Best Of: 'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle / 'Sinners' Director Ryan Coogler
48:43 Share

This message comes from Capella University. At Capella, you can earn your degree with support from people who care about your success. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. ♪

From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, filmmaker Ryan Coogler. His films include both Black Panther films and Creed. His latest movie, Sinners, is a vampire thriller about twins, both played by Michael B. Jordan, opening a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. The film explores themes of race, faith, and American history through the lens of horror.

They gotta be killed one by one. How the hell do we do that? Sunlight? I wouldn't state that hard. Also, Noah Wiley talks with us about his starring role in the TV series The Pit, about life at a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room. Plus, contributor Carolina Miranda reviews Leila Lalami's suspenseful new novel. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Cunard.

Soak in the calm of turquoise waters as you sail the Caribbean, savoring regional delicacies ashore and enjoying locally sourced cuisine on board. After a day of exploring unique islands, enjoy a cocktail at the Commodore Club, a charming bar at the bow of Queen Elizabeth. Relax with breathtaking ocean views and live music.

As you sip on a famous St. Martin Guava Berry Colada with locally sourced guava berry liqueur, cream of coconut, and pure pineapple juice. Explore these idyllic locales with Cunard and blend into a world of sunshine, style, and ease. Why cruise when you can sail on a Cunard Queen to the Caribbean?

This message comes from Rinse. These days, you can do a lot from your phone. Book a vacation, buy and trade stocks, but you can also make your dirty laundry disappear and then reappear washed and folded with Rinse. Schedule a pickup with the Rinse app, and before you know it, your clothes are back, folded, and ready to wear. They even do dry cleaning. Sign up now and get $20 off your first order at Rinse.com. That's R-I-N-S-E dot com.

This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, my guest is filmmaker Ryan Coogler. You probably know his name as the director of Fruitvale Station, Creed, and both Black Panther films. Well, his new film is called Sinners, and it hit theaters just last week. It delves into horror with a genre-bending thriller set in 1930s Mississippi. The story follows twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan.

After surviving the trenches of World War I and navigating Chicago's criminal underworld, the brothers return home to Mississippi, hoping to start fresh by opening a juke joint. But peace does not last long. Instead, they're met by supernatural forces, vampires, who act as metaphors for oppression, exploitation, and systems that feed on Black life, body, and spirit.

Smoke.

They have a connection, but they live on. Even if the one that made them is killed, the best thing we can do for him is free his spirit from this curse. They gotta be killed one by one. How the hell do we do that? Sunlight that wouldn't stake to the heart.

Ryan Coogler says Sinners is also a tribute to his late Uncle James, who first introduced him to the blues. When he was a kid, Coogler would soak up his uncle's stories about Mississippi as old Delta Blues records spun in the background. Coogler's debut into the film world happened in 2013 with Fruitvale Station, which chronicled the final hours of Oscar Grant, a young black man killed by police in Oakland.

Since then, he's become the highest-grossing Black filmmaker in history and the youngest director to helm a billion-dollar movie with Black Panther. He decided to press pause on making Black Panther 3 to take the risk of making Sinners. Ryan Coogler, welcome to Fresh Air and congrats on this film. I have seen it twice and I enjoyed it very much. I appreciate you having me. I'm really thrilled to be here.

So, Ryan, you put Black Panther 3 on hold. That is a billion-dollar franchise, as I mentioned, to make this film. In a moment when it seems like Hollywood is kind of playing it safe to sequels and remakes, what made you say, this is the story I have to tell now? And even if it means stepping away from the success of something like a Marvel machine, did that feel like a risk?

Yes, but to be honest with you, it would have been more of a risk to not make it. The movie was kind of on my heart. And when you have something that clear for me, it's a rare thing. And I had this idea and it was very, well, I will go back to say, like, I didn't put anything on hold for this. You know, it was more, you know, like that last Panther film took a lot of time.

You know, it took more time than any of us had anticipated it taking. You know, those movies tend to take about two years. You know, this one took four because of... The last Black Panther film. Yeah, Black Panther, Wakanda, February. It was because of the tragic passing of Chadwick Boseman, rest in peace, the global pandemic. And in making those films, man, like...

