Katherine LaNasa got teary-eyed as she remembered how Stephen Colbert’s words helped pull her from “a dark place.”
On Wednesday’s episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” LaNasa explained that her meeting the host at the Emmys last year left her “gobsmacked” and she could not properly explain how important Colbert was to her. Luckily, her guesting on his show gave her the chance to tell him.
“About a year before I got ‘The Pitt,’ I was in a dark place,” LaNasa said. “I had been unemployed for a while. I had cancer. When I was growing up, if something didn’t go your way, it was like, ‘Why did you do it like that?’ So I had subconsciously developed this paradigm where I thought that if I just did everything perfectly, that I would insulate myself somehow from loss and bad things. So when I found myself in this place, I felt like a failure. I was riddled with regrets.”
She continued: “I saw that clip of you talking to Anderson Cooper that is so very famous, and you – and I paraphrase – say that our grief and our loss is part of what makes us human, and it allows us to understand and connect with other people, and if we’re really going to love our life, that we have to love all of it. We can’t turn our back on that part.”
LaNasa spent a year on the award circuit enjoying one win after the next for her work on “The Pitt” Season 1. She won the Emmy and Critics Choice awards for Outstanding Supporting Actress playing nurse Dana Evans. She is back for the second season of the acclaimed HBO Max series with her character grappling with the trauma she endured through Season 1.
Colbert won an Emmy for his late-night show the same night LaNasa won for “The Pitt” which was how the two first had a conversation. Despite the win, “The Late Show” is coming to an end in 2026. The final episode is set to air on Thursday, May 21.
“The Pitt” Season 2 airs Thursdays on HBO Max.
You can watch the full “The Late Show” segment in the video above.
