Laëtitia HollardEditor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for The Pitt Season 2 Episode 12.
With Noah Wyle and R. Scott Gemmill‘s hit HBO medical drama The Pitt heading into the last three episodes of Season 2, the current Fourth of July shift at fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center hasn’t gotten any easier. With the network offline in the wake of a cyberattack hitting other hospitals, being forced to work in analog mode is only adding stress for doctors, nurses, and patients alike — and now, they’ve just lost one of their own to a detainment by ICE.
Season 2’s latest hour, “6:00 P.M.,” directed by Amanda Marsalis and written by Danny Hogan and R. Scott Gemmill, finds every character navigating different stressors. When a patient attacks nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard), Dana (Katherine LaNasa) is quick to intervene, but her actions with the all-too-convenient syringe in her pocket immediately raise Robby’s (Wyle) suspicions, leading to a telling confrontation between the Pitt’s two biggest pillars.
Meanwhile, there’s little time for other doctors, like Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif), to think about slowing down — or, as she tellingly reveals to Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball), even taking the time to cry over the loss of a patient. Ahead of the episode’s premiere, Collider had the opportunity to speak with Dourif about her character’s most pivotal moments in Episode 12, including what Cassie’s conversation with Robby really means, why Season 2’s ICE storyline made everyone in the cast “uncomfortable,” and more.
COLLIDER: There’s so much to talk about, starting with Roxie, whose storyline is so heartbreaking already, with her making the decision to die on her own terms. Cassie, unfortunately, isn’t present, and has to find out from Robby that Roxie passed while she was tending to Kiki with Ogilvie. It feels like you really get to dig into the tough emotions of that storyline. How does getting to play that storyline over a series of episodes, as opposed to being confined to just one hour, prove more beneficial as an actor?
FIONA DOURIF: I felt like I was dealing with that for months while we were shooting. I looked at it like it was Cassie confronting the fact that we’re all going to die. It was specific that she was exactly my age. She had children, like I have. She also had a family, which I don’t. So, there was a lot to think about. It came down to this question of, “What do I want my life to look like when I die?”
I started to think about that, personally, actually, as Fiona, because Cassie’s quite close to the bone for me. When a family member dies or when you’re confronted with it, like a lot of E.R. doctors are constantly, that becomes real, and that can change how you feel throughout the day, in ultimately a positive way, has been my experience. But yeah, I was thinking about those things for a long time in 2025. And those beautiful performances, you know? All of it felt very sincere while we were shooting it. Very moving.
Fiona Dourif Teases an Emotional Future for Cassie on ‘The Pitt’ Season 2
“It hits you two days later when you’re on your couch — not necessarily tears, but just the gravity of it.”
Later on, there’s that exchange that Cassie and Langdon have, where Cassie admits she can’t remember the last time she cried, and she’s worried that she’s forgotten how. Is that teeing up any possibility of her becoming overwhelmed later?
DOURIF: I can’t answer that.
[Laughs] I had a feeling.
DOURIF: But that’s very real. You toss a penny on the side of The Pitt, and you hit an actual medical professional, and they talk to me about it. I’m pretty close friends with one of the consultants, Dr. Jacob Lentz, and he talks about that a lot; that stuff is very moving, but you do it for some amount of years, and you feel sort of separate, and it hits you later. It hits you two days later when you’re on your couch — not necessarily tears, but just the gravity of it.
On a somewhat lighter note, I really like seeing you get to step into more of a teaching role than we even got in Season 1, specifically with characters like Ogilvie, but also Javadi. How do you feel like Cassie’s approach to mentoring or teaching echoes her overall approach to medicine?
DOURIF: Cassie understands that her strong suit is more human connection than technical, and it’s because she had a long road to get to medical school. Most often, doctors go from a very good college to a very good med school to residency to being a doctor. Cassie dealt with addiction and wrong choices and an early pregnancy, all kinds of things. Because she’s had very hard things happen, she can relate to people in the hospital who also have.