There's so many, there's so much interest. There's so many people involved. There's so many industries that are around. When it comes to a Marvel film, right. Yes, yes, yes. Because, you know, and it is, I'm not complaining about it, but there is a lot of pressure around those movies. And I just made two back to back, you know, so I was coming off of both of those projects, you know,

you know, knowing there was no way I was going to do another one next. You know, I was going to have to do something, you know, I was going to do something different, you know, before I came back to that. But for me, I got hit by almost like a bolt of lightning,

You said this particular film, Sinners, was like it was on your heart to do. And I want you to take us back to when that idea really clicked for you that not only the creation of a story like this, but that the story didn't have to live in one genre or even one reality because you're blending so much here. I mean, you're blending history, historical drama, action, romance.

all against the backdrop of 1930s Mississippi. What made you realize that this mix was necessary to fully bring this story to life? This movie was, like, all about dichotomy, you know, and that's something that I've been dealing with my whole life. You know, this feeling of not totally fitting in or things not totally squaring with each other. You know, like, coming up, I was black, I was from Oakland, I was middle class,

And I was in these neighborhoods where my parents were kind of outliers. They got married young and they went to college, but they stayed in their neighborhood, you know. So I constantly, as a kid, would feel like I was like living in two different worlds. There's a dichotomy there. And I took the students serious. I was like a big old giant nerd. But I was also like a very, very serious athlete, you know, in where I'm from.

To be an athlete, you're adjacent to street culture. You know what I'm saying? You get cool points in the streets when you good at football or basketball or running track like I was. I was also raised Christian. I was raised Baptist in the Black Baptist tradition. You know what I'm saying? But I was going to Catholic school. So I was around these two very different types of Christianity.

It's trying to reckon, you know what I mean, reckon with that on a daily basis. And it made me very sensitive to themes of identity, you know, and the dichotomy as an idea. That's so interesting because I really feel it almost with every single character in this film. I want to talk to you in a minute about how you complicate, like, villains, but...

The use of vampires in particular to like really articulate the story. One of the vampires says in the film, I want your stories and I want your songs. And that line is very important. You got to finish it though. He says something after that. He says, and you're going to have mine.

Yes, right, right. Exactly, exactly right. It's important. That's such an important line because it brings into focus that these vampires are like draining more than blood. They're draining culture and identity, but they're also offering something back like in replacement of that. Like, how did you land on using vampires as a metaphor for that kind of extraction? I mean, I'll be honest with you. To me, allegory, metaphor, metaphor.

All these all these things. I'm not going to tell you that they're not present in my work. Right. But I was not in this case with this project. I was not being conscious of it. You know, like I was I was trying to you know, I was trying to communicate a feeling through cinematic language. And the reality is, as I've gotten older in this in this business and in this craft, you know, I realize that if I can make something true.

it's up to the viewer to draw those parallels. You take the thing and you analyze it. And within your analysis, you might project your own experiences, your own knowledge, you know what I'm saying? And you might draw certain parallels that weren't the parallels that I was intending, you know?

But I think it's super fascinating, though, that like when I asked you the question about like what drew you to this story and why you had to tell this story, you said immediately like my life experience is the reason why I wanted to tell this story. What drew you to a vampire story? Yeah, I love vampires, man. Like, you know, I love horror fiction. I love horror movies. I love fantasy movies.

I was raised, you know, around a lot of organized religion. And vampires intersect with all of that. You know what I mean? Like, I grew up, also grew up in Oakland, which is very dominated by street culture, you know. And, you know, all of these things, like I find vampires, they pull from all of that in terms of supernatural creatures, right?

And I thought when I, when I, when the idea came to me for this movie, I thought about, I thought about other supernatural creatures as a thing that they can, that they confront at the juke joint. I went down the line, you know, like, um,

I thought about werewolves. I thought about zombies. You know, I thought about, uh, shapeshifters, which, which is some, in some, um, indigenous cultures, uh, might be referred to as skinwalkers. I thought about, you know, I got, I went through the whole Rolodex, you know, and, and I, and I kept coming back to vampires because of, um, everything that the vampire implies in public consciousness, you know, uh, vampires, uh,

It's not a steadfast rule, but it's pretty commonly associated with sensuality. Vampires are expected to be sexy, usually expected to be fashionable, usually expected to be knowledgeable, usually expected to be very powerful. It's not thought of as wrong if a vampire is converted to vampirism, but they maintain a human personality, you know, the human memories. It's a fascinating premise.

You'll see a version of this almost in every culture. And to me, that is just a fascinating thing. If I'm trying to have a conversation about our common humanity, which for me, this movie is about. Director Ryan Coogler's new film is called Sinners. We'll hear more of our conversation after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

This message comes from ProFlowers. Mother's Day is coming up, so let ProFlowers help you celebrate the incredible women in your life. Shop modern bouquets at affordable prices. Visit proflowers.com slash NPR for $15 off your ProFlowers Mother's Day gift. This message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify. No idea where to sell? Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. It is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide.

Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or IPO ready, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle. Once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers. Go to shopify.com slash NPR to take your business to the next level today.

