Exclusive: Fiona Dourif on embracing her second act, and how her late mother led her to The Pitt

Fiona: McKay's journey in season two is the same as everybody's journey – of figuring out what they need to do for themselves after the mass casualty in season one.  Self-care is the real issue in America for doctors – suicide rates being much higher than other professions – so that's a theme. 

But there's also an existential theme for McKay. She is 42 and is looking at what she wants her life to look like when she dies. What has she not been paying attention to because of this profession that helps other people? 

And the idea of motherhood [is there]; a lot of women in middle age fall into this trap of giving to other people but not figuring out what they like - and then realizing it would be very nice to be touched! 

I've been there, and it's nice to write that story for a character in her forties because it's true for a lot of women.

Fiona:  I'm playing something so close to the bone; the way the plot tends to mirror my life feels a little eerie!

In my experience, the writers are also starting to write how I talk, which is so cool: I have this loud guffaw, and Noah [Wyle] wrote an episode in which he put in a line where I say to somebody, 'What, my witch's cackle?' And I genuinely have a witch's cackle, you can hear it from yards away! 

It's been very cool, and it makes you feel seen and everything easier.

Fiona: There's some beautiful movement with Javadi. There are a lot of life lessons that the kid has to teach McKay, and the other way around. 

There is also a kinship with Samira, who I think is compassionate and very smart and has similar shortcomings as McKay. I think they are aligned, and that's been an interesting play I was not expecting.

Fiona: Maybe it's my generation, but I never interpreted it that way. I think in his own way he is trying to make each doctor better, and so the way in which he was riding Samira was in hopes of helping her be the best doctor she could be. 

I actually thought he was harder on Langdon than he was on any of the women, ultimately.

Fiona: That would never apply to me!

We don't shoot like a regular television show – there's maybe one camera rehearsal, but there's no marks and no lighting setups. We shoot 10 pages a day, and there's no chairs to sit down.

This season [the cast] did get better at hitting our marks but it was the operators who had to dial it back, and it is also easier for us when it's dialed back because you can say to yourself, 'The camera is here to catch me so I'm just going to do the scene.' 

I think The Pitt is trying to make it [feel] much more like a stage; it feels very much like a play that we're performing.

Fiona: One thing we had to do over and over again [in season one] was stop because you couldn't see my face! 

It would be a really good take and they'd be like, 'We have to do it again. It's only Fiona's nose and chin!'

And I saw a Reddit thread that noticed the length kept changing, and I was like, 'You guys, it's very hard to stay consistent for 8.5 months! We're growing and getting taller and getting older and gaining crow's feet and our hair changes!' 

We are told not go in the sun, so no beach time and you can't gain or lose weight, but also you work so much because you're in the scenes you're in, but you're also in the background of everybody else's scene… so I don't really have a life in the same way that McKay doesn't have a life.

Fiona: What I think is better about season two is that it has gore that I wasn't expecting. I think it's gorier, and it's funnier. It's an even sharper, higher roller coaster.

We were all scared that we weren't going to be able to match season one which was such a runaway success! But then I saw the second episode of season two, and I was like, 'Oh, it's funny!'

It's also occurred to me before that I think the success of The Pitt has to do with viewers unconsciously wanting to see flawed people trying their best to be good people. I think we're starved for it. The Pitt is full of three-dimensional characters who give a shit, and they're really good at something, and that is a beautiful quality of humanity.

Fiona: Hell yeah, I'm part of that! I'm a founding member!

Fiona: Katherine! 

Katherine and our production designer Nina Ruscio are both poker sharks. They went to Las Vegas together, and Katherine had to drag Nina off the poker table at 3am at the Golden Nugget. She was like, 'Friends, do not leave friends at the Golden Nugget at 3am!' 

But we have a $40 buy-in – and look, I'm pretty bad at poker, but I'm slowly getting better. I tried to read a couple of things about poker. But Patrick's quite good; he paid his way through undergraduate college by playing poker.

Fiona: Yes definitely. I think it means a little less now as there's a wisdom that fame is going to come and it's going to go. 

I'm the daughter of a character actor (Brad Dourif) who has watched his career go up and down my whole life, so I'm really aware of the luck aspect. 

[The Pitt] happened to have written somebody who was my age and had the qualities that I have, so I'm approaching it as this wild roller coaster that I'm extraordinarily grateful for but I'm trying to hold it loosely.

Fiona: Yes – this is a little heavy – but my mother had a psychotic break when I was 25, and she died eight years later.

Everything bad that could happen to a person eventually happened to her – she got very sick and lost everything: she became homeless, was in and out of jail, and then died of an overdose – and I was her sole advocate.

The experience of going through that, particularly without a group of people going through it with me, gave me the quality to understand suffering. 

I think McKay's character breakdown said, 'No matter how bad it gets in the hospital, she knows it will always be better than where she's been,' and I have a visceral understanding of how far somebody can fall.

I understand that it is never going to happen to me, but I'm aware of how lucky I am and how bad it can be for other people, and it's my belief that it's the reason they picked me for McKay.

They auditioned the whole world for this thing, but I had it.