Editor’s note: The below interview contains spoilers for The Pitt Episode 14.
Medical dramas are a dime a dozen on television these days, but one show in particular has been drawing in more and more viewers each week, becoming a major streaming success alongside all of its network counterparts. The Pitt, created by R. Scott Gemmill and starring Noah Wyle, follows the doctors and nurses working in the emergency room of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital in real time as they go about what starts as an everyday, garden-variety day shift. As we quickly come to realize, though, the first season’s 15 episodes (compared to what should normally be a 12-hour workday) have much more in store for the staff of “the Pitt,” with their day culminating in an unexpected mass-casualty event involving an active shooter at a local music festival.
Ahead of the premiere of Episode 14, which wraps up The Pitt’s first major crisis storyline so far, Collider had the opportunity to speak with Fiona Dourif, who plays Dr. Cassie McKay, about some of her character’s biggest moments of the season to date. Over the course of the interview, which you can read below, Dourif discusses why she was interested in joining a medical drama after years of playing in other genres, why Cassie McKay is “scarier” than any of her previous roles, and how The Pitt’s latest episode became an unexpected family reunion when her real-life dad, Brad Dourif, was cast as Cassie’s father. She also discusses her character’s most significant on-screen relationships, her clash with Dr. Robby (Wyle) over how to handle one particular patient, and more.
COLLIDER: I’m excited to talk about The Pitt! I feel like this show has just caught on like wildfire on streaming. Every week, I see more and more people screaming about it.
FIONA DOURIF: I have gotten a text or email from everybody I’ve ever met in my entire life. [Laughs] It’s really, really, really cool.
‘The Pitt’s Fiona Dourif Explains Why Cassie McKay Is a “Scarier” Role for Her

Image via Max

Before we get into episode specifics, you’ve worked in a lot of different genres—horror, sci-fi, fantasy. I’m curious about why you were drawn to a medical drama. Did it have more to do with this show, in particular, having appeal?
DOURIF: I would have always loved to have been a part of a medical drama, there just wasn’t the right role. When I read the breakdown for this, I immediately thought I wanted to do a version of it. It’s both about being the right vibe, but also just luck of timing and age, and everything just lined up. I love genre. It’s my first love. I have a history of playing these kinds of feral characters, and this character is much, much, much closer to who I am — in fact, almost identical, including the backstory stuff, and it made this a little scarier.
Talking about the character’s backstory, one of the things I really enjoy about this show is that it sprinkles out the details about the doctors and the nurses over the course of this shift. It’s not like we’re getting some big infodump right at the beginning. When I talked to Taylor [Dearden], she said before the season even started, she got a breakdown of who Dr. King was, what her backstory was, to help inform her performance. Did you have a similar experience with Cassie?
DOURIF: In fact, I got that backstory with Taylor. We were brought in in groups of two, so me and her got it together. When we initially auditioned for it, we got a paragraph or two, and there were a couple of sentences which matched a sort of vibe that I think I have. Then Scott Gemmill and John Wells sat both me and Taylor down, actually together, and told me the backstory, and I almost laughed, it was so close to my real life. I was like, “Oh, that’s why you picked me!” I haven’t had that experience before.
One of the relationships that we get a sense of early on as being a little bit complicated is Cassie’s relationship with her ex, Chad, and the custody situation with Harrison, and how that ends up spilling into her work day, too, especially when they both show up at the hospital — and then Chloe shows up. It feels like this slow avalanche of more and more stress that’s piling up on [Cassie] as she’s dealing with so many other things.
DOURIF: Then, right at the end of that, is when the mass casualty happens, right? It’s a very frustrating relationship that she is tied to, because of Harrison, with a person who just doesn’t feel like he really sees or hears reason, which is very frustrating. I think that’s the overall feeling that’s there between them, or that McKay carries, and a sense of injustice of just dealing with somebody who is a manchild. I don’t know if you’ve had this ex-boyfriend, but I certainly have, who you can’t reason with. You just want to walk away, but you can’t. And then to have it unfurl in my workplace, the feeling that I was experimenting with was embarrassment. I thought Rob Heaps was wonderful and hilarious in it. Me and him actually ended up becoming friends. I really like the guy as a person. So, we had a little bit of chemistry, but ultimately frustration and humiliation.

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The series is streaming now on Max.