There was Barbenheimer summer, then Bratt summer. What will this season bring? Maybe it's the season of actual good superhero movies like the Fantastic Four and Superman. For a guide to the movies and TV we're most excited about this summer, listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.

I'm really struck by what you said that, you know, the blues connected people to their humanity. It reminded them that they were human. And blues serves really as the sound and the soul of this film. Your relationship with the blues, you talk about your Uncle James. What music did he play around you? What was he into? Man, he played all of it, man. He was big on Aubrey King. He was big on Muddy. He was big on Holland Wolfe. He was big on Coco Taylor.

Big on John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Mississippi Fred McDowell. He's big on all of them, man. You being a kid of the 80s and the 90s, what was it like for you to sit at his knee and listen to that music? Did you appreciate it at that young age? I just liked being with him. I wasn't thinking about the music. I associated it with him. And at that time...

The blues wasn't for, I didn't think the blues was for me. I didn't think it was mine. You know, like, like it was, it was just all man's. And like, and like, to be honest with you, I thought the blues was like for white people. You know what I'm saying? Cause, cause at that time, you know, you had like the movie, the blues brothers, which I hadn't seen, but, but you know, on the poster, it was these white dudes with these hats. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, so I was, I was like, okay,

The blues is for all black people, and it's for white people. You know what I'm saying? Because I was listening to Tupac, and what's crazy is my favorite song, group, and music video was Bone Thugs, Crossroads.

Not even knowing that the crossroads is, you know what I'm saying? That's a blues thing. You know what I mean? It made its way in the Cleveland gangster rap, but it was really that. But I didn't know. I was a kid, and it took my uncle dying and then me listening to the music without him anymore to explain it to me. But I'm trying to hang on to every word, trying to see if I could get a clue

about my uncle's life or, like, why he liked this stuff. You know what I'm saying? And then, boom, I realized the brilliance of it. Like, this was the base that everything came out of. How did legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy become part of this project? It was so cool to see him. That was, like, a really cool cameo. Buddy Guy was, like, the last musician my uncle would go see consistently. You know, he would get dressed up and go to his concerts, like, up to his death.

So when I was finishing up the script, I had this idea when I got to those last few scenes. I was like, oh, man, wouldn't it be cool if my uncle get a kick out of Buddy Guy being in this movie? You know, so I kind of got that. I kind of had that idea. And I talked to my casting director, Francine Magler, and my producers, Zinzi and Sev, and said, I want to try to get Buddy Guy in this movie. And everybody kind of panicked a little bit, you know, but then...

But then, you know, we got into it, and Zinzi and I went out there and went to his restaurant, Blues Club, Legends. I fully expected Buddy Guy to say, hey, man, it's nice to meet you, kid, but I'm not being in a movie. You know what I mean? Like, I'm good. You know, I'm almost 90 years old, bro. You know, like, I don't have time for that. And Saul was prepared for that. But his kids, man, they were smiling at me. You know, and I got to sit down,

He's like, look, I don't know who you are or what you do, but my grandkids tell me I should sit with you and I should hear you out. And I've decided whatever you need from me, because they speak so highly of you, I'm in.

Has he seen the film? Have you guys talked? Yeah, we showed it to him. We showed him to him in Chicago. What did he say? He gave it a stamp of approval, you know, like, you know, because, you know, that was his life, man. He was a sharecropper in Louisiana and had to make the decision to leave home. And he has so many beautiful stories, but a lot of them are heartbreaking, man. Like he wears polka dots, polka dot suits, polka dot guitars.

And I asked him why. And he said when he left home to become a blues musician, he told his mom he was going to make enough money to buy her a polka dot Cadillac, you know, and she passed away before he could do it. So the polka dots became his trademark. You know what I'm saying? And just that story of him having it, like me imagining this nearly 90-year-old man having to explain to his mom, hey, I'm going to leave home. I'm going to try to go make it with this guitar.

You know, while she's in what was a slave shack in Louisiana. You know what I mean? Like sharecropping, you know, and he's here in 2025 completely lucid telling me all about it.

There is this moment when one of the twins, he says something like, it's better to deal with the devil you know. And he's referring to having lived in Chicago and up north and gone all across the world, but now he's back in Mississippi. And you being a guy who was born and raised on the West Coast in Oakland, your accent gives it away. What did you learn growing up about

Kind of those myths, like you talk about the shame a little bit, but those myths that somehow the West or the North or the East was better than the South. I was born in the wake of the military defeat of the Black Panthers. So that dream of a better life in the West, you know, that was gone. You did not grow up with that myth that where you are is better than the South. No, I grew up. Look, the first movie I seen in theaters was Boys in the Hood, you know, which, which, which, which.

