From the moment she arrived in the emergency room at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, it was clear Roxie Hamler wasn’t just another patient on The Pitt.
Although her immediate issue was the aftermath of a seizure, the medical staff quickly realized there was little they could do for Roxie except make her comfortable — Roxie was in hospice treatment for end-stage lung cancer — and her ultimately tragic arc that enfolded over the course of the season would change them all.
None more so, perhaps, then the woman who played Roxie: Brittany Allen.
As the mother of a 3-year-old, Allen confesses she hadn’t watched The Pitt before she landed the role. “Finding time to watch TV can be a challenge,” she tells Gold Derby. But she quickly got hooked — but then had to stop herself from bingeing all of season one before arriving on set. “Suddenly all of these people who were supposed to be my doctors were movie stars in my mind,” she says. “So I pressed pause on watching it, so I could commit to the reality of being Roxie in this hospital setting.”
The other homework she assigned herself was a crash course in mortality and terminal illness. “I felt like it was absolutely my duty to immerse myself,” she says. So she gathered every book she could find on the subject, including “beautiful, brave memoirs” like Death Becomes Air and the works of authors like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. “It allowed me to deepen my own relationship with death,” she says.
Allen also wanted to create a backstory for Roxie, as well. “Whenever you’re playing a character who’s losing something, you really have to build up what it is that they’re losing,” she says. “You can’t just focus on the sadness and the heaviness. What was the joy that came before? What were their hopes for the future? If you really have an understanding of that, then the loss of it feels so much greater.”
It wasn’t easy, she admits. “As in real life, we do all resist these hard conversations, admitting the truth of where we’re all heading, and so the body resists it,” she says. “As a mother myself, my body sometimes didn’t want to go to that place of really committing to that truth, so I did everything that I could do to make myself feel safe and know that was that was my job in that moment. To do anything less than that would have been a real disservice to the character and to the people who I knew would connect with the story.”
Once she got on set, Allen says the cast and crew were incredibly supportive, especially the actors playing her parents and children. “We’d all be committing to this reality,” she says. “It required each of us to dredge up whatever we were using to get there. It was beautiful to be so vulnerable with people.”
The set of The Pitt is unlike any other she has worked on, she says. “It’s just a real playful set, even in the sadness and the stillness and the quiet, it’s playful because of how they shoot it,” she says. “There’s still angles and sides that you have to hit, but there’s a real flow and a real rhythm to it, so you are given the opportunity to roll with the scene a good number of times. When you’re working with such great actors who are just there, they’re present, giving and receiving, it’s the kind of creative environment that you just long for as an actor.”
Among the cast, Allen singles out Fiona Dourif, in particular, who as Dr. McKay was the resident treating her. “Fiona in particular I had some intimate moments with,” she says. “She’s just so open and supportive — her heart is there. That’s what it felt like.”
And then there’s Shawn Hatosy and Noah Wyle, both of whom directed her in episodes, an experience she calls “a real treat.” “That was one of the best parts, because it inherently brings up very honest conversations because of the subject matter,” she says.
For example, Hatosy, who she calls “a brilliant actor,” directed the episode where Roxie confides in Dr. McKay about her fear of dying. “Shawn just had this really open-hearted way of working,” she recalls. “He would come in in between takes and just really kind of gently check in. There were a couple of times where he offered some of his own experiences of times in his life when he had lost someone, just to see how that might unlock something for me, and it definitely did.”
As for Wyle, she says he’s “a rock star.” “I was nervous at first, to be honest, but he’s a very disarming presence and made me feel incredibly welcome when I arrived on the set,” she says. “He had an equally sensitive touch as a director. I think anyone who has been an actor know what’s required, they know the process that that an actor is going through to arrive at the state that they need to be in, and so they are able to bring that understanding and that empathy and speak the language.”
While Roxie’s ultimate fate was always pre-determined, where and how she would die was still being debated in the writers’ room as the episodes unfolded, Allen says. “It was still a conversation of whether or not we would see her pass away down in the ER or if they would have found her a room upstairs,” she says. “So I felt happy that they landed on showing the entirety of her arc, because I think they decided that the audience obviously would have been so invested in her at that point that they would need that resolution.”
For Allen, finding her way into the performance, “it was really just about what was on the page,” she says. “I think it really instilled a sense of what I can do as an actor. I’m a pretty physical performer, so being bound to the bed, it was a really interesting challenge to figure out how to harness my power from that place of stillness. That’s maybe not a place that I exist in quite as comfortably, but that’s another thing that [Roxie] taught me about myself, both as an actor and as a person, how to harness that, and in the power and the honesty that can come from that place.”
Allen compares playing Roxie to the series finale of Six Feet Under, which she binge-watched after the death of her grandmother, the first loss of her adult life. “I remember being able to look at death and see death reflected back at me, seeing characters like real human beings experiencing it from every angle, and seeing the beauty of it, and the commonality of it, the way in which it connects all of us, especially with that finale where you see every single character go through their life,” she says. “I wish that that was something we could all carry with us always. I think we live on the surface for the most part, and in these moments where we have to face the tragedy that is also life brings us to a place where we can finally let down our guard and connect with other human beings. There’s such a beauty in that.”
Allen, who’ll be submitting for the Emmys for guest actress, says the reaction she’s gotten from the show’s fan continues to overwhelm her. “It opened everyone up to be able to talk about their experiences with death and ultimately that’s been so rewarding, to meet people who have watched the show and who have had that moment that I had when I watched Six Feet Under through watching Roxie, of whether it’s some sort of peace or whether it’s just being given the space to mourn, to cry, in ways that our society doesn’t always support.”
These days she’s still chasing her toddler around, but the role has given her the opportunity to interact with people, especially in a city like L.A. where people can be very disconnected from each other. “It’s been particularly special when people have come up to me and they obviously were deeply impacted by the story, and maybe they had recently lost someone, or they had just watched it with one of their parents, and I can feel the emotion inside of them as they’re saying hello,” says Allen.
“They’re letting me know that they were affected by the story, and that is the reason why I became an actor, because I was made to feel that way when I watched movies and shows and great performances that made me feel less alone and more connected to my fellow humans, and so to see that I was able to do that is just so gratifying. You don’t get the opportunity. I wish that every character I could do that with. This one has just been so powerful because it really aligns with what I want to bring to my work and to the world as a human existing in it.”
