Noah Wyle, The Pitt‘s star doctor, only learned that HBO altered the show’s controversial ICE episode after their edits were already negotiated.
“The negotiation was being driven by political reasons, creative reasons, fear, uncertainty, all sorts of legitimate reasons,” Wyle, 54, who stars as Dr. Robby in The Pitt, told Variety on Thursday. “I’ll be honest and say that I was concerned about the edits we were making initially.”
In the episode, ICE agents arrive at the hospital with an injured detainee, leading patients and hospital staff to flee in fear, and a nurse to get arrested. At one point, Dr. Robby unloads on a masked agent for being a “disruption” to the medical team.
Executive producer John Wells initially revealed that HBO had asked for changes after reading the script for Episode 11.
“Good story. Just make sure it’s balanced, and we’re not just treating the situation as if it doesn’t have other points of view,” Wells, 69, said HBO told him.
Wyle, who also writes and produces the show, was only informed of Wells’ discussions with HBO after they took place.
Between the time the episode was filmed in December and its March premiere, ICE became an ever-present issue when Trump sent 3,000 officers to Minnesota. In Minneapolis, immigration officers shot and killed two citizens—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—and medical professionals complained of their presence in hospitals.
The Emmy-winning actor said that the national discussion around ICE informed how viewers received the already finished episode.
“Because the context came out after we’d filmed that episode, we didn’t have to do half of what we had done,” Wyle said. “That had already been imprinted into the mind of most Americans.”
The actor also acknowledged that HBO’s edits had pushed the show’s writers to strive for a more complex story.
“When I saw what we had done, I actually think we arrived at something more elegant and a little bit more restrained, which leaves a little bit more ambiguity in it than we may have started out with,“ he said.
”I think it’s healthier for the storyline in the long run. It ended up being show the bear, don’t poke the bear in a lot of ways, which is enough,” Wyle, who took home several of the year’s major awards for his role on the show, said.
The Pitt, which embraces difficult politics with episodes on anti-vaxxers, health insurance disputes, and abortion access, has been accused of pushing “woke” storylines.
“You’re not making value judgments. You’re just painting a picture, and if it’s accurate enough and it’s representative enough, it becomes a bit of a Rorschach test,” Wyle told Variety last summer. “If it looks like the system is untenable, unfair, and skewed towards one population over another, maybe it is.”
Wyle, who unveiled his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Thursday, said not much has changed with healthcare since his first medical drama, ER, including the then “40 million Americans going without health insurance.”
“And here we are, 30 years later, and that number is doubled, almost tripled, and people won’t even go into emergency rooms to seek that health care for a myriad of reasons,” the star concluded.
New episodes of The Pitt stream on HBO Max each Thursday, with its season finale on April 16. The show’s dramatic season finale will premiere three days early in select movie theaters.
