‘Chicago Med’: Steven Weber Says Dean’s Health Crisis Forces Him to ‘Let His Guard Down’

“In spite of all his efforts, he’s finding out how vulnerable he is,” Steven Weber says of Dr. Dean Archer as his health worsens on Chicago Med.

Dean needs a kidney transplant, and he does have support (more than he wants, really), in his life right now. His relationship with his son, Sean (Luigi Sottile), who has offered up his if he’s a match, is much better than it’s been. Dr. Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram) is by his side… but might both Archer men be interested?

Weber previews the final two episodes of the season.

Dean’s not doing so well health-wise. What are we going to see from that in these final two episodes of the season?

Steven Weber: We’re going to see more revelations involving how he deals with being vulnerable and asking for help. He’s not used to that. He’s used to assuming that he’s the help that is asked for, and so he’s got to find a way to trust people, another big issue for him, and the people who he’s seeking trust from are also people who have trust issues. Hannah Asher has a past in which she’s dealt with a lot of betrayal in a way, and of course, his own son, who’s fresh out of the clink and fresh into the world of recovery. These are Dean’s allies. It’s hard. It’s hard. And also his situation is becoming more serious. He’s tried his best, but in spite of all his efforts, he’s finding out how vulnerable he is.

He’s much different though from when we first met him, because I feel like he would’ve handled this completely different then.

And let that be a lesson to you that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Some books, yeah, easily judged, but he’s a complicated guy, which is one of the things that I love about this character. He comes off one way, but to the writers’ credit, they have given him a complicated, interesting, and engaging life, a backstory, an inner life. It’s funny that at this stage of his life, after he’s had so much challenges and has been so defensive, he’s now learning really to let his guard down and to let help in and to let love in, if you will. I don’t mean that to imply that he and Hannah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, not at all. We don’t know where that’s going. But yeah, it’s fascinating. The next season will be very interesting. We’ll see what happens.

How much is he going to continue to treat patients though? Because we’ve seen that he doesn’t want to stop doing that.

He’s still able to treat people, but it’s becoming more and more challenging. And apropos of what I was just saying, he’s got to now ask for people to help him accomplish these things. It’s very hard for him. We all know people like this. We all have people like these in our lives who find it hard to open up and ask for help. He’s got to learn to do that in order to continue.

George Burns Jr/NBC

Dean’s relationship with his son has been gradually getting better. The possibility of him donating and the Hannah of it aside, how is Dean feeling about where things are between them right now? The best that they’ve maybe ever been?

He’s optimistic, but wary. This is a guy that, for all intents and purposes, kind of gave up on his son for years, and he might have seen the logic in that, but at the same time, Dean for all his irascibility and defensiveness is a human being. To borrow a phrase from Steinbeck, he’s “pain covered with skin.” He’s got some deep issues. So he worries about his son and it’s hard for him to love as well as be loved. He’s learning about it.

And again, to the show’s credit and the writers’ credit, they’re willing to go a little deeper than usual on a character that could be more easily drawn and thrown out there: “Oh, he’s just a pain in the ass.” “Oh, he’s just a jerk to people.” He’s more than that. And it suggests that, if you want to extrapolate, these people in real life also have more to them. And it’s really fun and rewarding to play those scenes as well. As much fun as it is, yelling at people, “Get me a spreader! 10 ccs and blah, blah, blah,” that’s great, especially for me because I have no authority in my life or credibility where I could do that without somebody saying, “Shut up, get it yourself.” It’s also really rewarding to go deeper into this particular character.

Dean has said that he won’t say no if Sean is a match, but how certain is he of that?

There’s a little bit of uncertainty there, having to do with those trust issues that I mentioned earlier, and also because he understands the reality of hospital world. It is of course his world. It’s what he believes in. He also knows that there are great risks involved, even in the simplest of procedures. This is not a simple procedure, and it also binds people together in ways that might make a guy like Dean very uncomfortable. There’s a lot of obligation involved and a lot of kind of existential obligation. Dean is a guy that’s a rolling stone that gathers no moss, but since he’s been at Gaffney, he’s fairly moss covered, and so this will be a challenge to him.

Sean is worried about what could be going on between Dean and Hannah because he saw that moment between them in the last episode at the end. Should he be worried? How does Dean feel about Hannah?

Look, as I said before, he’s not a guy that loves easily. I’m not sure he’s a guy that believes he’s deserving of love. So even though he’s not an idiot and understands how something like that might look, I’m not sure he believes that it’s a possibility at all. He has whittled his options down to just working, being good at it, and being efficient. While it might be acceptable to be that way in a very narrow medical context, he’s also a living, breathing human being, so it’s hard for him to contemplate something like that.

On the other hand, Sean is also kind of a raw nerve of a person, and he’s trying to find ways to reconcile whatever feelings he has in this world where A, he’s not in detention, and B, he’s not in the thrall of drugs, of addiction. Very difficult to navigate those genuine feelings, to know how to modulate them and how to apply them in a world where these people and Hannah, too, are kind of desperate for love and for contact. This is a hard world for them.

What are we going to see between the three of them in these next two episodes?

We’re going to see versions of what I’ve just been discussing. These people are going to try to navigate these emotions which are nagging at them, which are threatening to upset the fragile balance that they’re just encountering for the first time: Sean out of prison, Hannah continuing her sobriety, and Dean who’s kind of growing finally at this late stage of his life, facing his own mortality in ways that he never reckoned on. He probably thought that he might be killed in battle or he might just kind of go on and just become an even more irascible and unapproachable doctor and maybe just kind of faint over a patient, drop dead at work. He’s more vulnerable than that, and that’s a little scary to him.

George Burns Jr/NBC/Universal

The staff is not happy with changes at the hospital lately. Maggie’s (Marlyne Barrett) even met with a recruiter. What’s coming up there? Does Dean even care about the state of the hospital? His health is what’s important.

Obviously his health is paramount, but I think he’s really concerned with the emotional welfare of the people around him. His ability to trust and his ability to trust his own vulnerability is going to become paramount, even more than his health, at least on the surface. He’s seeing what it’s like to be part of a family — the Gaffney doctors are a family — and so he’s learning to exercise all these muscles that have been unused probably since he was a young man. He sees Maggie, he sees what she’s going through, he sees what the hospital’s going through in terms of its relationship to its new owner, Dayton [Sasha Roiz], and 2.0 and all that stuff.

And he’s coming out of a world where for many years was very regimented. The military world, you knew exactly what you were there for, what you had to do and where you were going. He thought that it would continue after that and it hasn’t. It’s been very challenging for him. So this last blow to him where he finally has to deal with his own health, he sees how much it impacts this family, the Gaffney family, and how much all those doctors interact.

It’s going to be a challenge for the show to write to and to navigate themselves. But I think they’ve done a great job at pushing the show, especially in this last season, into that direction. There probably will be fewer exciting, spectacular moments, crossovers, whatever. I think we’re going to go deeper into the emotional interiors of each character.

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We’ve gotten great Dean and Charles (Oliver Platt) moments and that Dean and Maggie conversation was so good.

Oh my God. It was beautifully written. Not only does it scan in a very interesting way for his character, but also for hers. People see seeing themselves. They just don’t go out, they leave their apartments and they go and they do their jobs and they’re who they are, and then they go home. They’re actually now facing these existential questions about life and love and mortality, and it’s coming up in subtle ways. That’s what I think is at play in this show, because, to be frank, who knows how many more seasons this show has? TV is changing, and while this is a reliable and moving and obviously popular show, it’s changing, too. And so it demands that its characters meet that change. I think the writers are doing that.

Chicago Med, Wednesdays, 8/7c, NBC