Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Pitt” Season 2, Episode 4.
As the strenuous Fourth of July shift on “The Pitt” Season 2 sees mounting pressure for plenty of the ER doctors and nurses — including Langdon’s tense return — the day has actually been more scaled back for Shabana Azeez’s Javadi and Fiona Dourif’s McKay, who both experienced a rather stressful first season as their personal lives coincided with the ER.
“This season Cassie’s life is a little bit more settled in a nice way — she’s not at the apex of chaos,” Dourif told TheWrap, noting that her Season 2 journey is a bit more “existential.” “‘What do I want my life to look like when I die? And maybe I could fill out some of the interests that I have been ignoring because of work and raising my kids …. it’s kind of big, middle-aged stuff.”
Dourif also played with how McKay’s interactions with patients would differ now that her character is a bit more settled and has prioritized self-care, alongside every ER staff member that went through Season 1’s mass casualty event. “Where does the empathy go from there?” she pondered.
Even though Javadi’s first day jitters didn’t reach the level of humiliation McKay felt as her ankle monitor went off in the ER, Azeez noted that first shift meant that Javadi didn’t yet feel comfortable in the Pitt. But now, after some time working in the ER and other rotations under her belt, she’s able to let her character’s vulnerabilities come through.
“When you start to work in a new place, you put your best foot forward, or you try to, and then maybe you faint,” Azeez said, referencing the Season 1 event that gave Javadi her nickname as “Crash.” “Now we can deal with the nuance and the complexity of her character and the ways she is a complex young woman.”
That complexity is quickly shown in Season 2 as she finds herself in competition with new Season 2 recruit Ogilvie (Lucas Iverson), opening up a side of herself that Azeez notes she isn’t proud of, but that she can’t quite control. “That’s interesting to be like, ‘Oh, I don’t like this part of myself, but I don’t have the experience yet to know how to stop this impulse that I have to hit this man,’” Azeez said. “I don’t want to play perfect characters, and I think that the show is very much like allowing us to open up a bit and be a bit more gray.”
Javadi also faces a pressure-cooker with her mother, which kicked off in Season 1 and continues into Season 2 as her mother pressures her to specialize in surgery, which Azeez predicts will eventually pop one day, whether during a day featured in a season or in between them.
“What she really needs is to decide if she wants to do medicine, and … if she doesn’t, then she needs to take that leap and quit. But it’s the only thing she knows, so it’s hard to make that choice without having an emotional fail safe, because if she does that and disappoints her parents, she really has no one, and I think that would be so painful for her,” Azeez said. “She’s trying to build this love with her mom so that she can fail and be her own person, but that’s just not coming, and that’s a really complicated thing.”
Azeez noted that Javadi is slowly building a community within the ER, which includes McKay, Samira (Supriya Ganesh) and newcomer Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi). Azeez explained that ahead of Season 2, she decided Javadi would interact with her patients in a similar kind manner to McKay, while Al-Hashimi comes in and presents another example to follow.
“She’s like, ‘I’m finding all these women who I have so much to learn from — I’ll just take a little bit of Al-Hashimi, a little bit of McKay and become a better doctor that I can be myself because of it,’” Azeez said.
Dourif sees Al-Hashimi’s buttoned-up methodologies as a bit of a foil to McKay, whom she explains has dealt with addiction, tragedy and other personal hardships prior to becoming a doctor that gives her a sense of street wisdom to patients.
“She views Al-Hashimi as the other kind, and there’s a lot of admiration there too,” Dourif said, noting the advanced technologies she hopes to bring to the Pitt also come with some resistance. “It’s also wonderful to see you know a younger woman in such a powerful role.”
Episode 4 also gave a glimpse into Javadi’s online presence as TikToker Dr. J, who seems to have gained a notable enough following to be requested by a young woman in the ER. While we don’t see any of her videos, Azeez imagines her online presence is “beautiful,” “uplifting,” “honest” and “raw.”
“We spend so much of our lives performing for people — whether it’s our bosses, our co-workers or literally performing for people for money,” Azeez said with a giggle. “There’s something really raw and unfiltered about the way she is online. I think that’s a Gen Z thing, the way they are unapologetic in a lot of ways, and able to be vulnerable online and open online.”
Azeez noted that there’s another side to Gen Z, which embodies cringe culture and are afraid of vulnerability, but, luckily Javadi is not in that camp. “I think she’s very much in the Addison Rae, ‘We should all be visibly trying’ camp of things,” Azeez said. “Her TikTok is a really uplifting space, in a space where people can go to live in the gray area and fuck up and be embarrassing and whatever else.”
After McKay’s Episode 1 comment that she needed to get laid, she took a step closer to making it happen in Episode 4, when she set up an informal date with a patient who had been hitting on her. Dourif noted what gave her the courage to do so was her interactions with her older lady’s man patient, played by Michael Nouri.
“It was really interesting to watch a character who has such a robust love life in his 80s and is really just free and enjoying it, [and] to see that that is possible and how restricted McKay’s life has been,” Dourif said. “That’s part of the reason why she is able to turn around and just be like, ‘Let me take a risk, man … let me see if this guy, maybe you want to see me at an art gallery later. It’s no big deal’ … It was cool to be that vulnerable.”
“The Pitt” Season 2 releases new episodes Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT on HBO Max.
