After working with Noah Wyle on ER, George Clooney revealed his honest take on The Pitt.
Clooney brought up HBO Max’s new hit medical drama during the Monday, June 2, episode of Late Night With Seth Meyers, telling the crowd, “Have you guys seen that show? It’s so good.”
While discussing The Pitt, Clooney, 64, took the chance to praise Wyle, 54.
“I have to say, we’ve been really dear friends since [ER] — since we did the pilot of the show,” he noted. “He is just the most honorable, talented young man, [which] I get to say because I’m an old man. I cannot be happier for his success on the show. The show is just a beautiful show, and he does just a great job with it.”
Clooney recalled struggling to remember the medical terms during his time playing a fictional doctor. Wyle, however, “never had trouble” on ER, with Clooney adding, “He always could do it, and I hated him for that.”
ER, which aired from 1994 to 2009, followed the inner workings of an emergency room in a fictionalized version of Chicago’s real Cook County Hospital. Wyle starred alongside Clooney, Julianna Marguiles, Anthony Edwards, Eriq La Salle and Sherry Stringfield (and later John Stamos, Mekhi Pfifer and Linda Cardellini).
More than a decade after ER ended, Wyle returned as the star and executive producer of The Pitt, which is described as “a realistic examination of the challenges facing healthcare workers in today’s America as seen through the lens of the frontline heroes working in a modern-day hospital in Pittsburgh.”
“[Fellow EP] John [Wells], Max and Warner Brothers were on board to try to make use of this new platform of streaming, to see whether or not we could tell the story in a visually more arresting way than we did back in the ’90s,” Wyle explained to TVLine in January. “It is a more photorealistic way than we were ever able to do, and in a more organic, performance-based way. Because you’re no longer to standards and practices and language [barriers], you really can paint with all the colors on the palette. The question isn’t ‘What can you show?’ Instead it is, ‘What should you show, in discretion and taste?'”
Wyle found it “really gratifying” getting to play a new doctor.
“I wanted it to feel like what it used to feel like — and what it hadn’t felt like for a long time. Could we make it feel that way again? John and [creator] R. Scott [Gemmill] were on board for that because they, too, have been looking for that feeling that we all [last] had 15 years ago, when we did this the first time,” he continued. “The work felt good, and we had a good time, and we liked each other while we did it, and everybody was respectful. It was inclusive, and it was groundbreaking. And we wanted to see if lightning could strike twice — and, in some ways, it already has.”
The Pitt has been renewed for season 2 and is currently streaming on HBO Max.