Despite some of her more stressful relationships, I really enjoy seeing the mentor-mentee dynamic that starts to grow between McKay and Javadi. It feels like McKay has a soft spot for Javadi and that she’s trying to help this younger doctor find her voice in a lot of ways.
DOURIF: I’m helping the younger doctor find her voice — and, also, go through what feels like an initiation that I’ve been through. I think that [Cassie’s] experience and Javadi’s experience in life are almost polar opposites, so that was an interesting dynamic to play with. I think that she is a smart kid who I know is going to be very good at her job, but the thing that she lacks is my strong point. So, it was knowing that. She is probably smarter than me, probably did better in school, but doesn’t really understand fundamentally how the world works, which was where I come in.
More street-smart, and then also coming to the job, it seems, a bit later in comparison to some of these other doctors.
DOURIF: Yeah. [She’s] from a different culture. Also, there is a cultural divide between my age and the younger generation in a way that feels actually quite stark. I’m pretty close to Gen X, [and] I think we were actually just raised differently. I was a latchkey kid, and I think that’s very rare these days.
According to ‘The Pitt’s Fiona Dourif, Cassie Doesn’t Know Whether She Made the Right Call About David

One of the storylines that I wanted to speak with you about is McKay’s involvement with the young male patient, David, who is, at this point in the story, under suspicion of having some involvement in Pitt Fest, especially paired with what his mother discovers that he was posting online about female classmates. It culminates in him being detained and his mother pleading with him to get some kind of help, but it also leads to this clash between McKay and Dr. Robby. He’s a bit critical in thinking that she might have overreached in contacting the police. From your character’s perspective, is she convinced that, in this situation, she’s done the right thing and her decision was the right thing to do? Even if he’s not ultimately responsible, do you think she feels that she handled it correctly?
DOURIF: I don’t know if she does. She thought about the stakes of it and what the consequences could be if he was capable of what he wrote down that he could do. The stakes are really high. But I don’t think that she ended up really convinced or certain that she made the right choice. It’s doing your best. I think she knows that she did her best.
On the other side of it, on the other side of the stakes, is the damage that can be caused to a kid who is 19, who is obviously struggling, but then has the experience of being arrested and suspicious, and the domino effect of that, I think, is also quite real. In real life, from my talking to doctors on set, they just end up having to make calls that are both correct and incorrect, in retrospect. So, I look at it as McKay doing her best.
‘The Pitt’s Fiona Dourif Was Delighted To Have Her Real-Life Father Playing Cassie’s Dad

On a lighter note, I was so delighted to see your dad [Brad Dourif] pop up in Episode 14. There’s a great shot where the camera moves past someone’s shoulder, and then there he is, just standing there in the midst of everything that’s going on. Whose idea was it to have him on the show?
DOURIF: I don’t know whose idea it was. My suspicion is that it was Noah Wyle, because I know that Noah had talked to me about my dad. Noah has seen, like, every one of my dad’s movies, and would talk to me about that. So, my suspicion is Noah Wyle. [Executive producer] Simran Baidwan was the one who approached me before they put the offer out to my dad to see how I felt, and I was delighted. The Dourifs were delighted. It was really tender and special.
It seemed like you had fun on set with him for a day, getting to hang out.
DOURIF: Two days! Two days, and we got dinner. We’ve been on set before. The last time I was physically playing him, with the same face. So, this was different, but really special. I’m incredibly lucky to have a dad [who’s invested] and I like hanging out with. Not everybody gets that.
At the end of Episode 14, during the crisis situation, McKay drills into her ankle monitor because it starts acting up again, and she’s ignoring calls that pertain to that, and then we see the fallout from that when the cops show up at the end of the episode. What can you tease, in terms of how any resolution will play out in the finale?
DOURIF: We were waiting for that script for a little bit, and I was very impressed by how well Scott Gemmill, who wrote [Episode] 15, tied up every last loose end, and her character arc. I thought it was just so impressive. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m excited to. But the script was wildly good. I can tease that there’s a lot of humiliation. There’s a lot of humiliation and some amount of resolve.
New episodes of The Pitt premiere Thursdays on Max.

The Pitt

Release Date

January 9, 2025

Network

Max

Showrunner

R. Scott Gemmill

Directors

Amanda Marsalis

Writers

Joe Sachs, Cynthia Adarkwa

Noah Wyle

Dr. Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch

Tracy Ifeachor

Uncredited