‘The Pitt’ Star Katherine LaNasa on Dana and Robby’s Fight, His Sabbatical

SPOILER ALERT: This submit comprises spoilers for “7:00 pm,” the thirteenth episode of “The Pitt” Season 2, now streaming on HBO Max.

Katherine LaNasa says that her cost nurse character, Dana Evans, on “The Pitt” would never use the phrase “triggering,” however the Emmy winner can’t assist however attain for it when attempting to grapple with the end of Season 2’s thirteenth hour on the clock. For two episodes now, Dana has been at odds with Robby (Noah Wyle), her strongest ally in the ED and the one who sometimes ranges her out —a service she also offers to him.

But neither is working at their best by 7:00 p.m. on July 4th. Specifically for Dana, she’s triggered on two fronts. After her pupil nurse Emma (Laëtitia Hollard) was attacked by a coked-out affected person, one that Dana subdued with a punch and a mysteriously helpful shot of Versed, she is struggling to search out any sense of calm as she bats away the PTSD of her personal assault last season.

“She’s incredibly off balance,” LaNasa tells Variety. “She’s still really reeling from that punch. She didn’t take care of herself. I think it’s part of why it was really important to her that the rape victim set herself up to be able to get justice for herself, should she change her mind. Because Dana didn’t do it. Dana didn’t press charges. That’s a fine choice if you want to make that choice. But I don’t know that it’s working out well for Dana.”

Adding to her defensive conduct is Robby’s persistent inquisition about the techniques she used to deal with Emma’s attacker. Every time he tries to ask about why she had a sedative in her pocket or questions what actually occurred, she launches into her personal line of questioning about Robby’s more and more regarding mindset round his impending motorcycle-bound sabbatical.

By the end of Episode 13, she has confronted him yet again about his incapability to obviously state the true objective of his journey and his risky anger over the state of the ED ahead of his impending absence. She reminds him that they’ll survive without him until he’s again, just like they did when she give up last season following her personal assault.

“What if I don’t come back?” he responds in the episode’s final alternate, chopping to black on a shocked Dana’s face.

“I think that if he leaves, she’s there all alone, and Dana is a person who doesn’t face her own need for help either,” LaNasa says. “But more importantly, there is just something very organically stressed out about her with him not being OK and not making a commitment to come back. It’s that kind of unwillingness to answer me or sometimes even look at me. That would be her worst nightmare, if anything happened to him. They’ve been through this for decades together. It would be like losing a spouse in a way. So I think she’s just up to here with her inability to reach him. He’s vital to her.”

This isn’t the first shouting match they’ve engaged in this season, or even this episode. Their last few encounters have left Dana on the brink of tears or screaming in anger at herself in the rest room. Robby, for his half, isn’t precisely smiling after each bout both. But this final speak of the episode is their most trustworthy and alarming.

Before he even admits he may not come again, Dana tells Robby that he’s being overly confrontational and aggressive, and he must go house if that’s what he needs. Her actual phrases are that he wants a time-out, like she used to present her children; he responds by telling her he doesn’t want a mom. He had one in every of those, he says, and she walked out on him.

In that second, Dana learns one thing deeply private about her pal and colleague that she never knew, and emphatically apologizes for stepping on an emotional landmine she didn’t know was there. Robby responds, “It doesn’t matter. Who gives a fuck?”

“I like that moment, and I try to just justify it for myself,” LaNasa says. “You could just assume that people weren’t close [with family], and if they didn’t ever open up about their parents or something, you just let it be.
I don’t have much of a relationship with one of my parents, and most people don’t really know that about me. It doesn’t really come up, so it makes sense why it hasn’t for them.”

But for Dana, her maternal intuition towards Robby comes from a real place of concern that her pal has determined to take his personal life. “There’s a kind of panicky desperation that he triggers in her,” LaNasa says. “I think the whole thing feels terrifying, and I think it’s also happening at a time when she doesn’t feel OK. I had a therapist once that told my husband and I, ‘You both can’t have a problem at the same time. Who’s going to be the one who listens?’ At this point for Dana and Robby, nobody can listen.
Nobody’s doing OK. Nobody is the pillar.”

Even though they spend the episode oscillating between avoiding each other and going at each other, Dana never loses sight of her bedside method. She joins Emma to continue their season-long take care of the unhoused Digby (Charles Baker), whom they’ve bathed and now supply to present a haircut. As they gently ease him into the thought of tidying up his look, they speak about his household and his daughter’s marriage ceremony. Emma’s kindness towards him leaves Dana beaming, a mentor-mentee relationship that is often reserved for Robby and his residents. After worrying about her security all day, LaNasa says it wasn’t arduous to muster delight for the younger lady sitting in entrance of her.

“It’s easy to feel,” she says.
”I also really feel actually happy with Laëtitia. She just graduated from Juilliard and walked onto the set. It’s unimaginable.”

In that scene, Dana pulls again the curtain on her family, which she doesn’t often speak about and audiences have never seen, given the sequence’ four-walls, single-day framework. She mentions that she has lower her husband Benji’s hair throughout their complete marriage; she later mentions her kids to Robby of their heated alternate. While the sequence has never drawn audiences a full household tree for Dana, LaNasa often thinks about who she is exterior her pressure-cooker job. It’s second nature to her understanding of Dana, a lot so that she will be able to launch into it at a second’s discover.

“Dana has a middle daughter that has been tricky,” she says. “That has caused her a lot of stress. You’re only doing as well as your kids. If one of your kids is doing poorly, that’s how well you’re doing. I think that she’s got a daughter that kind of keeps her a little on edge, and she’s always hoping that one’s OK. In my imagination, she is very close to her granddaughter. She has a 23-year-old granddaughter, and that’s someone that she’s looking forward to seeing on certain nights. Those are the nights that she comes over, and they have their movie and their pizza or whatever they do. They have their little rituals.”

For Dana’s husband, LaNasa doesn’t totally purchase into the little perception the present’s writers have given him to this point.

“I know they said that he would fly off the handle, but I would say that I generally view him as just a big, calm hunk of a man,” she says. “I think that Dana’s home is very tidy and kind of minimal, and I don’t think that she has bad taste. She just likes things calm. I think she likes her family to come over. But I think Dana is tired. Dana is really tired. I imagine, also, that she went to the family cabin out in the woods somewhere after she got punched, and she was going to take some time off. But because she wasn’t getting any help, she just really wasn’t doing well. One of her daughters was like, ‘This isn’t working for you. You need to go get some help.’ So I think she got some help. I just don’t think she got enough help.”

All of that informs the one who stands in entrance of Robby at the end of episode 13, pleading for him to be trustworthy about what he actually envisions for this sabbatical. LaNasa was nervous about the writers’ alternative to present the sturdy duo of Robby and Dana so many hurdles this season, however she finally gave in to that freefall.

“Noah was really down for us to have conflict, and I said, ‘Let’s do it,’” she says. “I trust [executive producers] John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill immensely. I didn’t want it to come across that they’re nasty to each other. I want the audience to know and for the story to be that they love each other, but that they’re human and they’re struggling.”