You know, I was five years old when my dad took me to see that movie. And, you know, that was what was happening, you know, down the highway five from us. You know, I was four years old. You saw Boys in the Hood at four years old? I might have been actually five. Yeah, yeah. I was born at 86. I think that movie came out in 91. Yeah, I was five years old. You know, my dad, but, you know, my dad was, you know, dad in his 20s. He heard that it was a—he had just lost his father before I was born.

My mom's dad died before I was born. Both my parents' fathers died within two weeks of each other, right after they got married. And, you know, I heard that this was a movie black fathers should text their sons to, so he took me. You know, did the same thing with Malcolm X like six months later. Five years old in the theater watching Boys in the Hood.

Do you remember the scenes that like were seared into your brain that stuck with you? Because that's a real powerful movie for a five-year-old. I remember the whole movie. My memory with movies is pretty solid. You and Michael B. Jordan, you guys have worked on Fruitvale Station and Creed, Blank Panther, and now Sinners. In Sinners, he plays twin brothers. Why twins?

It's a great question. The film deals with dichotomy, as I mentioned. And I was born into a family with loads of twins, specifically like my mom's older sisters were identical, my auntie Merlin and my auntie Kerlin. So you saw that intimacy of twins up close? Oh, yeah. My whole life. Like I can't like my aunts have always been around. One of them was my godmother, you know, so they always been a part of my life. The dynamic between them and the stories, you know, they're in their 70s now and they live next door to each other.

But the stories, man, of, like, them beating people up and, you know, like, the fact that they can't live with each other, they can't live without, they're constantly arguing.

You know, the games that we played with people when people couldn't tell them apart. And the fact that us and our family always could. We could turn our backs and feel one of them come into the room and know which one it was. You know what I'm saying? So it was something that I was always interested in exploring. And it felt mythical. The other thing is like identical twins are kind of always outlaws. You know, they're kind of always local celebrities.

And there's always like a level of othering that happens with them. I want to end asking you about legacy because I heard there was a bidding war over Sinners. And part of the deal was that you'd retain Final Cut and you get share of the theatrical opening and eventually own the film outright after 25 years, which I felt like that's such a boss move.

Is that all right, first off? And why was it important for you? I mean, it's some truth that some of those articles, I haven't seen any that were totally accurate. But the thing is, is like, you know, those terms are not new terms. Like they're not unique. I will say they are unique, but there are other filmmakers out there in the world who have not made as much money as I have at the box office who've had these terms for a long time.

It's not that unique for me to have asked for these terms and for me to have received them, right? I wrote the script on spec. My production company has made some really incredible movies in the past, you know, and there was no shortage of companies that wanted to work with us, thankfully. You know what I mean? Like, for me, the film was so personal and about my family. A hundred years ago, my family were sharecroppers. A hundred years before that, they were in a different type of situation.

if you catch what I'm saying. So for me, that was something that I stood on, you know, that my company stood on. And I was so thrilled that Warner Brothers was comfortable with us standing on that and saw value in this project. And I have to imagine there were some people that were upset about it. You know what I mean? Like...

Well, I feel like owning Sinners outright after 25 years, I mean, it is a long play. And I just wonder what you envision for this story over that kind of timeline. But is it something that you imagine expanding or revisiting or building upon in the future? I wouldn't rule anything out. But that was not the reason. The reason for me was just this story that I wanted to... You listed the films that I made before. I made these movies when I was very young.

And they came at a steep price. I was not there when my uncle died because I was making a movie. I missed so much, you know, making these movies before I was 40 years old. And they've done well over two billion dollars at the box office. You understand? And I will never own any of these movies. The next movie I make, Black Panther 3, I will not own that. Disney won't own that. You know, it was time for me to own this.

Ryan Coogler, this has been such a pleasure to be in conversation with you. Thank you so much for this. And thank you for this film. Thank you for watching. And thank you for talking about it and bringing your brilliant expertise to it. I'm looking forward to folks hearing it. Ryan Coogler's latest film is Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan. It's now showing in theaters.

In her new novel, The Dream Hotel, author Leila Lalami plunges us into the story of a woman who is imprisoned solely on the basis that she might commit a crime. Lalami, who was born in Morocco and is now based in Los Angeles, won the American Book Award for her 2014 historical novel, The Moors Account.

She's also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Contributor Carolina Miranda reviews Salami's novel and the disquieting ways it speaks to our tech-saturated lives. Sarah Hussain hasn't committed a crime. But perhaps she was flagged because she dreamt about it, or because of the heated argument she'd had with a crackpot on social media. Or maybe it was the images of early 20th century Moroccan rebel fighters she'd been posting to the internet.

