The Pitt has leaned headfirst into politics and controversial subject matter during its second season. But it saved its biggest course-correcting rewrite for a single character.
Student Dr. James Olgivie joined the HBO Max medical drama’s Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center in Season 2 as a fourth-year medical student, and immediately drew the ire of fans for his know-it-all personality and judgmental demeanor with patients.
“I didn’t think Ogilvie was a big enough part in our story to warrant the hate that he would end up getting,” Lucas Iverson, 30, who plays Ogilvie, said in an interview with Vulture on Tuesday. “I thought he would get some offhand comments, but it feels like there are online militias rallying against him. They’re at the gates.”
Mid-season, however, the show’s writers realized his character arc needed to change to resonate with viewers.
“Originally, and in the scene I auditioned with, he burned out and quit. There was this confrontation scene with Robby,” Iverson, 30, said. “But as the season went on, the writers gave him a bit more heart. I think that’s when the empathy came in.”
Due to his competitiveness, Ogilvie was immediately pegged by fans as a massive jerk. Iverson said it was by design, as his character was described as, “can’t really read a room, really smart and likes to show it.”
Initially, Iverson was worried he had leaned too far towards being unlikable, so he sought guidance from showrunner John Wells.
“I was concerned that I was being too much of an a-----e, and he said, ‘I think your job is to be too much of an a-----e,’” The Gilded Age star recalled.
“If you want to crash into humanity, you have to start running from really far away,” Wells told him.
“I was like, ’OK, give yourself the furthest possible distance to fall,‘” he recalled.
The Pitt implemented the rewrite in the 13th episode of its second season. Warning: Spoilers ahead.
After Ogilvie finally opens up to one of his patients, who reminds him of his father, the patient dies on the operating table. Ogilvie is devastated.
Instead of his usual obstinacy, Ogilvie, still wearing his blood-stained surguery gown, has an earnest conversation with Dr. Whitaker about death and, for the first time, admits his weakness before trying to quit.
“You ever get used to that?” Ogilvie asks about patients dying.
“No. You try to accept it. You try to find balance,” Whitaker, played by Gerran Howell, replies, mirroring the speech that Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) gave him in Season 1.
After the conversation, Whitaker tells him to go home and reconsider his decision to leave the trauma center. With two hour-long episodes to go in the real-time series, it seems unlikely Ogilvie will appear again this season. But Whitaker’s speech seems designed to bring him back for Season 3.
New episodes of The Pitt stream on HBO Max every Thursday, with the Season 2 finale airing on Apr. 16.
