In the tenth hour of The Pitt’s shift, a standoff reaches its boiling point. When we first meet Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball), the hotshot senior ER resident seems to be heir apparent to Noah Wyle’s harried leader Dr. Robby. Langdon is charismatic in a banter-forward way, and as we learn from brief glimpses of his personal life, a dad under a lot of pressure to hold his life together. Over the course of the season, Langdon develops a bond with newcomer resident Mel (Taylor Dearden) while clashing hard with new intern Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), a hotshot herself who bristles against Langdon’s stern reprimands for her mistakes and oversteps. But the stakes are higher than they seem: By episode ten, Santos has started to suspect that Langdon is overprescribing benzos to his patients and stealing the excess for himself. She confides this in Robby and, in a blistering confrontation at the end of the episode, Robby confronts Langdon, makes him open his locker, and finds his stash of pain meds. As Langdon tries to defend himself, blaming a back injury from helping his parents move, Robby orders him out of the hospital.

Aside from an appearance on Law & Order, The Pitt is Ball’s first TV role, and though some of the show’s audience might have not expected this twist, he knew that confrontation was coming from the jump. It was, in fact, his audition scene with Wyle, though as filming on the series actually started, Ball wasn’t sure exactly how the show’s storylines would converge to get Langdon and Robby to this moment. Ball grew up watching ER with his parents, who are medical professionals in their own right, and drew on all this experience in the audition room opposite Wyle. “John Wells goes, ‘Okay, take whatever time you need,’” Ball remembers. “I was like, ‘John Wells, I was born for this. Let’s rock, baby.’”

Did you know from the beginning that Langdon was stealing pain medication?
From fairly early on. That wasn’t part of the initial rounds of auditions, but when they decided to have me screen test, they included that scene from episode ten. It was my first time doing anything like this. They fly me out to L.A., take me to [Pitt executive producer] John Wells’s headquarters, and I’m sitting there with Noah. We do the first couple of scenes, which were just banter, and then we get to that big freak out.

What was it like jumping right into that fight? 
Noah was really generous. We were laughing, we were playing, it didn’t feel precious. I think I have a lot of experiential overlap with Langdon. I’ve gotten in a lot of trouble. [Laughs.] And that scene is the closest thing you’re going to get to a break-up scene in The Pitt. He’s my brother and my mentor. Langdon thinks there’s an understanding that there’s a lot of trauma inherent in what we do and we’re just doing the best to soldier on. And then Robby says, “No, you took it too far. You’re on your own because you fucked up.”

We’ve seen a few glimpses of Langdon’s life outside the hospital. We know he has a wife and kids and a new dog. How did you fill in the backstory of how he ended up here?
He’s a young dad, got two kids, and I think both at home and work, he doesn’t have time to process what he’s feeling. He’s got to do the next right thing for the other person — whether that’s a patient or a 2-year-old or my wife who’s stuck at home dealing with the 2-year-old while he’s off doing his dream job. He’s someone who’s trying to figure out how to be who people need him to be. There’s a certain amount of ego to that and a certain amount of pride, but also an incredible amount of responsibility. I have to be excellent because if I am not excellent, people die.

You knew that fight was coming, but then you had to go and film all the episodes before it. How did you approach them, knowing what would be revealed about Langdon?
We worked almost completely chronologically. They dropped these episodes to us one at a time, so we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but I knew that in episode ten the drugs were going to come out and I was going to get fired. It was this thing that was looming. If you’re playing Hamlet, you can get everything right, but if you fuck up “to be or not to be,” you’re dead. So there’s this huge scary thing looming over me, but when we got to it on the day, it was just fun. Noah’s an actor’s actor. He has that incredible ability to go out on a limb and get to the scary territory while also being a generous and present scene partner.

Did you watch ER? There’s an interesting parallel in the fact that Noah’s character Carter had a painkiller addiction for back pain on that show. 
My mom’s a lifelong ER nurse and my dad’s a lifelong paramedic. We grew up watching two shows every week, The West Wing and ER. It’s really crazy I now get to work with these guys. When this job came along, I made a point of not going back and watching ER because we were doing a completely different thing and I didn’t want to be consciously or subconsciously informed by it. But right before I went for the screen test, I was like, I should watch one random episode, and I ended up picking out the one where Carter gets sent to rehab. It was amazing, though I’m glad I didn’t watch more than I did. If you just get to know Noah watching ER, you’ll think Carter is who he is. But the guy I got to be on set with and who’s become a dear friend is a different person than that, so I’m glad I didn’t focus on the previous project he’d done.

What’s it like for your parents to watch you on The Pitt?
My mom sends me text messages. She gets mad at me for not wearing eye protection in the trauma scenes, and I’m like, “Mom, nobody’s got time for that!” It’s actually been a secret mission of mine to maximize my character’s relationship with the nurses because that is literally my mom’s job. I want those relationships to be as rich and respectful as possible. Kristin Villanueva, who plays Princess, and I found this relationship where she’s the nurse who always has to remind me to put my gloves on, because I’m the guy who’s always moving fast and scatter-brained. But my parents do love it. They were with me when I got the screen test and they read through the episode with me and the first thing they said was, “This checks out.”

I’m interested in the two very different dynamics that Langdon has with Mel and Santos. Let’s start with Santos: What do you think it is about her that sets him off?
Working with Isa Briones is amazing. She comes from the theater like me, and there’s a tinkering-ness about her. We’re both tinkering as we go along. But with Santos, that relationship is fraught. Santos comes into that environment on her first day being like, “I’m the shit,” and that rubs Langdon the wrong way because he’s been there for years longer than her. He really respects authority and the chain of command, so when somebody doesn’t want to respect that, it causes major problems. But I think that whenever Langdon came in for his first day of work, he was probably a lot like Santos. There’s projection there. It’s a generational thing, too. Robby was trained in a tough-love tradition, and Langdon probably was too, but the conversation has shifted, and what we deem appropriate between mentors and mentees has changed.

Then with Mel, Langdon can really connect with her and their relationship is a lot warmer. I thought there was something lovely about him getting, for instance, that an assignment digging out gravel from a guy’s wound would be just the right job for her.
Taylor is such a craftsperson, because she’s very unlike Mel in real life. Langdon sees in Mel someone who’s got the right stuff, is in it for the right reasons, and is also a caretaker for her sister in the way that Langdon is a caretaker for his kids. He’s struggling with the weight of responsibility and he sees that in Mel. The way she sees the world is also appropriate to how Langdon understands the job: There’s a level of compartmentalization that’s necessary for survival.

But she’s also sympathetic and generous, which is what Langdon needs in his life. Something I talked about with Noah early on is that Langdon is figuring out the difference between being labor and management. Langdon thinks he does his specific job as good as anyone and that he just has to lock in. Robby’s trying to encourage him to learn what it means to be a leader. That means backing up and trying to see what other people bring to the table. That’s something he can do with Mel. When we work together with an autistic patient, Langdon doesn’t understand what he’s missing, and Mel comes in and teaches me about how the care this person needs might be different from what other people need.

This show puts a lot of emphasis on the realism of what you’re putting onscreen, especially in terms of medical procedures. Was there a sequence that was the hardest to film?
We had one episode where we do a reverse crike [a cricothyrotomy] on a kid. Robby’s going in and trying to feed a wire up backwards through this kid, and I’m reaching down into his mouth with gauze and a forcep and going in with a breathing tube. But we’re not cutting around the sequence and all the props have to be switched out because we have long and short versions of them depending on what actually has to go inside the actor. Meanwhile, you’re speaking what sounds like Ancient Greek medical terms, which you can’t get wrong because it all means something specific. If you do get it wrong, there will be a bajillion people out on the internet who will know.

Your parents will call!
And I wouldn’t be able to go home for Thanksgiving.

How do you memorize all those terms?
My theater background is useful. It’s a lot like doing Shakespeare. If you try to rise to the style of the language, you end up sounding real old school, like a Laurence Olivier sort of actor. If you’re doing a medical scene and you try to sound smart, you don’t sound like a doctor. This is just their job. The thing is to focus on the intent behind the procedure. We got two weeks of doctor training at the beginning of the shoot and they taught us a lot about the concept of “thick slicing.” When they’re asking questions of each other with all these terms, they’re really trying to eliminate broad swaths of possibilities. You’re trying to slice down as closely as possible. So when I’m saying all that, I’m trying to think about the possibilities I’m eliminating.

Have you been following the fan response to the show? I’m curious what it feels like when you know this big fight between Robby and Langdon is coming, but by episode nine airing, the show has started to hint pretty clearly at Santos picking up on what he’s up to. 
We’ve had a lot of response, dozens and dozens of real-life nurses and doctors reaching out in my DMs being like, “thank you so much.” It makes me feel very warm and fuzzy. But then I hosted an Oscars viewing party for my girlfriend and all her friends, and they were all like, “I fucking hate Langdon! I’m Santos all the way!” I’m just like, great. Well, stay tuned. It is an interesting challenge because it started airing as we were still filming. The audience started to learn about these characters and share their ideas about them and I have to be like, okay, okay. They’ve only seen through a certain number of episodes and their opinions are valid based on that information, but it’s a point on a long trajectory.

The Pitt has been picked up for a second season. Do you know if Langdon will be back?
Well, I applied for the job. I would love to come back. This is my favorite show on television, and it’s fucking rad that I get to be on it, so I hope so.

 “Langdon thinks there’s an understanding that there’s a lot of trauma inherent in what we do. And then Robby says, ‘No, you took it too far.‘”