The actor, who plays troubled senior resident Dr. Langdon on the Max series, opens up about working alongside Noah Wyle, reactions from medical professionals about the show and the "amazing" full circle experience of the series being his first big on-screen role.
Paging all Pittheads!
Max's original series The Pitt is having a moment, with the hospital drama debuting as one of the streamer's Top 5 series ever -- and keeping that momentum going on social media week-to-week, as fans praise its storytelling and acting, all while reacting with some amazing memes in the process.
Among the show's stars are Patrick Ball, who -- aside from a one-off appearance on, what else, Law & Order: SVU -- has never had an on-camera role before landing the part of Dr. Langdon, a senior resident caught up in an apparent drug addiction. Getting the role on the show was a true full-circle moment for Ball, a David Geffen School of Drama at Yale grad student who got his start in theater.
"It's amazing. My parents are both emergency workers, my mom's an ER nurse, my dad's a paramedic," he shared with TooFab. "I've spent 10 years working in the theater and auditioning for TV ... and then the opportunity that does come along is the opportunity to tell their story. And to not only tell their story, but to tell their story with John Wells and Noah Wyle."
Wells created ER, on which Wyle, of course, starred as medical student-turned-physician John Carter.
"People don't realize this, but, like, emergency medicine was not really a respected specialty in the medical field until ER, the TV show, happened," Ball explained. "And then the number of med students applying to specialize in emergency medicine multiplied by 10X after the show came out. They brought awareness to it that made people see it and appreciate it in a different way. And so to be able to work with those guys on this story is just a miracle."
As we previously mentioned, and as The Pitt fans have happily pointed out themselves, the show's popularity seems to have only grown since its premiere. A lot of that, it feels, comes from positive word of mouth about the series, which has almost become appointment television for some viewers every Thursday. While Ball tells TooFab he, of course, always had love for the show -- which he believes doesn't "do any of the things you're supposed to do to be popular on a TV show" -- like highlight sex or star a ton of big names -- he wasn't sure how it would be received by the public once it started dropping.
"I think I said to [Wyle] at one point -- we got a screening of the first episode, and I go, 'You know, man, I think this is going to be the kind of show that people brag about having watched like The Wire or The Sopranos, like back in that old school way of doing TV shows,'" he recalled. "So to see the popular appeal that it seems to have had to audiences is just like kind of mind blowing."
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Also kind of mind-blowing is the fact that some viewers are "shipping" -- or wan to see a romance between -- his character and Taylor Dearden's Dr. Melissa "Mel" King. On the series, King plays a second-year resident under Langdon's tutelage.
"I think that is so funny. I love it. I love it. I've said from the very beginning, I said to Taylor, I was like you, Taylor, You remind me so much of my sister," Ball told TooFab. "Like, my real life sister. Taylor and my sister are very, very similar."
"And it's kind of perfect because my sister works in autism, she does adaptive technology for the public schools in North Carolina," he continued. "And her wife runs, you know, the autism wing of a psychiatric hospital in North Carolina. And my nephew is autistic. And so they are both very much like primary caregivers to a lot of people with autism."
While the show hasn't outright identified Mel as autistic, the character's sister is. Viewers with autism, meanwhile, have seen themselves in King's performance -- while Dearden has revealed she herself has ADHD and is happy to see a "range of the spectrum" on screen.
"Just something about how Taylor operates and how Mel operates, I was like, 'You just feel like my sister,'" he continued. " I just immediately feel this sort of like brotherly attachment to you. So the fact that the Internet is trying to, like, make this a different thing is kind of insane to me. So funny."
As for the reactions to the show that touch him the most, Ball said it's the ones from medical professionals tuning in.
"I get people reaching out all the time, like doctors and nurses reaching out and saying thank you, thank you for for telling my story in a way that I see myself represented in," he told TooFab.
"I had somebody reach out the other day -- and there's so many I could quote -- but I had a person reach out the other day that said, 'Thank you for, for showing my story in such a way that says that like, I am interesting, my work is interesting. My life is interesting and nothing needs to be added to it in order for it to be interesting,'" he continued. "You don't need all the Hollywood stuff. This work is worth talking about."
While the show can be a pressure cooker, filled with intense moments in enclosed spaces and blood and guts galore, Ball also revealed how the cast and crew decompresses during filming. After spying a photo of the cast playing what appeared to be a video game in one of Ball's Instagram posts, we had to know what they were playing.
"Isa [Briones] has a Nintendo Switch, so she would invite us up to come play Mario Kart with her. It was great," Ball revealed. "I didn't get to join that much. All of us were working a lot, we didn't have that many opportunities to relax. But every once in a while we would all sneak up to to Isa's dressing room and play Mario Kart."
Ball's go-to kart-er? "Toad. He's small, he's quick, he's scrappy."
New episodes of The Pitt release Thursdays on Max, with the finale dropping next week, April 10. Be sure to check back then for more from our interview with Ball, as we break down any cliffhangers and his character's storyline with Dr. Santos.
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