“Pitt” stars have parallel lives, 30 years apart

As “The Pitt” returns, let’s view parallel lives, three decades apart:
— 1994: “ER” began, with Noah Wyle ill-prepared for what’s ahead. He’s 23.
— 2025: Wyle’s “The Pitt” began, with Patrick Ball (shown here) ill-prepared for what’s ahead. With the exception of one TV episode, he had never acted on camera.
Now he was playing Dr. Frank Langdon in an intense hospital drama. “I was flying by the seat of my pants and trying not to get fired,” he told the Television Critics Association via Zoom.
Both shows soared instantly. In its first year, “ER” won eight Emmys and was nominated for best drama; “Pitt” — which startts its second season Thursday (Jan. 8) on HBO Max– won five Emmys, including best-drama.
“ER” also reached No. 2 in the Nielsen ratings, then No. 1 in three of the next four years, making everyone famous. “The Pitt” has a smaller audience on HBO Max, but that still involves millions. Ball told the TCA he’ll “never be able to go to the dentist again.”
The parallel lives have one more thing in common: Both men grew up with mothers who were real-life nurses: Ball’s mom works in emergency-rooms; Wylie’s worked in orthopedics and operating rooms.
“I used to joke that at 11:01, (my mother) would call me and say, ‘You never touch your face with bloody gloves and you never do this and I have to go to work tomorrow and I’m gonna have to answer for that,'” Wylie told the TCA.
And now? “Thanks to the internet, I’ve got like eight million mothers to tell me, ‘I think your stethoscope was backwards.'”
There might be fewer such calls these days. Ball, for instance, told a previous interviewer that his dad (an EMT) and mother never watched medicals shows because “they’re like, ‘This doesn’t feel real.'”
That changed with “The Pitt,” he said. “Now they watch it and I get text messages all the time saying how accurate it is.”‘
For Ball, this acting-on-camera thing came relatively late.
Wylie — who grew up in the Hollywood area, with a stepdad in the film industry — went straight from high school to acting. He was in a mini-series and three movies (including “A Few Good Men”) before landing the pivotal “ER” role at 23.
Ball took a more gradual route. After high school, he did five years of local and touring theater, before going to the University of North Carolina (in his home state) and getting an MFA degree from the Yale Drama School in 2022.
Theater remains big for him. Last spring, he did “Hamlet” in Los Angeles; this spring, he’ll have a show (“Becky Shaw”) on Broadway.
And theater is where he met his girlfriend, Elysia Roorbach. “We did a play together in Miami …. She played sort of like the femme fatale who gets sucked into the Venezuelan underworld of crime,” Ball said. “And I played her loser boyfriend back home.”
Now she makes her TV debut (her only on-camera acting, except for shorts) as Willow Baptiste, starting with the second season’s second episode. “I get to be her doctor and she wants nothing to do with me,” Ball said.”
With all of his theater work, he was already 35 when “The Pitt” provided virtually his first role as an on-camera actor. As Langdon, he was a senior resident and Wyle’s top subordinate, in a season that captured one 15-hour day, one hour per episode..
Langdon was, Ball said, a guy who was “very sure of himself, very confident, very competent.”
As Ball did those early episodes, producers hadn’t told him the flip side: Langdon was doing drugs at work. Late in the end of the first season, Wyle’s character confronted him angrily.
This second season skips ahead 10 months, with Langdon back from rehab.
“He’s come to realize that needing to be the best and be the fastest may be a mask,” Ball said. “He’s had to sit with that wound for the last 10 months. (Now he) walks through the door without that charm and without that confidence.”
A new day — a long and messy one, again — awaits him.