Key Takeaways:
- Actor Noah Wyle is a 2025 Emmy nominee for his performance as Dr. Robby on The Pitt.
- The 54-year-old’s personal experience with and past roles related to the medical industry helped shape the HBO drama, which he also helped produce.
- Wyle is so passionate about healthcare reform he recently visited the U.S. Capitol to lobby for change.
It’s been five months since the season finale of The Pitt—five months since we watched Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle, lead the chaotic emergency room of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital with calmness and compassion.
Wyle’s performance on the show earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. But this isn’t the first time the 54-year-old actor is being recognized for his medical prowess on TV.
Wyle rose to fame as Dr. John Carter on the popular medical drama ER, which first aired in 1994 and also starred George Clooney, Mark Greene, and Carol Hathaway. Wyle’s role earned the actor five Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. Although he never won, his character was no doubt beloved for much of the show’s 15-season run.
As it turns out, Wyle isn’t the only healthcare worker—albeit a fictional one—in his family. His mother, Marjorie, was an orthopedic and operating room nurse for 35 years.
“What I look back on with my mother, it’s that my mom’s hardcore,” Wyle told The Los Angeles Times. “You can’t rub her shoulders too hard or she’ll bruise. If you tease her, she gets upset. But she carried a man’s leg to pathology and didn’t blink twice about it. I have a lot of respect for what my mom did and shouldered and carried all day long.”
So it makes sense Wyle is passionate about advocating for healthcare workers in the United States. Back in February, he visited Allegheny General Hospital, which The Pitt is based on, to meet the staff who worked there. “It’s important for people in Pittsburgh, certainly, to feel like we’re honoring the city that we’re filming in or depicting,” Wyle told WTAE-TV Pittsburgh.
In June, Wyle joined his mom and a coalition of frontline healthcare workers, the FIGS Ambassadors, on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. to fight for fair compensation, safer working conditions, and mental health support for nurses.
“These aren’t partisan issues. They’re practical ones. And they’re urgent. Because when our healthcare professionals are burned out, buried in paperwork, or forced to leave the field altogether, we all pay the price,” Wyle wrote in a USA Today op-ed.
Wyle’s desire to discuss these real-world healthcare challenges influenced the making of The Pitt, for which he’s also a producer. “[The COVID-19 pandemic] was the catalyst for all of this—that post-COVID, there might be another story to tell about American healthcare that shined a light on the two different healthcare systems that exist in this country, the disparity between the two, and the toll that it was taking psychologically, emotionally, and financially on the frontline workers,” he told The Wrap.
Wyle and others behind The Pitt spoke to tons of healthcare workers to make the show as accurate and current as possible, asking questions like “What would you like to see on TV?”, “What isn’t on TV that should be?”, and “What would be bad and counterproductive for us to put on TV?”
Since the HBO drama premiered, Wyle said he’s heard from numerous healthcare workers who have told them they “finally feel seen.” “Their stories echo the same themes: exhaustion, compassion, and a system that threatens to make their life’s work unsustainable,” he wrote in his USA Today op-ed.
At the end of the day, everybody knows somebody who will wind up in the hospital, Wyle has pointed out. And when that happens, it doesn’t matter what your political or religious beliefs are or what the beliefs of the healthcare workers helping you are.
“You’re going to be very happy that that Haitian nurse or that gay respiratory therapist or that Jewish doctor is working to save your life. That is just a reality that everybody experiences,” he told The Wrap. “And yeah, if everybody needs to remember that, I’m all for it.
Danielle Zickl is a Pennsylvania-based freelance writer. You can find her work here on Biography.com and in many other publications including National Geographic, Self, Runner’s World, Women’s Health, and more. In her free time, she enjoys working out, curling up with a good book, traveling, and spending time with her tortoiseshell cat, Willa.