I think that that is both good and bad with teaching. There’s an element of frustration for kids who don’t understand how hard the world can be for people, and that has shown its face with dynamics with Javadi, and certainly with Ogilvie. It’s sort of like, “How can you not get this? Not everybody has been as lucky as you.” And I think [the writers] probably tee it up purposely so there’s that conflict.
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Just talking about Cassie’s past, we’ve seen Robby making the rounds before his sabbatical, and the two of them have what seems to be their parting conversation, where she says, “I’ve had friends who liked to see how close the edge was.” You can see on Noah’s face that the emotions are there, but he doesn’t quite know how to respond to that. How long do you think Cassie’s been picking up on those vibes from Robby, and what is her biggest concern about him heading into this sabbatical?
DOURIF: Cassie is very intuitive, which is something you can’t really even describe. It’s just a feeling. I think that Robby and all the doctors are dealing with the aftermath of the mass casualty, and there’s a degree to which self-care can sort of fall away, and that feels very crystal clear with Robby’s case. He’s like, “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter,” but yet he’s doing what Cassie perceives as something quite reckless. If you don’t know that you’re doing that, consequences can follow that can be life-threatening. I think she’s worried about his genuine safety, actually.
On a variety of levels — not the least of which is because he doesn’t want to wear that helmet.
DOURIF: Or why doesn’t he want to wear the helmet?
Exactly. Last time we talked, you hinted at how much bloodier Season 2 gets, and there’s that gnarly scalp lac case in this episode.
DOURIF: [Laughs] Oh, just you wait.
Fiona Dourif on Why She Prefers Working With Practical Effects on ‘The Pitt’ — No Matter How Bloody It Gets
“It’s also just very cool what modern medicine can do to save an actual body.”
I know! But in terms of getting to interact with practical effects like that, what do you enjoy about having something tangible to work with?
DOURIF: When acting is really good is when you forget yourself, and when you’re doing something that is really tactile and specific, you have to. Also, just the way we shoot The Pitt, we shoot every scene from beginning to end, and you don’t know where the camera is, so it very much feels like a stage play when you’re shooting it. You are fully focused on what you’re doing, so it’s almost helpful that way. Though when there’s a major reset, also, it’s kind of scary because we’re a television show that has a time frame.
I always appreciate the surgeries and the technical aspect of it. We get rehearsals. It’s also just very cool what modern medicine can do to save an actual body. I had no idea how good we’ve gotten at saving a body going through trauma. It’s pretty exceptional. I may have said this to you before, but when we were going to medical school, we would watch actual surgeries, and we watched a double thoracotomy from a gunshot wound, and somebody staple a beating heart, and the person lived, which is wild. I mean, I can say this to you, but when you watch it, it’s phenomenal and genuinely shocking.
There’s been a lot of chatter about Season 2’s ICE storyline. McKay is thrust into the center of that, and at the beginning of Episode 12, we see the immediate aftermath of Jesse being detained, but how did you want to approach playing someone who’s just trying to get through the day with this added stressor?
DOURIF: I think the secret weapon of the show is that all of us, everybody, is a flawed person trying to do their best, which is sort of the case with America and most of the population of the earth, anyway. We are dealing with some real-life circumstances that are happening in American hospitals and trying to portray real-life people in those situations, and so it’s a mixed bag.
It was very uncomfortable to shoot for everybody — for the actors playing the ICE agents, for the patient getting arrested, for all of us. You could feel it on set, for all 150 people in that room. So, we were all in it together. It’s a wild time.
As we’ve been talking about with Cassie and her ability to kind of bury the emotions, is that also her approach to dealing with a patient in this situation?
DOURIF: It’s always the patient first. It’s the situation first and yourself second. But I think Cassie is not bad at self-care, actually. Of all of the doctors and their various ways of dealing with hard situations, Cassie has a lot of experience with it because of her life.
I’m still hoping that the date that she got asked out on works out.
DOURIF: Me too! [Laughs] Actually, that scene gave me a little bravery in my personal life. I was like, “I’m just going to ask somebody out someday soon,” and I did.
New episodes of The Pitt Season 2 premiere Thursdays on HBO Max.
