Wizards of Waverly Place star-turned-nurse Jennifer Stone shared details of her traumatic audition for HBO’s hit medical drama The Pitt.
The former Disney child star reflected on trying out for a series-regular spot on the show, which stars Noah Wyle and a cast of acclaimed actors as medical professionals navigating life in a fictional trauma center.
Stone, now 33, went from playing Selena Gomez’s best friend in Wizards of Waverly Place to studying nursing in 2019. She now works at an ER and regularly posts updates about her profession on Instagram.
But her real-life connection to the world of healthcare made the premise of The Pitt all too familiar.
“I auditioned for one of like the series regulars for The Pitt when that first came out,” Stone said on the podcast CHEERS! with Avery. “At the end of the pilot episode, the Noah Wyle character, he’s having like COVID flashbacks. As I often do, I was reading the script and like, working on lines while we were waiting for a patient to get admitted or something like that.”
“So I was working on the lines and reading the script at work,” she continued. “And it got to those last few pages and… I started having a panic attack.”
“Even, like, just hearing about that, I started having like the heavy breathing, and I started having to do like the, ‘OK this is the floor. That’s a table.’ I started having to like talk myself down ’cause it’s still back there, you know?” she said.
Stone said even watching The Pitt is “too close to home a little bit.”
She used to watch long-running medical drama Grey’s Anatomy while in nursing school “because it also helped me get the lingo down.” But when it comes to The Pitt, which is heavily rooted in contemporary politics and themes, Stone says she and her co-workers have struggled and that it can bring back “the PTSD of COVID or things like that.”
Stone continues to work as a registered nurse but also appeared in the reboot of the Gomez-led show, which brought her recognition. In 2026, she reprised her role as Harper Finkle in Wizards Beyond Waverly Place.
Like Stone, many doctors and other medical professionals have said that The Pitt is a portal into some aspects of the field. Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, told NPR that the series is “by far the most medically accurate show... ever created,” adding that his colleagues feel the same way.
Several medical professionals similarly told The Harvard Gazette that The Pitt—while heavily dramatized—is accurate in its portrayal of the pacing and collegiate nature of an ER. One such professional praised the show’s handling of the COVID pandemic in particular, saying it illustrates the “difficulty of it.”
Wyle, 55, who writes for the series and has won several accolades for his role as Dr. Michael “Robby” Robbinavitch, has said healthcare workers have praised how the narrative is “grounded in real stories.” In an op-ed for USA Today, Wyle wrote that the show is “shaped by medical advisers who’ve lived them and delivered with reverence for the professionals we’re honored to represent.”
