‘The Pitt’ Spotlights Nurses — Which Docs Are Donnie, Perlah & Emma Most Worried About in Season 2?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 Episode 6 “12:00 P.M.”]

The Pitt highlights the nurses in an emotional, personal hour for the ED staff as the Fourth of July shift continues on Thursday, February 12.

It’s the nurses who transition every scene (and they’re present in every patient interaction), and they do so as everyone is grappling with Louie’s (Ernest Harden Jr..) death. It hits Perlah (Amielynn Abellera) the hardest, leading to some great moments where Dana (Katherine LaNasa) takes over cleaning the body — showing Emma (Laëtitia Hollard) how along the way — and Princess (Kristin Villanueva) checks in on her friend.

Below, Brandon Mendez Homer (Donnie), Amielynn Abellera, and Laëtitia Hollard talk about putting the spotlight on the nurses, Louie’s death, which doc their characters are most worried about this season, and more. (Watch this episode’s Post-Op: The Pitt Aftershow here.)

This is such a fantastic episode, and I love that the nurses transition the scenes. Talk about learning that would be the case, and if there was anything you wanted to showcase about nurses in this episode.

Amielynn Abellera: Well, I love how Whitaker [Gerran Howell] says nurses run this ER, the backbone. They keep this place going. And I think that’s true about nurses. I think the ratio of doctors to nurses in an emergency room is, there are more nurses, and we are doing the hands-on work and interacting with the patient a lot, a lot, a lot more than any other healthcare professional, I think, in my experience, and what I’m learning from The Pitt. So to see an hour from our perspective is really important and really eye-opening and very, very different. And I’m excited for the audiences to see that. And it clearly is a cool impact and exciting.

Laëtitia Hollard: Yeah, I was so excited when Val[erie Chu] told me like, “Hey, Episode 6 is going to be like a nurses episode.” I think that that representation is really needed. There are so many nurses that care so deeply for their job. They put their job over their personal life. And so I think that representation is everything. I got adopted by these PICU nurses in New York, and just seeing how they are family to each other, which is really similar to the vibe we have on set. I think it’s really important in Episode 6 for people to see how in the face of such a difficult and a hard job, emotionally, and just like you’re on your feet for 12 hours, how important it is to have family within your coworkers. So I was really thrilled.

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Brandon Mendez Homer: Same. I’m echoing a lot of that passion and feelings around that episode. I think the spectrum of experience from being a nurse practitioner and that there are also teachable moments where nurse practitioners step up and say, “Hey, this is how you do something,” to the doctors who are new to town. And that was an exciting moment. That was a true honor to be able to step in and do that. And I think that nurse practitioners are going to feel honored by that. That’s what my hope is, is that yeah, they should feel respected. There’s a huge conversation obviously in the country about that role in comparison to doctors and who’s in charge of who. And so it’s going to be interesting to see how the conversation unfolds around that. So I was excited about it.

This is a tough episode for the entire staff because it’s Louie’s death, which so painful, and Amielynn, it feels like it hits Perlah especially hard, and then Laëtitia, Emma’s also seeing how attached nurses can become to patients because both of your characters are there for the death scene itself.

Abellera: Louie is my favorite patient, Perlah, me, my favorite patient. And I’ve been at PTMC for a long time and I’ve seen him come in and out at least a hundred times, and he’s become my family and he’s a delight every time he comes in, even though I don’t want to see him for why he’s coming in. And I think that’s one of the big catch 22s of being a healthcare professional is that people are coming to see you because they’re sick, they’re in pain, they’re injured, and you don’t want that. And he’s a frequent flyer, but every time he comes, he brings joy to our day. He asks me about my kids, he asks how I’m doing, and he actually is one of my favorite patients anytime he comes in during one of my shifts. And so I also don’t think I was expecting this to happen today. Nobody was. He comes in for a tooth and to get a pericardiocentesis like he kind of always does, and then it goes completely bad and in minutes, minutes away from being discharged. So it does rock Perlah’s nervous system quite a bit.

Hollard: Yeah, Emma is seeing everything and seeing everything really fast. I actually talked to a lot of nurses, and they’re like, their first day they got ignored, which was a difficult experience, but Emma got the other side of not being ignored but being [told], “Jump into the deep end.” And I think that seeing someone who was so lively, and I never really got up close to him, but I think I saw him and saw it like, “Oh, this guy’s doing well,” and then touching his cold body, that is an insane experience, and I think it’s as shocking as seeing maggots. And then what Dana says about the Star Wars reference and everything, the fact that we have a bigger responsibility than just taking care of people and patching them up, that we now have a spiritual responsibility as the last person to see them go, especially with people who don’t have their biological family show up for them. So yeah, it feels like a lot of responsibility.

Donnie finds out after. Brandon, how is he dealing with that loss?

Mendez: Oh, he’s completely blindsided by it. I think it was really painful for him to see Louie go. I think I’ve been around just about as long as Perlah has, and he’s a frequent flyer, a part of our family. This is our chosen family. We feel as loyal to him as many people feel to their blood family. So to have that loss for Donnie, who’s really a quietly emotional person, it just is cracking him wide open because it means that he experiences the cost of caring again. And when you care very deeply for one particular patient that goes, it’s on your sleeve the rest of the day, and it’s going to come up in interactions. So, he’s trying to navigate those feelings while also feeling a bit of a sense that he should have took a second look at some of the discoveries that come out in the group scene about who Louie was and how he felt about us. I don’t think Donnie ever truly expressed how passionately he felt about Louie.