Whatever the cause, Sarah now finds herself incarcerated in the California desert because an algorithm has determined she's an imminent risk. What exactly that risk may be and when and under what conditions she might be released is anybody's guess. This is the dystopian premise of Leila Lalami's gripping new novel, The Dream Hotel.

In this unsettling vision of the future, a company called DreamCloud makes brain implants that give insomniacs like Sarah a better night's rest while also harvesting valuable data from their dreams. The blandly titled Risk Assessment Administration assigns individuals a score that determines how likely a person might be to commit a violent crime, but how that score is calculated is confidential.

And the places where high-risk individuals are held for observation, called retention centers, are run by a private company called Safex that contracts out detainees as cheap labor to corporations. Into the crosshairs of these overlapping systems steps Sarah, a busy 30-something mother of twins who works as a museum archivist in Los Angeles.

She's in the process of returning from a conference in London when an elevated risk score, based partly on data taken from her dreams, gets her dinged for retention at LAX. The Dream Hotel has been compared to Philip K. Dick's 1956 science fiction novella, The Minority Report. That story imagined a society in which police arrest people for the crimes they have not yet committed based on data produced by a trio of humans with predictive powers.

But the minority report, with its snappy gumshoe dialogue, is told from the perspective of the police. Lalamie instead sends us down the psychological rabbit hole of what it means to be incarcerated without due process in a world where your fate is decided by algorithms. The narrative is propulsive, but what makes the novel so absorbing are the ways the author makes this near-future world come to life—

Much of the story is presented as an omniscient third-person narrative, but in between, Lalamie inserts fragments of emails, corporate reports, and bits of a procedural manual, all of which give insight into the systems that keep people like Sarah indefinitely detained.

Ultimately, it is Sarah who is the beating heart of this remarkable story. And Lalami gives us a character that isn't simply an archetype, but a real human being full of ambition and ambivalence. Sarah is a scholar of post-colonial African history who works at the Getty Museum. She's also a woman who dwells on her insecurities and on petty annoyances, like the mundane squabbles she has with her husband.

Occasionally, she's betrayed by her own irritability. The novel credibly conveys her harrowing sense of disorientation as the wide world she once inhabited is reduced to a cell. Sarah's most relatable trait is the struggle she faces trying to contain the rage that she feels over her situation, rage that, if expressed, will only worsen her circumstances.

As the narrator tells us, compliance begins in the body. The trick is to hide any flicker of personality or hint of difference. It's a condition that isn't specific to her incarceration. As a woman of color, Sarah's of Moroccan descent, she's not the kind of person who is generally afforded the benefit of expressing anger. To inhabit Sarah's story is to hear the echoes of real people who are held in private immigration detention centers online.

who have no legal recourse and no timeline for when they might get released. Her book also paints a grim picture about the ways in which our data can betray us. Lalami was inspired to write the novel after receiving a notification from her smartphone giving her the travel time to a yoga class, but she had never set such a reminder. Her phone was simply keeping track of her personal habits.

The Dream Hotel is a suspenseful novel. The book's simmering tension is whether Sarah will be able to find a way out of this trap. This ordinary woman who has plotted through life has to figure out how to undermine a system that has overtaken her mind and her body. Carolina Miranda reviewed Leila Lalami's new novel, The Dream Hotel.

Coming up, actor Noah Wiley will talk with us about starring in the new TV series The Pit, about a Pittsburgh hospital emergency room. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

This message comes from NPR sponsor Amazon Prime Video presenting Common Ground, a film about the power of agriculture to reshape the planet through sustainable farming. Featuring Jason Momoa, Laura Dern, Donald Glover, Rosario Dawson, and Ian Somerhalder, Common Ground profiles a movement of farmers using regenerative models of agriculture that could balance the climate, save people's health, and stabilize America's economy. Now streaming only on Prime.

This message is from Synchrony Bank, who can help you get your do-nothing savings to work hard with their high-yield savings account. Put your lazy savings to work at synchrony.com slash NPR. Member FDIC.

Support for NPR and the following message come from Edward Jones. A rich life isn't always a straight line. Unexpected turns can bring new possibilities. With a hundred years of experience navigating ups and downs, Edward Jones can help guide you. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones, member SIPC. Dave Davies has our next interview.

Our guest today, Noah Wiley, is an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Mac series, The Pit, which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room. Wendell Stone, 52, chief rigger from Pit Fest. Isolated trauma to the left chest when a speaker tower came down on him. Looks like multiple rib fractures. Pulse 110, BP 130 over 85, decent stats at 96, 50th bent in the field. Got it? How we doing, Mr. Stone? Mr. Stone is my dad. Just Stone.

