For a series like The Pitt, casting can be an incredibly time consuming and involved process. With over 300 roles to fill, casting directors Cathy Sandrich Gelfond and Erica Berger need to comb through many auditions before they are even brought before creator R. Scott Gemmill.
“We get up to 6000 submissions per role, and then we’ll go through and see around… on a regular episode, 40 per role,” says Berger. “And then you guys get between five and eight of our favorites.”
“We never counted, but if it was over 300 parts, I’m sure we saw over a thousand people,” adds Gelfond.
“Thousands,” corrects Berger.
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Gemmill admits that the process was made more difficult because they were looking for actors who aren’t well known. “We wanted people we’d never seen before,” says Gemmill. “So, trying to cast faces that no one’s really familiar with, generally are actors who haven’t done as much as others, and then we were also expecting them to be very, very good.”
However, that difficult approach is actually what Gelfond calls a “casting director’s dream”, to not be required to fill roles with well-known names. “We could actually go and discover these people,” says Gelfond. “It was very much like casting a play and making sure that everybody, all the series regulars, understood that there’d be days when they’d have great stuff to do, and there would be other days when they’d be walking down a hall and not saying a word.”
One of the people that actually helped the most in the casting process was Noah Wyle, who plays the lead character Dr. Robby. “Noah was there a lot, so we could at least have a guestimate to how [the chemistry between characters] would all work,” says Gelfond. “He was so involved, that was a big help too.”
“He wrote the sort of mission statement for actors coming to the show that was really, really profound, because that’s something that hasn’t really ever been done that I’m aware of,” says Gemmill. “It was basically a call to action for any actor who wants to come and play with us and how we were going to do things a little differently.”
“And they also understood the caliber of people they’d be working with who are incredibly hard working, but incredibly kind and no egos,” says Gelfond. “What Noah did so well was he was essentially the Dr. Robby of our cast, because he welcomed them in, he shepherded them… I’m constantly hearing stories of people who felt so welcome as the guest cast and him giving people tricks he learned through the years.”
“We still use that letter today,” says Berger. “Every audition gets that letter from him.”
In addition to the mission statement, Gemmill says the actors also bonded a lot as they trained together for the roles. “Another thing we did with our actors, which I think they really appreciated, was we put them through two weeks of medical boot camp, so they could learn how to intubate and how to put in a chest tube and suture,” says Gemmill. “Because almost everyone was new to the genre, they bonded over that sort of process.”
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