Playing one of the worst days of Mohan’s life, her first reaction was “I feel like I really screwed up”
Photo: Warrick Page/HBO Max
Spoilers follow for The Pitt season two episode 10, “4:00 P.M.,” which premiered on HBO Max on Thursday, March 12.
Everyone who works at the Pitt is having an awful day, but resident Samira Mohan (Supriya Ganesh) is having a particularly awful one. Her diabetic patient Orlando Diaz (William Guirola) walked out after learning his hospital bills could swell to tens of thousands of dollars. Samira’s mother won’t stop calling to discuss her new relationship and plans to sell their family home. Then the hospital’s computer system goes down just as victims from a waterpark-slide collapse arrive at the ER. Mohan is accosted by a pushy patient and then swarmed by desperate ones in the waiting room, and suddenly she’s having a panic attack — a totally reasonable response, if not exactly one Ganesh saw coming.
“The panic attack was a surprise to me. But then I was like, ‘Why would we ever know a panic attack is coming?’” Ganesh laughs. “I leaned into the unexpectedness of it. I have had my own experience with it in the past, and I was having, weirdly, imposter syndrome about my panic attack. Did I even really experience it? I was looking up symptoms, and I was like, Oh no, I did. I should have recorded myself.”
In The Pitt’s first season, Mohan is a thoughtful, curious resident, though her supervisor, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), criticizes her for spending too much time with her patients. She’s a good doctor but, under the hospital’s time restrictions, not a particularly efficient one. Her relationship with Robby seems stronger in season two, until Robby reacts to her “4:00 P.M.” panic attack with shocking contempt — cursing at her and telling her to go home if she can’t do her job. It’s a galling moment Ganesh communicates with a devastated, dazed expression and a glimmer of what she considers Mohan’s own self-hatred. “She processes how awful it is after the fact in a way that a lot of people process something that’s traumatic,” Ganesh says. “Genuinely, I think this is one of the worst days of her life.”
Mohan is now a fourth-year resident. She’s applying for fellowships. She doesn’t seem to be struggling as much with her caseload this season. In what ways did the time jump change your character, and how did you want your performance to reflect that heading into season two?
Season-one Mohan starts off in a really insecure place and then gains a lot of confidence by the end of the shift. I relished the time jump between seasons because I thought that was such an interesting way to show growth on a show that has this time constraint. I didn’t really know where her arc was going — the writers developed it as the show went on — so it naturally came together that a lot of this confidence gets chipped away by the end of season with the obstacles that were being thrown at me.
New this season is the dynamic between Mohan and her mom, which really starts coming to the fore in episode seven, when Mohan’s mom is calling her over and over again. From what you understood about Mohan, did it track for her to be super-frazzled by her mom?
Oh yeah. That was the one thing creator R. Scott Gemmill and I had talked about in between seasons, and that was a great thing to do imagination work on. This is not something Samira would do, ever — her mom just met this guy, and now she’s going on this cruise with him and selling the house that Samira thought she was going to go back to. That was really meaty and fun to play with. I definitely think she was always closer to her dad, which is why the loss of her father was so hard in her teenage years. While she is close with her mom, I decided they get on each other’s nerves a little. When you’re an only child and you only have one parent left, you end up in this weird almost-friend place with them, and that’s what Samira unfortunately had to be in some ways for her mom. The frazzledness, it was a choice I made. It’s part of what’s fueling this nervous breakdown.
Tell me about the imagination work you did.
I did this in season one, too, but it was really important in my prep for season two to imagine that last day with her dad. Samira’s dad passed away from a heart attack because of medical mismanagement. They go to this hospital because her dad’s having chest pains. They send him back home; there’s maybe a tinge of racism there, where it’s like, We don’t have time for this. He goes back home, and then he passes. One reason she’s so gutted about losing the house is because that was the last place she saw her dad alive. She always thought she was going to go back there. It’s not unheard of for South Asian people to live together with their partner and their own parents. She’s even losing her mom because she’s now starting this new relationship. That’s one less person that’s going to remember her dad the way she wants him to be remembered.
Samira reaches her breaking point in “4:00 P.M.” She’s snapping at patients. She starts experiencing stomach pains. She thinks she’s having a heart attack. I’m curious about the physical challenges of externalizing this internal thing she’s going through.
I haven’t seen the edit, but one of the decisions I made was to have clenched fists. It’s not something I experienced, but a lot of people who experience panic attacks have that. I wanted to make sure there was chest pain, but also stomach pain, which women sometimes experience heart attacks as. A big challenge for me was the breathing, because you have to work yourself up to hyperventilating. I really had to figure out how to time myself, because otherwise I would have passed out. Every patient on our show gets an intimacy coordinator, and as a patient, I got my intimacy coordinator for that scene, Nicole Randall. I asked Nicole to keep an eye on when the camera would start rolling, so that I could start doing my breath work at the right time. It’s interesting how broad their role can be. It’s also about, like, comfort.