The Pit has drawn critical praise for its engaging storylines, intelligent dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And it's gained a following of real-life emergency room doctors, who praise the accuracy of the show's depiction of medical conditions and treatments. Noah Wiley is a veteran of stage, screen, and television, who's no stranger to lab coats and hospital scrubs. He played a medical student and then a physician on the hit NBC TV series ER for most of its 15 seasons.

where he earned nominations for three Golden Globe and five Primetime Emmy Awards. He starred in the TNT series Falling Skies and The Librarians and has appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organization's Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World. Noah Wiley, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me.

You know, I mentioned in the introduction that your character – maybe I didn't. He's the senior attending physician in this emergency room. And, you know, in addition to treating patients, you're really running this big organization and it's a teaching hospital.

So while you're an experienced pro, there are all these others who are less experienced, residents in training and medical students, on their first day, I believe, in their rotation as this thing begins. So there's a lot going on here. Tell us just a little bit more about your character, Dr. Robby.

I play Dr. Michael Rabinovich, who is several decades into his medical career and probably should have retired a couple of years ago. But like many practitioners, post-COVID felt pressed into service and out of the increasing need. And because he's really good at what he does and he really cares about the people he works with, he's kept working. And it's taken a toll on him. He's seen a lot and done a lot and

been able to compartmentalize a lot of that and today we are embedded with him for his entire shift on the day that he's no longer able to do that right and things he

He runs into some rough seas. You know, he's surrounded by these young medical students. And I don't think I recognize any of the actors in this, but they are just so terrific. The casting process was laborious. We were looking for people with theater backgrounds, people who were really adept at memorizing lots and lots of dialogue, very good with props, who could do all sorts of things while doing a procedure and walking backwards.

And we had to cast the show internationally. We found actors in Australia. We found them in England. We found them on the East Coast, West Coast.

But we found tremendous performers. So while you haven't seen them before, I knew early on that I was going to be a Trojan horse that was going to introduce all this young talent to your living room. And they're great. Well, let's listen to a scene and get a little bit of a flavor of the show. This scene is typical of many where a new patient is being wheeled in by paramedics from an ambulance.

And we hear them barking out critical facts as they're rolling them in. And then you hear this one, two, three as the team coordinates lifting the patient from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital gurney. And then the team gets to work. Let's listen. 23-year-old Ben Kemper, no helmet, got doored riding an e-scooter. Neck versus handlebar, then face planted to the pavement. Obvious facial fractures, but alert and oriented with good vitals. Here we go. One, two, three. How we doing, Ben? Good.

- One. - Back in my throat. - That's probably from the nosebleed. Short rapid rhino, please. - Tachy at 120, pulse ox borderline at 90. - We'll buy it 15 liters for now. - Neck contusion, larynx shifted to the right, no crepitance. - Four of morphine. I'm gonna stick something in your nose to stop the bleeding. - No hemotimpanum. - Inflate the balloon? How about now, then? - What's up? - Good vitals, A and O, let's have a look.

And that's a scene from The Pit where our guests know Wiley is a star.

Awfully intense. It's tough to get the impact of that clip on radio, but that was a Laforte 3 floating face fracture, which when you put your fingers on somebody's teeth and you pull their teeth forward, their entire face comes with it. It's rather dramatic. You don't see it very often in an emergency room. Right. And you don't see it on the radio, but it is dramatic there. But just the audio, I mean, you can hear the intensity of it. And there's all this medical jargon flying by. I mean, did you know all this stuff before you got into this series? Yeah.

I knew quite a bit of it. You know, after 15 years on a medical show, you pick up certain things through osmosis. The specifics of what each patient needs when they come in is a total mystery to me. And thankfully, we've got a great team of technical advisors on the writing staff and on the set. Our secret weapon is a man named Dr. Joe Sachs, who is a board-certified emergency room physician. He was a technical advisor and a writer on ER, and he is with us again today.

And he is meticulous in his attention to detail. And he basically does those trauma scenes. He will sort of present what the appropriate medicine and procedures are, what each person in the room's role is, given their hierarchy in the hospital, and even weighing in a little bit on emotionally how they may be feeling given the circumstances and stakes of the case.

Yeah. I watched this series with my wife who's 25 years as a primary care physician. She gets almost all of it. I get maybe a third of it. But I don't feel like I'm missing much. But I did wonder – you were a writer on the show, I know. I mean do you think about maybe letting up on some of that or is getting all that in critical to the authenticity of it?

