Ernest Harden Jr. didn’t just play a dying man on The Pitt. For a while, he tried to become one.
The actor, now a first-time Emmy nominee for Best Drama Guest Actor, joined a packed The Pitt guest stars panel at HBO Max‘s Emmy nominee celebration on Sunday that included casting directors Cathy Sandrich Gelfond and Erica Berger alongside fellow guest actors Tal Anderson, Tina Ivlev, Brittany Allen, and Jeff Kober. But it was Harden’s account of playing Louie Cloverfield — the ER’s beloved “frequent flier” patient whose season-long arc ends in his death — that captured the room.
Asked what the hardest part of the season was, Harden explained that he’d built out a whole backstory for Louie in the 10 months between seasons: a man with no medical care, living on the street, who came in from the cold each time because the hospital had become his family. Then he revealed how far he’d taken it.
“What I did actually is — I did something that was very dangerous, but I went off all my blood pressure pills and everything to try to feel what it would be like if I was ill like that,” Harden said. “And that’s the Robert De Niro method of acting. I don’t recommend this at home.”
He said it worked — maybe too well. “It was hard to breathe and sometimes I would use all that too. It worked for the character. And so people really related to what I was putting out.” His manager didn’t take the news well: “‘You’re going to die. You got the part of a lifetime, you’re going to die. What’s wrong with you?’ And I said, ‘OK, all right.'”
Harden brought in a doctor friend, Dr. Allen, to keep an eye on him. The diagnosis wasn’t reassuring. “He told me, he says, ‘Man, you got to get a stent. You’re ready to have a heart attack.’ And I said, ‘There’s no way I would stop.’ He said, ‘I never seen such intestinal fortitude. Oh my God.’ I said, ‘You haven’t been out here long enough. It’s hard for an actor to get a job. I’m not quitting.'”
He kept the whole thing quiet on set, where the cast and crew were treating him, in his words, “like royalty” — rides everywhere, visits to his dressing room, lunch invitations he sometimes had to turn down. “I apologized sometimes. I said, ‘You know what? I’m not just that lazy that I can’t go to lunch or something, but I’m not feeling great.’ And they said, ‘What? You’re not feeling great?’ And then I see a team of people around me taking me to the nurse. So I had to keep it quiet.”
Later in the panel, Harden clarified that despite everything, mortality wasn’t actually on his mind while he was in character — Louie, he said, was looking forward to fireworks, not dwelling on death. The harder part, it turned out, was faking it. “Playing death was not easy. I had to hold my breath a lot.”
He also got a glimpse of how much the role meant to the show around him. The production built out an entire section of the hospital set for Louie’s funeral scene that hadn’t originally been planned, and Harden said the whole cast had something to say about the character while his body lay there. “It kind of made me feel special,” he said. “And the scene was so emotional… I was actually crying, but nobody could see it because I was dead.”
Harden’s performance in the episode “7:00 A.M.” earned him his first Emmy nomination, for Best Drama Guest Actor, ahead of the 78th Emmys.
Video courtesy of HBO Max.
