Production designer Nina Ruscio and casting director Cathy Sandrich Gelfond dish on designing \u201ctriggering\u201d hospital sets, casting for raw authenticity and how their time at Berkeley taught them to watch life closely, turning every detail into material for an immersive narrative.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ask people what they love most about\u00a0The Pitt, the HBO Max medical drama that debuted in 2025 and went on to sweep the Emmys, and the answer is almost always the same: It feels so real.<\/p>\n
The show\u2019s pace appears just like an emergency room \u2014 lively and chaotic, always in motion. Its characters seem like real doctors and nurses you\u2019d meet in an overcrowded urban ER: They\u2019re highly competent and compassionate, sometimes curt and distracted, while bearing a mountain of responsibility and layers of trauma they absorb during their grueling 15-hour shift.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But what exactly goes into making the show, a massive hit with over 10 million viewers per episode, feel so real? How do you create an immersive, full-bodied world that pulls you in so far you forget that this place and these people don\u2019t actually exist?<\/p>\n
Turns out, two UC Berkeley alumni know all about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nina Ruscio and Cathy Sandrich Gelfond both work on\u00a0The Pitt \u2014\u00a0Ruscio as the production designer and Sandrich Gelfond as a casting director. They also both graduated from Berkeley in 1983 with degrees in English, widely regarded as one of the country\u2019s leading programs. But the self-described \u201csoul sisters\u201d didn\u2019t actually meet until they began pre-production and development for\u00a0The Pitt\u00a0in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI always tell people who say that English is an impractical degree, \u2018Are you kidding me?\u2019\u201d says Sandrich Gelfond. \u201cIt\u2019s about storytelling. It\u2019s about character and tone and human behavior. If you know how to write, if you know how to communicate your thoughts and ideas, you have the foundation to do just about anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
In this\u00a0UC Berkeley News\u00a0interview, Ruscio and Sandrich Gelfond talk about designing \u201ctriggering\u201d hospital sets, casting for raw authenticity over Hollywood gloss and how their time at Berkeley taught them to watch life closely, turning every quirk and detail into material for an immersive narrative.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Production designer Nina Ruscio and casting director Cathy Sandrich Gelfond dish on designing \u201ctriggering\u201d hospital sets, casting for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":224751,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-224750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}