One of the decisions we made early on was to not employ any soundtrack in the show. And by lifting the music out, we've sort of removed the artifice that says you're watching a TV show and we need you to feel sad here because we're playing strings or exciting here because we're using percussion.

We're letting the sort of symphony of the sound of the procedures in the room be our cadence, and a lot of that is the technical jargon that the doctors are employing. It becomes the soundtrack in the scene, and the intensity with which they're delivering those lines becomes the emotional equivalent of a score. And it's really less important the audience understands and more important that the audience sees that the doctors know what they're talking about. It's competency porn. Yeah.

You know, the origins of this show are interesting. As I understand it, during the pandemic, you began hearing from medical providers and first responders who were dealing with all this high stakes, stressful demand on them. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, watching the news, but I was also getting a lot of mail that was coming from first responders and some of it was

you know, hey, Carter, we could use you out here. Carter was the character you played on ER, right? He was, yeah. And a lot of them were sort of thanking me for inspiring him to go into a career in medicine, but also telling me how hard it was at that moment. And I was sort of overwhelmed being a lightning rod for that at that time. And so I pivoted a lot of that mail to John Wells, who executive produced ER, and said...

Outside of the birth of my kids, this is probably the best thing I ever do with my life because we inspired a generation of practitioners to go into the work that is saving lives right now. And then I went on to say that I think something's happening here. And if you ever want to make a show about what's happening here, even though we said we'd never do it again, I might be ready to volunteer. And a couple of years later, after we saw how this broke down over time,

socioeconomic lines and racial lines and geographic lines, there was a show to be told here. What was it like for you to put on scrubs and a lab coat and get back in a hospital setting again after all those years? It was wonderful. I think I spent 15 years avoiding, actively avoiding walking down what I thought was either hallowed ground or traveled road.

And then finally I had an opportunity to come back and was excited about it and slipped a stethoscope around my neck and just felt right at home. You know, I should just mention it's been widely reported that there is some litigation around this. The estate of Michael Crichton, who was the creator of ER, has sued alleging that The Pit is an unauthorized reboot of the program. I mean, one of the differences between the two shows is that –

The pit is the entire 15 episodes are one day in the life of this ER. There's an hour – essentially in real time, an hour per episode is one hour of the day. And so you get to see these things develop just over a day. So that's the real distinction. Very much so.

Different city, different character. We had started down a reboot road and then it became an impossibility. And so we pivoted as far away from it as we could to come up with a new medical show. I stand by what we have. You're the lead attending in this emergency room. And in real life, you're also an executive producer and a writer and an experienced actor among a cast which includes a lot of much younger actors. Yes.

Were you kind of a coach on the set in the same way you're a medical coach for these people, learning the craft? In a way. You know, it's interesting. We started with two weeks of medical boot camp for everybody, myself included, to kick some rust off and to re-familiarize myself with how much has changed in health care, but also to bring everybody up to speed with where they needed to be by the time we rolled the cameras. And John Wells, who directed the pilot episode and executive produced, said to me, don't be too nice to him. Yeah.

And then he sort of segregated us where I was off by myself and I ate lunch by myself. And then the R4s ate together, the R2s and 3s ate together. That's fourth year residents, second year residents. Second year residents, fourth year residents. And the med students all ate together by themselves. And they all sat behind me. And then when we did our training rotations, the med students learned what med students know. And the R2s learned R2 stuff and so forth together.

And I kind of walked around and did a little bit of everything. But it set a kind of hierarchical tone and differentiated us enough as performers that when we started working, it carried over. So whether it was a byproduct of the rehearsal or the fact that I am

considerably older than the rest of the cast, or that I've played a doctor before. Yes, there was a lot of meta energy where everybody was sort of playing the dynamics that were present and just sort of heightening them a little bit.

You know, we listened to a clip earlier that was an intense moment in which a patient is being wheeled in and the staff is immediately getting to work on him. There are a lot of quieter moments in this series where you are dealing with a patient or a relative and have some tough issues to communicate. This is one I want to play now where a man and a woman who are a brother and sister, played here by Rebecca Tilney and Mackenzie Aston, are at the hospital working

with their elderly father who has pneumonia. The father has left instructions. He does not want to be intubated. And they're talking to you as Dr. Robbie about it. Dr. Robbie speaks first. Let's listen. Either his pneumonia is getting worse or his heart couldn't handle the fluids that we gave him to treat the sepsis. His lungs are filling up with fluid. Can't you take the fluid away? Not without his blood pressure crashing with very bad consequences. So let's just hope the BiPAP works. And if it doesn't?

then I would need to know your decision about using a breathing machine. We're still talking about it. Well, we know he expressed his wishes in writing. Do not intubate. We're thinking try it for a week. That would be a very painful week. He wouldn't get a lot of rest with all the monitors and all the blood tests. He might need to be sedated. He might need to be restrained because he'd be in an unfamiliar place with a very uncomfortable tube down his throat. And he wouldn't really know what was happening.