When Robby questions Mohan about her symptoms, you give this little pause before Mohan says “no” to the possibility of being pregnant. I feel like the fandom is going to interrogate this pause.
This is her boss — in some ways, this paternal figure — essentially asking her if she has sex. The pause is very much her being like, I feel really awkward about admitting that there’s no possible way that I would be at risk of that right now. She’s embarrassed about that.
That’s how I read it, too, but I know about the Mohan and Abbot shippers. That pregnancy question is before this really unprofessional moment where Robby unleashes on Mohan. He says, “Is this a panic attack because of your mommy issues? Jesus, do you need to go home? You should go home. I don’t need the fucking liability. Go home.” It’s awful as an audience member to watch. What was your reaction to reading it, and what do you remember about filming it?
My first reaction, and in some ways it also is Samira’s reaction when she first hears it, is, “I feel like I really screwed up.” Whether that’s true in an objective sense, Samira – and I relate to her about this — is someone who’s really hard on herself. There’s a part of Samira that hates herself, that understands or even wants to say those things to herself in that moment.
But it’s also about the context of where it’s happening, how it’s happening, and how he says it. Even as the character, I felt very emotional seeing Dr. Al-Hashimi in the room because that’s someone I really want to impress and I’m really fucking embarrassed that this is happening in front of her. In the moment when he’s talking to Samira that way, I feel like I was so focused on trying to convince him. Then the second he leaves, I’m like, I can’t fucking believe that just happened. I don’t even know what to say. I don’t know if it’s a point of no return, but I think it’s pretty bad — especially when he apologizes. The fact that he doesn’t really stand by that apology, she’s like, What do I even do about this? This is my boss. I’m trying to get into a fellowship here next year. Is this something I’m comfortable having to potentially experience again?
What’s interesting to me is that the reason why he’s so hard on her about this panic attack is because he had one himself after the MCI. He is projecting, and I’m sure that’s how he talks to himself after that mental-health crisis. There’s things Samira doesn’t know, and I don’t think she ever will, because he’s someone that keeps things like that really close to his chest. As an audience member, you can see where it’s coming from, whether you agree or disagree with it. Personally, I think nothing gives you the right to speak to anyone that way. But she doesn’t realize where it’s coming from, and I don’t think she even realizes how awful it was until after it’s over.
Did you and Noah play it a lot of different ways? How did it compare to the table read?
I put up everything that had gone wrong in her shift so far. She is aware she literally lost a patient, Mr. Diaz. That situation is really triggering. She feels almost embarrassed to say that she’s worried about this patient, and he reminds her of her dad, and she’s worried about the family, because we’ve seen Robby in particular react to her being too preoccupied with a patient. But it’s really on her mind.
In the table read, we were both very calm. We started finding things while filming. Noah did a couple takes where he pushed himself further. I don’t know what ended up in the actual episode. It sounds like it’s one of the ones where he pushed a little further. I’m someone that doesn’t like to force anything. She’s responding so much to what she’s hearing. I would really let myself listen for all of my coverage and take the environment in as much as I could. After the scene, Noah and I gave each other a hug because that was kind of awful. We don’t really feel this way about each other. It was good to have that closure by the end of it.
Episode ten is so heavy. I want to ask you about a slightly lighter moment in “1:00 P.M.,” and Robby’s double take when he walks by and sees you and Abbot (Shawn Hatosy) together. I would have lost it at that expression. How did that come together?
It was really funny because Shawn could see the door, but he was like, “I need to look elsewhere, because if I watch Noah doing that, I’m gonna lose it.” It’s such a great moment of physical comedy. We did so many takes of that with so many variations and so many options. I’m sure they could make a blooper reel. I had a very easy thing of being focused on the wound, so I could totally miss it. But Shawn had a harder thing where he had to completely avoid looking in that direction to make it realistic. It was fun. It was in the script for sure. That wasn’t improv.
The thing with Isa and Sepi doing a double take — that was improv. They filmed their portion of the scene, and Shawn and I were off-camera at that point. Then when they were filming the other way of the coverage — behind Isa’s back, essentially — Isa was like, “Wait, I’m sorry. I need to react. This is so crazy.” They reset the camera to get a take of her doing it. She was so insistent. Santos is such a self-proclaimed gossip queen, she would absolutely go, “Wait, what?”
I love that. It’s a hard day in the Pitt. Sometimes you just gotta watch what could be sexual tension between a couple of people.
Yeah! And Samira has an awful day. If getting some help from Abbot about this patient who doesn’t really have the best outcome is her bright light of the day, good for her. It’s the last bit of hope she will probably feel for the rest of the day.