10 TV Docs & Nurses With Real-Life Medical Training
You know the old Vicks cough syrup ads with General Hospital’s Chris Robinson saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”? Well, some actors are doctors on television and in real life; one even went back to practicing medicine after becoming a TV star!
Our prescription: Scroll through the slides below to see actors who got a medical education, even if it was just a boot camp, before they started their roles as TV doctors.
Tamberla Perry
Perry, who plays Dr. Carol Pierce on Brilliant Minds, studied Health and Society at the University of Rochester as she prepared for a career in medicine, according to the Los Angeles Sentinel.
“I came [to Brilliant Minds] kind of like, I’m more of a doctor than any of you all because this is exactly what I was studying,” she told Rolling Out in a new interview. “I understood how fast-paced this industry is. I understood a little bit more of the terminology than I thought that I would coming into it.”
Ken Jeong
Before he created and starred on Dr. Ken, Jeong got his M.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and became an internal-medicine physician at Los Angeles’ Kaiser Permanente, where he met his wife, Tran.
“Just in case acting ever stalls, I still renew my medical license every year,” he said to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “And I still have a prescription pad. Why do you think I’ve gotten so much work in Hollywood? (Kidding, of course.)”
Linda Klein & BokHee An
Klein was a nurse at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, California, in the 1980s, when she started working in as a medical adviser in the TV business. Now she’s a director, co-executive producer, and Nurse Linda portrayer on Grey’s Anatomy. “I was the fourth person hired … before the actors were even hired,” she told Shondaland.com.
Then Klein recruited An, who has played Nurse BokHee in more than 260 episodes. “I was a scrub tech,” An recounted to Shondaland.com. “I worked in cardiovascular and neurosurgery operating rooms for an amount of time I can’t even believe. Enough time to be on more than two [entire runs of] Grey’s Anatomy from start to finish.”
Adelaide Kane
Before they played surgical interns on Grey’s, Kane (second from right) and costars Niko Terho, Harry Shum Jr., Midori Francis, and Alexis Floyd underwent a two-week medical boot camp, as she told E! News in 2022.
“They taught us how to suture and how to check heartbeats,” Kane said, “and how to listen for breath sounds and how to intubate people.”
Laurence Leboeuf
Before starring in Transplant, Leboeuf and her cast mates (including Hamza Haq, right) had to learn how to do medical procedures like putting in an IV. “We had a boot camp where we had the chance to rehearse our big medical scenes on weekends with a doctor there with us. It took about 4 to 5 hours to choreograph it,” the actor, who played Dr. Mags Leblanc on the show, told the New York Post.
Gerran Howell
Howell and the other stars of The Pitt also had a medical boot camp, learning the ropes of their onscreen careers two weeks before cameras rolled.
“We were sort of taken through, sort of a crash course on what most people would do,” the actor behind Dennis Whitaker told The Direct. “It’s kind of like medical school crammed into two weeks. But we were basically in one of the studios with about six medical professionals who come in, and we will do fake procedures on dummies, we will do presentations, we’ll watch videos of very graphic surgery.”
Ben Hollingsworth
“I’ve probably done about 300 hours of medical training and boot camp,” Hollingsworth told Edge Magazine in 2018, as he was playing Dr. Mario Savetti on Code Black.
He went on: “I understand how to work with a central line, intubation, chest tube, thoracotomy and just about every major ER procedure from start to finish. And I’ve actually gotten good at stitching. When people need their pants hemmed, I can suture to help save on tailoring costs!”
Nick Gehlfuss
“We had a boot camp set up by this medical adviser. We went to [Rush University Medical Center] in Chicago, and there were hospital rooms where medical students learn, and he put us through a bunch of different scenarios,” Gehlfuss told Daily Blast LIVE in 2022, as he discussed his prep work to play Dr. Will Halstead on Chicago Med.
The actor added, “A lot of the time, [the medical adviser] basically said, ‘You’re too frantic as a doctor. You need to be calm, cool, and collected because you’re a leader and you want to comfort the patient.’”
Peter Wingfield
Wingfield played Dr. Robert Helm in Queen of Swords (pictured here) and Dr. Dan Clifford in Holby City after he trained as a doctor at Brasenose College and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College. And he put his acting career on hold to go back to med school, and he got a job as an anesthesiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
“I’m very happy with how things are right now,” he said on Paths Podcast in 2021. “I’m in a place where both what I do every day and the people that are around me every day and the life that I have outside of that all feel like they are in a really nice balance. You know, most days I really enjoy my day at work. Some days are really tedious, and that’s OK, because that’s just how things are.”
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