Elderly patients can often develop psychosis. But he might get better. Or he might get worse. What would you do? I really can't answer that for you. This is your father. That's your decision to make. I can guarantee you that we will keep him as comfortable as possible if a natural death is what you choose. But he's not your father, and he can't recover from it. What my sister means is that we're still deciding the best thing to do. Well, the sooner you decide, the better. I'm really sorry. I wish there was more that I could do. I'm not sure that he has that much time left.

And that is our guest, Noah Wiley, in a scene from The Pit, which is now streaming on Max. There are a lot of these scenes where you're dealing with loved ones who just can't accept what's happening. And there's another one, two parents who just can't accept the fact that their son, who came in with a fentanyl overdose, is brain dead. You want to just say a little bit about preparing for these scenes?

Well, first of all, it's really gratifying to be able to play a storyline over several episodes so that you can watch the gradation of acceptance and watch the different methods and strategies that practitioners use to help families prepare. And sometimes when you only have an hour to tell a story that has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that feels like extremely hurried work and oftentimes feels disingenuous or inauthentic to the process. So when you can have these things kind of arc over several hours and

It feels like you can kind of walk through those five stages of grief with these characters. When we prepare for them, there's a lot of conversation about tone and about specificity of point of view. In this particular instance, we have a brother and a sister who have very different reasons for

for wanting to keep their father alive that have an emotional core to them that gets revealed in subsequent episodes. So you want everybody in these scenes to have a real point of view that's legitimate to who they are. And then when those three truths come out and they are in conflict with each other, as they often are, that makes for good drama.

The other thing that's happening in this story with your character is, you know, I mentioned before that this series, kind of the germ of it began during COVID when you were hearing from first responders and the crises they were facing. And in the show, your character, Dr. Robbie, during COVID lost a mentor, another doctor. And I believe this day that is the focus of the series is the anniversary of his death, right? Correct. We learned that early on.

And then you want to just talk a bit about how his flashbacks, his PTSD, if you will, is portrayed in the show. This is the five-year anniversary of him taking his mentor off life support, which during the height of COVID –

He had to be put on. And then ultimately in our backstory, he had to be taken off the life support to give it to another patient who had a better chance of survival. And then everybody died. And it was a traumatic memory that my character has just not really ever dealt with. He's moved on. And today is a day he probably should have stayed home. But today he went to work. And as a result, he's just getting triggered by different things. And those memories begin to come up with greater and greater frequency and greater and greater poignancy. And I think that's a great way to end the story.

to the point where he becomes totally debilitated by them. And the aggregate of all of that grief and all of that suppressed emotion just overwhelms him. And it was interesting. My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood.

And she came over for breakfast last Sunday, and she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, you know, Noah, I can't stop thinking about last week's episode.

in that scene where you were listing all the people who died. And I think I had my own PTSD reaction. I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the four-year-old. I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood. And she's just listing these names. And she's, you know, getting teary-eyed. And she finishes, and I said, "My goodness, Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that." And she said, "Well, that wasn't real."

I said, well, this one wasn't either. And she said, but it felt real. And it brought all that up for me. Isn't that funny? And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, the four-year-old, when was that? She said, oh, I think your brother was probably about four at the time. I think that's why it hit me. And then I thought to myself, oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night and you helped us with our homework? Yeah.

Wow. And she's carried that painful memory for all these years. That's 35 years it's been in there. It came out last Sunday. Well, Noah Wiley, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been fun. Oh, this has been a pleasure. Thank you. Noah Wiley is an executive producer, writer, and star of the series The Pit, which is now streaming on Max. He spoke with Dave Davies. ♪

Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

This message comes from Lisa. Lisa makes exceptionally comfortable mattresses designed for everybody and budget. Elevate your sleep with Lisa. Go to Lisa.com for 20% off their award-winning mattresses plus an extra $50 off with promo code NPR.

Support for NPR and the following message come from USPS. Did you know USPS Ground Advantage Service keeps your business in the know from dock to delivery and everywhere in between? Keep your business in the know at USPS.com slash in the know.

This message comes from eBay. Swapping out your tires? There's nothing like it. With eBay, you find the feel you're looking for. From smooth highway rides to grip for rough terrain. Get all the tires you need at prices you'll love. eBay. Things. People. Love.