This week’s penultimate episode of The Pitt Season 1 on Max ended with what seemed to be the potential arrest of Fiona Dourif’s Dr. Cassie McKay.
All season long, we’ve learned more about McKay and her personal life, including that she has to wear an ankle monitor. It is soon revealed that this stems from an incident she had with the current girlfriend of her ex/father of her young son. It went off in a previous episode, and it goes off again during the mass casualty event.
To stop the noise and so she can get back to work, McKay drills into it. This alerts the police, and they come to arrest her for tampering with it. It is a moment that Dourif described as “humiliating” for the character in a recent interview with Blavity’s Shadow and Act.
The feeling of ‘humiliation’ McKay had being put in handcuffs
“I think the primary feeling was humiliation,” she told us. “It was like an injustice because McKay was just doing her very best under these impossible circumstances. And the priority was to save all of the people who were disfigured and bleeding in front of her. So the primary thing was humiliation, and then a lot of self-shame…even get herself in this position where she’s wearing the ankle monitor. There was this level of inner self-loathing that I think I felt that surprised me while filming it. I’m enraged [for her].”
Diving into McKay’s personal life
McKay was one of the characters this season where we got to see a lot into their personal life, including her being a mother and dealing with a contentious relationship with her ex. She also had a scene this week with her dad, played by Fiona Dourif’s real-life father, Brad Dourif.
“Oh, it felt just juicy,” she said. “I felt grateful. I think that McKay is a private person who unless there was real utility for it, wouldn’t gossip about what’s going on. And so in order to experience her life, it made sense that it was sort of action as opposed to explanation. I felt lucky. I mean, [she’s] got [the] whole family. I got three generations in there [the hospital] at one point.”
On believing David could have been the PittFest shooter
McKay was also the character who called attention the the fact that the PittFest shooter could have been the son of a woman they treated earlier in the shift. Though this episode confirmed that the boy, David (Jackson Kelly), was not the shooter, Dourif says she thinks McKay did what she thinks was the right choice in flagging this to Robby (Noah Wyle) and Dana (Katherine LaNasa).
“I think McKay came to medical school and being a doctor later, so she’s about 10 years older than most people would be in my position,” the actress explained. “And she’s been around the block a little bit. So she’s been in violent situations, she’s had a violent partner. She’s been the person who’s been at the party where somebody got shot. She sees the potential and sort of has a visceral understanding of the consequences of making the wrong choice and having people suffer and die for it. In the end, I don’t think that she is confident, that she makes the right. I think she’s doing her best.”
The Season 1 finale of ‘The Pitt’ airs next week
With the finale of the acclaimed season airing next week, we’re finally getting to the end of the shift that has spanned all season long, even though it has kind of felt like the shift has been going on for days or weeks. Dourif said that the show’s creatives made sure to let them know that all of the things within the season are just happening over the course of these hours.
Dourif said, “They were like, ‘Remember that this is all happening in one day. You don’t want the peaks too high and the lows too low.’ And when I was watching what I did, I thought that that was the thing that I wanted to shift, maybe, is you really want to, as an actor, play moments like, ‘Oh, I know what this means. I’m going to play it.’ But with this kind of storytelling, I think slightly muted, is just more realistic, actually.
She added, “I think, for every actor, there’s like three medical professionals on that show. And Dr. Joe Sachs, who is an executive producer and just one of the main writers, he’s just tirelessly pouring over scripts and giving feedback to make stuff accurate. And then we have four consultants that are just there all day long to answer every single tiny question we have.
The season finale of The Pitt airs next Thursday on HBO Max.
