“The Pitt” star Katherine LaNasa on Dana’s emotional breakdown over sexual assault survivor: ‘Dana is furious about it’

Key Points

• The Pitt star Katherine LaNasa reflects on almost quitting acting after battling cancer and not booking work.

• She explains why a scene with a sexual assault survivor triggered her character, Dana.

• LaNasa says she didn’t realize how big the Emmy-winning drama series was becoming — or that she had gone viral.

Katherine LaNasa didn’t read the character description for charge nurse Dana Evans before she auditioned for The Pitt.

“I am glad that I didn’t read it because I probably wouldn’t have gotten the job,” the actress says on Entertainment Weekly‘s The Awardist podcast. “It said that she knows more than the doctors and she’s not afraid to let them know it, or something like that…. Thank God I didn’t read that. I might’ve been more heavy-handed with it.”

It all worked out. Not only did she win the role, but she also won an Emmy for her work on the first season of the HBO Max medical drama, each season of which plays out over one shift. In season 1, no-nonsense Dana steered the ship of the Pittsburgh hospital’s emergency department through a mass casualty event, and was physically assaulted by an angry patient. In season 2, the entire hospital had to go analog to prevent being hacked like other nearby medical facilities; she and some of the more experienced members of the staff remember the pre-computer days, but the younger staff are very reliant on technology.

In the midst of the action, Dana was determined to help find a home for an abandoned newborn, simply identified as Baby Jane Doe — a line-reading that blew up on social media thanks to Dana’s thick Philly accent. LaNasa didn’t even know she had gone viral — or how popular the show was becoming.

“I was in Spain working, so I missed all of the Baby Jane Doe [hype],” she says. “I wasn’t really in the States when the show was airing. I just got back, actually, for the finale, and it wasn’t until I went to see Isa Briones on Broadway and I was in the bathroom line that I was aware that we had kind of blown up to a different level.”

Viewers were especially affected in season 2 by Dana’s work with a sexual assault survivor who was reluctant to fulfill the rape kit and report the incident to police. At one point, a new nurse who’s working with Dana takes the patient on a walk to give her a break from the tension after a tough conversation with Dana about what happened to her. When they leave the room, Dana becomes overwhelmed with emotion.

“That wasn’t scripted,” she says, explaining that episode director Uta Briesewitz “just left the camera on, and I didn’t know she was gonna leave the camera on… I just did the next moment. That’s what happened. Isn’t that crazy? It’s me living it out as a character.”

LaNasa says she had prepared for what would come next, but in that moment, her emotional state took her a different direction.

“I’m very upset by what’s happened to her, and I think Dana is subconsciously projecting herself onto her, onto this role, because Dana didn’t report the punch and Dana is still reeling from that, and Dana is furious about it,” she explains, referring to that season 1 assault. “I can understand the choice of not pressing charges in the moment and wanting to deal with this big bully and just wanting to save face and pride, so that’s a choice that she made, but now she’s confronted with someone else that’s been attacked and I think she really wants her to report that. It’s just rage about stuff, like we all feel rage about so much injustice right now. And the helpless feeling, and also this kind of frustration because she really wants her to do it, but she can’t make her do it. She can decide later if she just finishes that rape kit. And so I think it might just feel like a little piece of justice for Dana, too.”

LaNasa has been on the receiving end of life-changing medical care, having battled breast cancer a couple of years before landing The Pitt. Between her treatment, though, and a lull in her career in the wake of the pandemic and then the dual Hollywood strikes, she wondered if her time as an actor might be done. Of course, it wasn’t.

“I got the role and I thought, God, they could just go any way. Like, are they really gonna cast an old white lady in this role? Is that really interesting?” she recalls. But then she and a friend ran lines together, and she realized how deeply she connected with Dana — and even thought like her. “I really felt, not so much like I wanted to throw in the towel, but like almost a confusion in my spirit, with God. Like, I need a sign. Am I supposed to keep doing this? I’ve done this for so long and I understand that COVID and different things affected us journeymen actors in different ways. But it was just so barren and I felt like I was turning in good work and I just couldn’t get anything.”

Once she got on the set, she admits she was “triggered” by being in an uber-realistic emergency department.

“I realized, Oh, all of that is for this. I think the experience of really knowing and understanding how afraid people are when they go into the hospital, when they go into the emergency room, having been that person, I think that really helped,” she says. “And also, the nurses that took a little bit of extra time, that were really human, how big of a difference that made, just these little interconnected moments. So I was really able to feed that into the role in a way that was so grounded because I’d lived it.”

Season 2 also heavily focused on the mental health decline of senior attending physician Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinovich, played by Noah Wyle. Having worked with him the longest, Dana knows something is up and is worried about what will happen to him on a road trip that he’s starting as soon as this shift is over.

“Dana really loves him, and my own adult son has a lot of grief around his father [Dennis Hopper] dying when he was like 19. And so I went through that with him, and that has been a really hard, kind of long process to live through,” she shares. “So I felt very connected to Noah and Robby in that way because he was still sort of reeling from COVID and the death of his mentor. So it kind of starts with that…. She was at her wits’ end and also coming up against this brick wall with him. She’s burned out and she’s had it as well. It’s a bad day.”

Check out more from EW’s The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year’s best in TV, movies, and more.

Listen to LaNasa’s full interview on The Awardist, below, where she looks back on her transition from ballet to acting and what her then partner Dennis Hopper had to do with it, getting to voice a nurse on The Simpsons and play the mother of a patient who sleeps with Dr. Kovac on ER, and more.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly