Pulse stars Willa Fitzgerald and Colin Woodell talk about what it’s like to stretch their empathy muscles playing emergency room doctors.
Also starring Jessie T. Usher, Jack Bannon, Jessy Yates, Chelsea Muirhead, Justina Machado, Arturo Del Puerto, Daniela Nieves, Santiago Segura, Nestor Carbonell, Ash Santos, Sophia Torres, Kathryn Smith-McGlynn, Brenda Arteaga-Walsh, Charlayne Woodard and Jessica Rothe, the Netflix series follows a group of emergency room doctors under intense pressure as they handle daily medical crises in Miami. The show also follows the doctors as they build relationships, get to know one another and get tangled in each other’s personal lives.
Fitzgerald and Woodell talked with Blavity/Shadow and Act Managing Editor about the show’s sexual harassment storyline that fuels much of the season’s drama and how empathy contributes to their characters’ growth.
Inside the tension between Willa Fitzgerald and Colin Woodell’s characters
In the first episode, we learn that Fitzgerald’s character, Danielle “Danny” Simms, reported Woodell’s Xander Phillips to HR for sexual harassment. The report has a ripple effect throughout the season. As the episodes progress, we gain more context around what actually happened — and why.
“It’s fundamentally an exercise in empathy, and I think that I love Danny as a character,” Fitzgerald told Blavity’s Shadow and Act when asked about the storyline. “I love her so much. And I think that the position that we find her in is really one in which she’s in an impossible situation that she can’t get out of on her own, and she has to involve a third party in order to have any sort of ability to move forward.”
“Then it turns out that that third party actually can’t give her what she needs to move forward. And so she then has to seek a different avenue of closure and restoration there between those two people,” she continued. “I think that’s a story we really haven’t seen before. And I think it’s talking about themes that I think we’re all very familiar with in a really new and nuanced and complicated way. And I was just so drawn to that because I think that at the end of the day, we all are just trying to do the best that we can with the information that we have. And I think that’s exactly what we see these characters do.”
How did Colin Woodell approach playing Xander Phillips?
“I think I struggled honestly with Xander at moments. You know, there was a part of me that I think, for me, I’m always trying to take accountability,” Woodell told us. “One of the things that Xander always struggled with in the show was that accountability in the relationship. He has tunnel vision for what he wanted. And it was…an exercise in empathy for someone who wasn’t necessarily evolved in that way quite yet.”
“Understanding the journey that you have to go on to have that perspective is so important,” he continued. “And I think it’s a testament to good writing, and it’s also a testament to patience and that we’re human, and that we have to be gentle with ourselves because we can’t change overnight.”
Pulse Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix.
