaching me how to do it, [they’d say,] “Oh, I would never do this. I would never say that. I would always put this here. I would put the cloth over them this way. You never want to touch them.” In showing me how to do what they do, they said so much about how they approach the patient and their mindset towards it, even though they probably never analyzed that themselves.
So I think just bringing that to life, I’ve seen nurses as heroes, and so to bring that heroic, compassionate nature of them forward in these story lines, was really what it meant the most to me. And then I think we got some really good information out there something I didn’t know. I was really proud to be on a show that’s doing that, about the fact that you can go to the hospital and you can get a rape kit done, you decide later if you want to press charges, when you’re not in the middle of shock or trauma. It doesn’t go on your permanent medical record. You can use a pseudonym. I added that when they told me that; I was like, we have to put that in the story. It was really cool to bring that to life. I knew that would mean a lot to people. I think a lot of what the show does is it allows people to process things, and I think also that people appreciate it showing how invasive and difficult a rape kit is for everybody involved.
I also appreciated that it didn’t just end there, but then you see her advocating for the rape kits to actually be collected.
The disrespect of that, right? It’s really amazing.
What do you have in common with Dana? And how are you different from her?
I think I’m intense like Dana. I’m very capable and I’m very brave. Those are my good qualities. I think that Dana is probably a lot quieter than Katherine at home. I imagine Dana to live a spartan, quiet life outside of the Pitt. That’s my imagination of her. Dana probably has more humility than I do. I would aspire to have as much humility as Dana. I think that’s the key to her. So I look up to her in that way. There’s a lot of humility in that person. And I think that’s kind of her strength.
Noah’s wife and Shawn’s wife have guest-starred the show. Is there a world in which your husband, Grant Show, would guest star?
Oh, he definitely would! I don’t know if they’ll have him. I mean, what’s he going to play? Like a movie star that came to town? Maybe he’s got a band. Maybe something happens to him while he’s on the road with his band. He’s so handsome he’d just be ridiculously out of place, I think. But I know, I keep thinking, “What could he play?”
Any other dream guest stars?
I keep joking that I’d want to see George Clooney, but I mean, if I got to act with them, God! I really love Julianne Nicholson. That would be really nice. I know she’s worked with John Wells before. I’m big fan of Patricia Arquette. She could be my sister. I’m a big fan of Jackie Weaver. She actually wrote me and said, “If you need anyone to play your mom, my hand is raised.” That would be amazing. She was kind of my North Star forever, because she came on to the scene in America, just so late in her career, but so fully formed, and then she just blew up. And I was like, “Oh, my God, maybe there’s hope for me.”
There have been a lot of headlines about the cast changes, including Supriya Ganesh leaving. How do you feel about everything that’s going on?
I think all of us always feel like, “Oh my God, are we going to come back? It’s just a job, right? Anybody could be gone at any moment.” They’re residents, right? And they’re moving up and they’re moving out. I think it’s always hard to see people go. Ayesha [Harris] is coming in [as a series regular], and I’m excited about that cast change to having her in there, because I think she’s great. I just love her acting. I love her energy. But it’s really painful to see people from Season 1 go. Those kids, we made something together, and nobody knew what it was going to be, and we were all kind of unknown, other than Noah. And so I feel a special bond to all of them. So I root for all of them. Ideally, I wish that it would work for us all to be together all the time, but I understand. It’s the nature of the thing. They’re literally student doctors and then residents. They don’t all stay. I guess they just can’t do that. But I trust the [producers]. I trust them that they know what they’re doing.
Why do you think fans have responded so much to the show?
I think it’s a very scary time in the world on so many levels, and I think the show is really so deeply rooted in compassion and also in people really putting themselves out to help other people. I think people helping people is always a hopeful sign. I think it gives people hope in that way. I think it feels very nurturing to watch people really caring for other people doing their best, that we all want to feel like people would go that extra mile for us. So I think that’s what it’s about.
I think we all want Dana to be there if and when we have to go to the ER.
A friend called us when he had to take his mother to the emergency room. And I don’t know, I had this feeling in the phone call like something was up. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. It’s almost like I needed to go over there and just pretend to be Dana. He was calling me, but he really wanted Dana.
