Every workplace has that one person who quietly and efficiently keeps the entire operation running without complaint. In Max’s The Pitt, that person is charge nurse Dana Evans, played by Katherine LaNasa (Truth Be Told, Devious Maids). Each shift, she serves as the emergency room’s control center, perpetual pinch hitter, and staff therapist. She keeps tabs on which providers are seeing which patients. She jumps in to break up fights. She offers supportive words to doctors, nurses, and interns whose nerves and emotions are frayed. She does it with a seemingly boundless capacity to absorb stress. That all changes at the end of the ninth hour of the shift, when a frustrated patient, Doug Driscoll, catches her taking a quick smoke break and punches her in the face. A shaken Dana insists on finishing her shift, determined to push through because that’s what she always does: push through.
During her recovery in the following episode, “4 P.M.,” LaNasa vibrates with an innate understanding of how this resilient woman is wired. That’s because she based her on a “really kick-ass” woman from her own life, her aunt, and an actual L.A. charge nurse LaNasa shadowed as she prepared to play this role. She also relied on information about Dana’s backstory from The Pitt’s creator R. Scott Gemmill and executive producer John Wells, the experiences of various medical professionals who provided training and guidance to the show’s actors, and even her personal experiences with hospice nurses. “I was very involved in the deaths of a couple of people over the last couple of years,” LaNasa says. “With the hospice nurses, I realized how comforting they were, in a way because of their emotional detachment. They were very compassionate, but they knew what to expect.”
How did your experience with medical professionals inform how you play Dana?
I shadowed a nurse called Kathy Garvin, who my character is loosely based on, at L.A. General. On top of that, John Wells had two weeks of doctor school and all kinds of medical professionals come in to talk to us, really the top people in the field. They love John Wells because he did so much to bring attention to emergency medicine with ER.
I was really touched by how emotional they got. So many of them cried when I asked them about their experience. One of our actors, Tim Van Pelt — he’s also a charge nurse, actually. He’s on set with us every day. We have real charge nurses and real ER doctors on set every day, and real ER nurses that are part of the scenes who are actors and nurses. I remember I asked him, “What was your best day and what was your worst day?” And he started crying. One of the biggest guys in emergency medicine education started crying when he talked about what people have been through, the COVID stories and how deeply that impacted them psychologically.
When I went and shadowed Kathy, I saw this sense of real knowing and care of their regulars. We have our Myrna and our Earl and all those people on the show. She told me about a guy there and what his journey had been like. I really got to see her relationship to him. But it was very matter-of-fact, because there’s emotional, mental, physical trauma going through there all day, every day. For them to be able to serve everyone, they have to have this kind of emotional efficiency. Later I asked her, thinking about the Doug Driscoll storyline: “If people are so rude and they’re demanding to be seen first because they have good insurance or whatever else, do you ever subtly put them to the back of the line?” She says, “No, but I wouldn’t give them a sandwich.”
Are there physical or emotional qualities in Dana that you took from shadowing Kathy?
Very much: that compassion, the calm, I also look a little bit like her — there were a lot of similarities. The way she was with the regulars: They’re having a fit, but it’s not that big of a deal because they’re her people. The line Dana has in eight, that she’s been doing this for 32 years because she likes helping people, especially the ones that might otherwise fall through the cracks — I think that is a sentiment that probably came right from the mouth of Kathy Garvin.
In episode nine, when Dana has to come in and break up the fight about masks between the two women in the waiting room, was that complicated to block and shoot?
No, it wasn’t. Honestly, the actors were so good. That redheaded couple was amazing. They made me have to fight to get them to shut up. Noah wrote something like, “The sound of Dana’s voice was like a gunshot going off inside” when she’s like, “That’s enough!” So I just went for it and they did not pull it back. They wanted us to go up to 11.
We’ve literally built a continuous emergency department. None of the walls move. Some of the glass they can tilt for reflection, but nothing comes apart. We don’t hang lights. It just creates this constant fluidity. We don’t go away while they set up the shot; we all stand around and when we’re ready to shoot, we figure it out together.
As an actor, you’re used to playing scenes that are dramatic or intense, but I wonder how much your body and mind absorb the stress of this role.
Every day at work, I’m looking at someone with a gunshot wound. I’m wondering, Is Robby going to come unglued? To play that with a sense of reality, you’re constantly opening up this compassionate part of yourself. It really accentuated the fact that we never know what’s going on with people. Just a little kindness at the right time could go a long way.
On the other side, going through the journey that Dana takes in nine, ten and 11, I mean, I was ready to be done with that. [Laughs.] It was such an honor to get these great scripts and move into the forefront with this big emotional arc. But you’re playing a woman who — I mean, I can almost start crying about it now — her whole life has been this hospital. John and Scott told me Dana’s mother died when she was 16. They also said she volunteered there in high school, so I think she immediately found purpose and solace in the hospital.
I think she’s like Dana from the block, right? Charge nurses get paid well. She’s probably elevated her family. There’s a huge sense of purpose and pride for Dana. So for this guy to beat me up in my workplace, really, just takes so much away from me. It’s very degrading. At that stage, you ask yourself, how do you go home? John and Scott told me that Dana has three daughters. I have pictures of my own daughter on the set, as my character’s granddaughter. So how do you go home to your daughters and granddaughter and be like, “Mom goes to a place where they beat her up every day”?
Did Kathy or any of the other medical professionals you spoke with talk about being in situations like that?
It happens all the time. I saw a situation at the hospital where there was security there for a guy; there are a lot of rules about when a violent person can be restrained. So they’re in danger. These are gritty, badass, tough ladies.
How much information did John and Scott give you and how much were you able to create yourself?
They told me that her mother had died when she was in high school and that she was from a fairly large family. I based her a little bit on my youngest aunt. My mother’s from a very large Catholic family in New Orleans. I had an aunt that was seven or eight years older than me, and we thought she was so cool. She was kind of a tomboy. She called my grandmother “woman.” My grandmother had this long yellow car with a brown hardtop. She’s like, “I’m not driving that bruised banana, woman.”
In the South, probably because of crops and farming, you could get your pilot’s license really young, like 14 or something. She got her pilot’s license in her teens. She was a really kick-ass woman and ultimately, a very serious woman. I just thought she was everything.
What I loved about this episode is that as soon as Dana’s hurt, it’s immediately apparent how much everybody in the ER values and appreciates her.
That whole arc was really just beautiful. I think Noah wrote 109, in a way, to show how much these nurses do. In one shift, they can go from helping in a trauma, to dealing with someone’s dog, to helping a young intern, to breaking up a fight. There’s so much on their plates.
I can remember one time I was at the ER being tested for something that was way scary. It worked out, but the way that this ER nurse talked to me about it was like, “This happens, that happens, it’s not going to last.” She calmed me down. That’s one of the people that I’m hoping to shine some light on. It’s really important for me to bring a lot of dignity to these people.