The Pitt’s Noah Wyle and Patrick Ball Unpack Episode 10’s Big Langdon Reveal and Why It Hits Robby So Hard
The Pitt Episode 10 ends with “the closest thing you are going to get to a breakup scene” on the Max medical drama. That’s according to executive producer Noah Wyle and his co-star, Patrick Ball, both of whom spoke with TVLine about Thursday’s huge reveal involving Robby’s protégé, Dr. Frank Langdon.
After Santos voices her suspicions about Langdon, Robby forces his senior resident to disclose the contents of his locker, which includes a stash of stolen pills. Langdon doesn’t want to admit to himself or to Robby that he’s a drug addict, but our department chief is no fool. And he’s furious, for a multitude of reasons — some more obvious than others — as he tells Langdon to take his belongings and go home.
More from TVLine
“It’s a serious liability issue, first and foremost, if you have a doctor who could be compromised in the kind of care that they’re giving,” Wyle explains. “Additionally, there’s the personal betrayal of having your mentee lie to your face and kind of gaslight you along. Then there’s the reverse engineering of recognizing clues that you probably should have picked up on but didn’t because of your bias, or your inability or unwillingness to look at things at face value, even though you are an expert in looking at signs, behaviors, ticks… so I think it’s a combination of anger at [Langdon] and anger at himself.”
Ball, meanwhile, refers to Langdon’s actions — and how they impact Robby — as a betrayal of their brotherhood. “Langdon and Robby really understand each other, and really see each other, and see the burden that the other person is carrying,” he posits. “There’s a certain brotherhood in understanding how,” as doctors, “we have to soldier on and care for the person in front of us, regardless of what we’re carrying.”
But this isn’t just a story about what burdens Langdon. This is a story about how he betrayed his mentor’s trust.
Below, in an extended Q&A, Ball goes into further detail about Langdon’s drug dependency, how much (or how little) he thinks it explains his volatile relationship with Santos, and what it was like shooting Robby and Langdon’s big “breakup” scene.
TVLINE | Your co-star Isa Briones told me that executive producers R. Scott Gemmill and John Wells filled everyone in on their character’s backstories fairly early on. When were you first made aware of Langdon’s addiction issues?
They told me when they decided they wanted to have me back for a screen test. There were, I think, four callbacks, and then they brought that to my attention — they actually included that scene at the end of Episode 10 — but through the first three rounds, I was completely unaware of it.
People stealing drugs in hospitals is not an uncommon thing. It happens all the time. You’ve got med techs on set that work in hospitals as their day job — they’re doctors and nurses, and they’re there to help us with the procedures — and they’ll come up to me and say, “This has happened at every hospital I’ve ever worked. People steal drugs.” They’re not going to come out and tell you about it. It might not be who you think. You don’t know what that person is going through. So it was really cool to try to tell the story that way, without making a whole bit of it.
TVLINE | How did that knowledge guide your performance, if at all? Langdon’s behavior has been all over the map, but an unsuspecting audience wouldn’t necessarily assume that those mood swings were a direct result of drug use.
It has been my goal — and we’ll see to what degree I was successful — that people would watch this season the first time through and be, like, “Oh, what a wacky guy. He’s a little strange, he moves a little fast, he works a little harder than he needs to, but I know this guy. I love this guy,” and all the behavior that you see can be explained by just being a colorful character. Hopefully the audience will be able to go back and watch it a second time and say, “Oh, the signs were there all along.” All credit goes to Scott. He did not circle anything with a big, red marker or try to make a meal of anything. He was quite deft in how subtly he put those clues in there, and so that’s really credit to him.
TVLINE | Because Santos is a character that audiences love to hate, they’ve mostly been on Langdon’s side from the jump. How much do you think that fraught dynamic is a result of Langdon’s mood swings? If Langdon was clean, do you think his approach to teaching her would’ve been any different?
I think the core of Langdon’s problem with Santos is that Langdon believes that expertise matters, and that experience matters. I think that’s really pertinent in today’s world, especially with what’s going on with the attack on expertise at the CDC, and distrust for people that have institutional knowledge that can only be built after doing a job for a long time. Santos comes in and she’s got a lot of confidence. She’s very front-footed. I think she probably comes into the ER very similar to how Langdon came into the ER, coming in and being like, “You can’t tell me anything. I’m the smartest person in the room.” I think Langdon sees that and is probably triggered by that because it reminds him of himself to some extent. But I think the argument is, “Look, I have been here longer than you have. There are things that I have done over the last three years — I have made the wrong call that has resulted in somebody losing their life, and I have learned lessons over the course of my residency that have made me a better doctor, the same way that Robby has been doing this job for 20 years and has learned all sorts of lessons. I trust his experience, not because I think Robby is inherently a smarter or better person than I am, but because his experience matters,” and I think that is something that Langdon is trying to convince Santos of that seems to be a hard pitch.
To some degree, there is a personal aspect. I think he has an emotional reaction to Santos that is disproportionate to the situation — that probably has nothing to do with Santos and has to do with what’s going on at home, and the struggle that he is having internally with himself and with his addiction. While the logic of his qualm with Santos is sound, the emotion of it has a lot to do with something else.
TVLINE | Do you think he was worried that she was the one person smart enough to figure out that he had a problem?
Yeah. I mean, she’s definitely ambitious, and she definitely wants to be the star of the show, and Langdon fancies himself the star. I think he becomes very aware that she’s got an appetite, and he’s got a target on his back, and if you have skeletons in the closet, that is a very scary place to be.
TVLINE | What it was like to finally film that intense final scene with Noah in Episode 10, having known for months that it was coming?
Noah is such a good scene partner. My relationship with him is very similar to Langdon’s relationship with Robby. He has really taken me under his wing and been just an incredible friend and mentor to me. Once we got to that scene, I was scared of it. I knew it was coming for 10 episodes, and then we got there, and it was so much fun to dance with the master like that. We had a stunt coordinator on set, because there were a number of iterations of that scene that got to various heights, physically and emotionally. I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t know what they used, but there were some takes where things got physical, and there were some takes where we brought it back a little bit to give Scott options in the editing room. It’s the closest thing you are going to get to a breakup scene on The Pitt.
What did you think of The Pitt Season 1, Episode 10? Drop your thoughts in a comment below.
Best of TVLine
Sign up for TVLine's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
