‘Chicago Med’: Steven Weber Reveals Original Plan for Archer Was Very Different

Warning: The following post contains discussions of self-harm.

Five seasons after his debut, Steven Weber‘s Dr. Dean Archer is a central part of Chicago Med and the ED. But when he first signed on (he got a call and didn’t have to audition), it was supposed to be for just four or five episodes.

Weber reflected on the character’s original story when he sat down with Brian Luce, a former Chicago police officer who is a Chicago P.D. producer and technical consultant for the Thursday, October 30, episode of the One Chicago Podcast.

“The character of Dean Archer was a guy who was a Naval surgeon, who had been to Afghanistan, had been wounded, had PTSD, and in fact, at the end of this arc was going to do some self-harm. He was not good up here,” he said, gesturing to his head. “He was suffering and had untreated trauma. And at the end of this guy’s story, he was not gonna make it. So I was kind of excited about that character, that was dark and interesting, and I was going to apply some things that I’d known, I was going to do some research and do what I thought was going to be just a good, nice little gig.”

That changed about halfway through the planned storyline in Season 6, according to Weber. “I think they decided that this character had more depth and appeal and possibilities beyond where they were gonna take him. And so after that, they decided not to end the character, and they brought me back the next season for a number of shows. And then from there, it sort of got longer,” he shared.

Luce described Archer as, at first, “a bit of a cranky guy with no heart, a little edgy,” Weber countered with, “It wasn’t even so much cranky. Bordered on sociopath. He was doing a couple of things that now, basically in the canon of the show, we’ve sort of conveniently forgot about. I mean, at one point, I think I took out some guy’s kidney without his approval. Like, I sedated him, pulled it out. It was really dark, and that’s why he was gonna kind of end.”

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On the One Chicago Podcast, Weber shared that he based his character on his father, who fought in the Korean War. “He functioned when he came home from the war … but he always had this haunted look. His hands shook a little bit. He always was quick to anger. He had some hopes and dreams that were thwarted by his own inability to express himself,” he said. When he raised the possibility of joining the service himself when he was a teenager, he revealed, his father snapped, “No, that’s not going to happen.” It was then that Weber got a sense of something from his father’s past since he never spoke about it.

He explained that he later researched and discovered that his father had seen a lot of action. His father was also why he worked for 10 years with New Directions for Veterans, who help veterans with addiction, homelessness, education, and employment. “At one point I was talking about him, and I said that a big piece of him had been gouged out of him in Korea. And so that’s how I approached Dean Archer,” Weber said.

“This was a guy who had trouble expressing himself, maybe even hated himself, maybe carried resentment. He had thwarted hopes and dreams. And so I brought those aspects to this character. So that was his history. Some of it was supplied for me, the idea that he had PTSD, and the rest I had to bring to the table,” he added.

Now, “he’s found a way to kind of mitigate all those wounds,” said Weber, pointing to Archer’s relationship with Dr. Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram). The two are having a baby together but are not romantically involved. He described that as “an emotional connection,” noting, “It’s hard to find a person patient enough to hold your trauma.”

When TV Insider spoke with showrunner Allen MacDonald about the premiere reveal of Archer being the father, we had to ask about a possible romantic connection this season.

“There’s a lot of feelings bubbling under the surface there, I think, on both sides. And I think those things are going to come up and cause some tension and cause some conflict,” he said. “And I think at different points of the season, some of those older feelings will pop back up. The question I have is, will they ever pop up at the same time? Will they ever be on the same page at the same time?”

Chicago Med, Wednesdays, 8/7c, NBC

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