The scene that made Fiona Dourif’s heart race the most on set for “The Pitt” Season 2 wasn’t simulating CPR or resetting a tailbone.
It was asking someone out.
In Episode 4, Dr. Cassie McKay gets dealt a flirty patient. After she diagnoses him with a non-fracture foot injury and permits his discharge, she confirms she won’t be seeing him again — “as a patient.” She starts to walk away, before doubling back and telling him she might check out an art gallery after her shift, around 9 p.m. He smiles.
“When I was actually shooting it, I remember my heart was beating out of my chest,” Dourif tells TODAY.com. “I’m somebody who has spent decades of my life single, and I know how scary that is. I’m actually quite bad at it. I’ve done it a couple times, but just the fear of rejection is really acute in the way that feels like a trauma bay.
“It’s also — it’s a funny thing when you play someone so close to my actual personality,” she adds. “I get nervous in places that I wouldn’t in my life and it just feels very exposing.”
Tapping into that raw nerve to play McKay, a resident in her 40s who made bad decisions growing up before deciding to turn her life around, has earned Dourif her first Emmy nomination, for best supporting actress in a drama series.
McKay is a third-year resident at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, known for an intuitive empathy inspired by her own traumatic past. She has a known experience with addiction but is now a sober single mom who started medical school in her 30s.
“I think (when) writing McKay, they wanted to feature someone who’s really fallen in their life and struggled to get back up,” Dourif says. “(She’s) had addiction problems, been arrested, just struggled in ways that a lot of doctors who went to a good school and then medical school and then residency and then attending don’t have exposure to.”
Below, TODAY.com caught up with Dourif to reflect on Season 2, her thoughts ahead of the Sept. 14 Emmy Awards and get as much as possible out of her about the highly anticipated Season 3 of “The Pitt,” due to return in January.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Where filming for Season 3 stands:
We’re on Episode 5 now. So I have a full-time Monday through Friday job. I report in.
The quote from the character description that Dourif most resonates with:
“No matter how bad it gets in the hospital, it will never be as bad as where she’s been.”
Everybody has their story, but it took me longer to get my feet on the ground. I had some sad things happen to my family, and I think I just had that quality, whatever it was.
I got two paragraphs in the character breakdown for the initial audition. I remember reading it and saying to myself, “If they’re going for somebody who looks like me, I’m a version of the character.” I knew right away. And mind you, the audition scenes were mostly medicine. It was very little about me … but it was mostly just a vibe. I think they were really looking for the essence of the person.
And then when we were cast, I was brought into this room with (executive producer) John Wells and (creator) Scott Gemmill, and they said, “Here’s what we’ve written about McKay’s backstory. You can take or leave whatever you want. This was just our idea of it,” and they read it through. There’s some things that are quite different from me. There’s a lot that’s pretty similar to my actual life.
They are nimble with what we fill in and where we take it, the character. But I’ve never played something so close to Fiona. It’s quite vulnerable to be honest.
… And the aspect of it she left on the table:
Something to do with McKay’s relationship with her mother that was sort of alluded to didn’t resonate with me, and that I don’t really think about. Oftentimes when I’m preparing a scene or a character, I figure out what activates me, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be close to me.
I’m often figuring out what sort of gestalt events led to the conditioning to make the character react a certain way in a scene, which is kind of the puzzle and the joy of acting. It’s one of my favorite parts.
But yeah, there’s some stuff that worked for them that doesn’t work for me. I left that vague.
Why she acts with a “secret”:
I think a lot of times in life and in relationships, a secret is much more powerful than something said out loud, and you feel it. And so, oftentimes, I have worked in a secret and if I say it out loud or I tell the other people in the room, it dissipates it. So that’s something I’ve been playing with since the beginning of acting. I worked with Peter Facinelli, I don’t know if you know him from “Twilight,” but he used to tell me that his secret was, every day was his character’s birthday.
So it was just this sort of added quality to everything that I thought was really interesting.
Who knows her character’s “secret”:
Nobody knows it.
The most enjoyable part, really, is figuring out why these things are happening. You have to let go of everything while you’re actually performing, or it can become kind of heady and controlled. It’s interweaving meaning and interest and all of that stuff. It’s like this psychological puzzle I really like playing with.
How she winds down after filming “The Pitt”:
I certainly want to turn my brain off. When we’re shooting, I get home at 7:30 (p.m.). If I’m up at 6 (a.m.), you can’t really even turn a screen on if you want to be tired by 9:30 (p.m.).
So I often just sit on my couch. There’s no music. There’s no stimulus. There’s no book. I’m just sitting there, and then I’ll wake up. I’ll sit outside. I’ll have some tea. I talk to a friend on FaceTime. Go over my lines and go to sleep. I’m reading a book on Lojong.
The age she feels on set of “The Pitt”:
I was trying to describe this to a friend the other day. When I’m on set for “The Pitt,” especially now in Season 3, I feel like I’m 12 years old. Because we’ve all been working together for so long, and also the season is so long. It’s like seven and a half months (of filming). It’s just become this playful, medical camp. I get very silly. It’s really fun.
How she’s feeling about her Emmy nomination:
It feels good. I feel like I’m on a roller coaster. I’m 44. I appreciate every moment of it. I wasn’t expecting it. It’s delightful. It’s ephemeral. I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.
But why a solo Emmy feels weird:
One thing that’s very cool about “The Pitt” actually is it’s very much treated like work. I think there was negotiations to have a shoot on the day of the actual Emmys.
You arrive on time. You are professional. You don’t have people running around catering to you. We don’t have special chairs. We don’t have any of that. We’re there to work along with everybody else that’s there to work. We’re all in scrubs, even the crew, too. And it feels very much like this unit that’s coming together to make the show, which is one of the reasons why the awards are very fun, but they kind of feel odd to pick some pieces out because none of it would work if it wasn’t all of us.
After saying “The Pitt” has been “very quietly in honor of” her late mother, Joni, how she thinks her mom would feel about her nomination:
There were a few things that happened (at) the end of my mother’s life where I stepped into a caretaking role for many years before she finally passed in 2015, that gave me the quality in a very direct way for McKay. It’s the reason why I was right (for the part), without question. I knew that from the jump. I knew it from reading the initial character breakdown.
And my mother really loved hospital shows. My mother would have loved “The Pitt” before she got sick. And a lot of the themes, especially in Season 3, that I’m really working with are part of my mother’s story. It feels like the whole thing is some wild, serendipitous kismet workaround of me honoring her and the grief. It feels good and odd and beautiful, and I feel very lucky.
If there’s some kind of afterlife, I hope she’s watching. She would have been so proud of me. She would have told everybody.