‘The Pitt’ Star Sepideh Moafi Says New Doctor’s Headbutting With Robby Is Like ‘Jazz Tones Clashing’

Note: This story contains spoilers from “The Pitt” Season 2, Episode 2.

Sepideh Moafi has clocked in at “The Pitt” and jumped right into clashing with Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robby — and she’s loving every minute of it.

The actress joined the second season of the lauded HBO Max series as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi — a new attending physician set to take Robby’s place leading the hospital’s emergency department while he goes on sabbatical. Despite being a newcomer for Season 2, she told TheWrap that the nerves coming aboard went away fast.

“Of course, I was overwhelmed with nerves and anxiety and feeling a kind of pressure,” Moafi said. “But as soon as I got on set, it was kind of surreal. It was like walking into this living organism: everything’s pulsing, breathing, moving, humming, and I felt like I could slip right in.

“Despite being this well-oiled machine, there’s a deep kind of authorship and trust on set,” she added. “So they trust you to know what you’re doing and do your thing, and they don’t get in the way.”

Although Dr. Al-Hashimi comes in as a temporary replacement for Robby, she wastes not time in shaking things up. Not only is she calling Robby out for the way he’s managing the Pitt, but she also pushes for more AI integration in the ER. This all excites as many doctors as it ruffles other’s feathers.

Below, Moafi unpacks how she thinks fans will respond to Al-Hashimi and Robby’s initial head-butting, playing a pro-AI doctor, and how she juggles Langdon’s first day back on top of everything else. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

TheWrap: How did you and Noah want to build Dr. Robby and Dr. Al-Hashimi in the earliest hours of the shift?

I don’t need to say it, he’s such a pro, and we both have a background of theater, and we’ve trained so we didn’t beat a dead horse here. We didn’t talk about things a lot. We just got to know each other through the work and then outside of work, and we both have a strong intuition. We both love to play and experiment. He’s such a dream scene partner, really.

As characters, they’re at the same level. They’re both fluent in the language of medicine — they just speak different dialects. She prioritizes more of a progressive approach, risk mitigation, burnout prevention, long-term outcomes, and he prioritizes more speed and sort of acknowledges the institutional reality. So it’s this tension between the old school versus the future of healthcare, and the evolution of healthcare and the inevitability of technology in healthcare. So when you have the blueprint, the scripts, it’s easy to build chemistry off of that. Especially with two actors who are so game to play and experiment. I’ve told Noah countless times — just the the feeling of aliveness in our work together. It’s really exciting and it’s fun to play with these tensions.

It would have been easy to make Al-Hashimi the villain of the season — someone coming in to disrupt everything Robby is doing — but that’s not what is happening. There is tension but also a mutual respect in the other’s skillset despite them not agreeing in how to get things done. How do you think fans will take to Al-Hashimi?

I have strong opinions about this and I’ll withhold some of them, but I think that in general, we’re less forgiving and lenient toward female characters — especially with strong POVs, women who are in leadership positions, who carry authority and command. So I do expect that there will be some people who will come down hard and not even really understand their biases, but I hope that throughout the season we’re able to see, like you just said, they’re both so good at their job. She is a disruptor, but not because she’s trying to take over or dominate. She’s trying to elevate and advance a system that’s hanging on by a thread. And it’s fun that neither one of them is wrong. They’re diametrically opposed in their philosophies and approaches to the work. But that’s why the tension lands. And I love that, especially in the beginning.

They both have a different rhythm, and I hope that people hear the rhythm initially as dissonance and kind of like jazz tones clashing. Then throughout you’ll hear more of the harmonies and see more of the harmonies the way that they come together and see eye-to-eye and respect each other. Just because she believes one thing and he believes another thing, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong and it kind of reflects a deeper reality of having to coexist with people you don’t agree with.

One of those big changes she’s trying to implement in the hospital is more A.I. use. That’s certainly one way for people to be more wary of her.

I certainly had to confront my own judgments and biases with technology and AI. I feel so tech-illiterate in so many ways, and I read this book, Eric Topol’s “Deep Medicine,” which is about AI in medicine and how it’s used because of burnout, because we only have human brains that have limitations, and we’re always drawing on the sort of breadth of experience the most recent medical cases or experiences that we’ve had. We sometimes have blind spots. So as physicians, AI can be an invaluable tool to help see things that we might overlook, or catch certain cases or diagnoses that we might miss.

I think the character made me reorient myself within the tech world and AI and its uses. I think she’s not somebody who doesn’t understand the abuses or potential downfalls of this technology, and she doesn’t see it as replacing doctors. She sees it as reducing human blind spots. She’s seen systems fail, especially the most vulnerable and marginalized communities. And so anything that could reduce bias and error delay — I think anything that can help improve or advance this flailing, failing system — I think we have to use it to our advantage before it uses us. So her radical position, it’s not the technology itself. It’s her refusal to romanticize intuition when lives are on the line.

Not only is Al-Hashimi butting heads with Robby on his last day before sabbatical, but it’s also Langdon’s first day back at the hospital. How is she juggling that on top of everything else?

I think she sees Robby — kind of as this cowboy in Episode One. If you remember, they walk into the first trauma together, and the way that he’s talking to Garcia, the way he’s running the ER, how everything is based on his impulses. He’s not very measured. It just seems like he’s a very impulsive, wild cowboy and I see the way he’s treating Langdon, and I don’t understand the history there, but I do think that one of my foundational principles as a doctor and as a teaching doctor is to mentor, to take care and empower the future of medicine.

I take Langdon under my wing a bit, especially since I see people are talking about him. I don’t really understand it, and I’m not going to engage in drama. Robby’s being harsh with him and he’s the most capable, skilled physician on the floor aside from Al-Hashimi and Robby. I’d say the most experienced senior doctor. So I don’t understand why there’s tension there, but I do find it problematic that Robby is trying to keep him in triage.

“The Pitt” Season 2 releases new episodes Thursdays on HBO Max.

The post ‘The Pitt’ Star Sepideh Moafi Says New Doctor’s Headbutting With Robby Is Like ‘Jazz Tones Clashing’ appeared first on TheWrap.