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Amielynn, how much did Perlah need Dana to step in to handle cleaning the body and giving her time, as well as for Princess to be there for her? Because those two can be the comedic break sometimes, more light-hearted stuff, but we see how much they care for one another with this.

Abellera: She’s seen it all, I think, and she has created ways to take care of herself and to protect herself and to create this armor around herself. And I think something that happens in this hour is that she wasn’t expecting it to crack and any other patient, she knows that, OK, next thing to do is clean the body, next thing to do is this, next thing to do is this, and then get on with the day, and then like Princess says at the end, leave it at the door. But I think this patient in particular really shocks her, the loss of him, and she isn’t able to come back as quickly as she usually does, and I think Princess sees that right away as I step out of the room. She knows me so well. She knows that I bounce back, she bounces back. But something in our connection deeply as friends and colleagues gives her the light that something’s wrong, got to check in.

And same with Dana. I think Dana walks in, and she sees me a little bit in shock and knows that I’m usually able to handle myself, but really, encourages me to take a break this time. And I think everyone knows that Louie is such a special, special, special thing in this hospital, so the loss is going to rock everybody in a very different way and very impactful way. So I think we all know how to take care of each other. And I think that was a beautiful thing to see how everyone can kind of see without words how to care for each other as colleagues.

Laëtitia, what’s Emma learning from Donnie and Perlah on this shift?

Hollard: Oh, loads. Actually, what I really noticed in this hour is that I could see that Perlah and Princess maybe seemed a little more emotionally intelligent than Dana has been. In that scene that I have with Dana, I’m trying to be like, OK, but what is the hardest part? What is going on? And she’s not giving me anything. And I think that I realized that I’m not going to be able to get everything I can from this one incredible charge nurse, that I’m actually going to have to lean on the entire community of nurses. And with Donnie, we don’t see it. But I spend a whole hour with him, and I feel like Dana’s kind of holding my hand, and I don’t think Donnie’s holding my hand as much. He’s big brothering me through these things and giving me the proper like, Hey, you’re in, kid. You’re going to figure this out somehow. So yeah, I think it’s been really sweet.

Brandon, you brought up the nurse practitioner part, which I love with Donnie. But I also love seeing him as a father. How is that impacting him as a nurse?

Mendez: Yeah. Just to also attach to the last thing you’re saying, the way Emma is having an impact on Donnie is, I feel like, and for many of the other nurses, is we’re seeing somebody at the start of our journey, which is really exciting. I think that cracks everybody open when you have somebody because we haven’t had that yet. I mean, in Season 1, there are no new nurses. So it kind of forces Donnie, especially, to see the world a little bit more open and a little less jaded, which has become very necessary, I feel, for the character and is attached to being a new father as well. Because the same thing is happening is that stepping up into these new roles, which is ultimately the journey of Donnie’s story, is about showing up more fully as a person who cares for the world and more open and less jaded about the job and where you are and the cost, and that they don’t pay me enough. So stepping in as a new father and as a nurse practitioner has always been about that same core sort of experience. I think at the end of Season 1, he came to a place where he realized he could have been doing more and was blindsided by the mass casualty, and kind of set off on a journey to take care of triage. If I can help in triage, then it helps back here. And I think that’s an essential role. So, it’s been cool.

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Amielynn, you brought up how Whitaker says, “Always listen to the nurses. They run the ER. We just try to stay out of their way.”  The nurses see everything. So, which doctor is each of your characters most worried about this season?

Abellera: I’m worried about Robby [Noah Wyle], of course. I always worry about Robby. He’s my leader, and I know that he’s dealing with stuff. I’ve seen him through COVID. I have the same traumas, and I have the same protection mechanisms of pushing things away. And I hope that he — but he’s an adult, he knows how to take care of himself, I think. So, I have to just let him go, but I hope everything’s OK. So I worry mostly about him.

Hollard: I love the moment I have with Langdon [Patrick Ball] where it’s like a parallel. I’m having difficulties with Dana, he’s having difficulties with Robby. I have no clue about what’s going on with Langdon and what happened in the past. But I think I may be worried about Langdon a little bit. I think I realized in that moment like, “Oh, this is as hard a day for you as it is for me.” And so I would say Langdon.

Mendez: I was surprised by it in the shooting of it, but I have to agree, too, it was Langdon for me. It’s his return. And the fact that we got paired up in triage, I felt was sort of an intentional stroke of luck, that this is somebody who’s been a father and a new one, and he gives me that piece of advice, which I imagine is coming during a hard time without any sleep for my own baby. But yeah, I think that’s kind of where I’m in the same camp as Emma and Laëtitia on that one, is that Langdon, he’s just moping around. He’s not on his same sort of perch that he was before. His energy is a little bit more drooped, and I know what he can do. I’ve worked with him, and I know he’s essential, but I also understand Robby, and I don’t think he’s wrong.

I liked seeing Donnie and Langdon paired together this season.

Mendez: Yeah, we got a little flow there. It was a little Lethal Weapon. That was my reference for it. It was good.

The Pitt, Thursdays, 9/8c, HBO Max