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Patrick Ball is proudly showing me the bracelets he was recently handed by fans. “This one says ‘China for Langdon,’” he explains, holding the handmade friendship bracelet up to the laptop camera. “And this one — I got this one last night — it’s ‘Sexy Bitches for Langdon.’”
Right now, Patrick Ball is technically not Frank Langdon, the troubled but kind-hearted doctor he plays on The Pitt. He’s part of the cast of the acclaimed new Broadway play Becky Shaw, at least until the show ends its limited run in mid-June, at which point he’ll report back to work on The Pitt in Los Angeles. With HBO Max’s hit medical drama just having ended its second season, Ball admits, “I’m drinking from a firehose right now for sure.” But when fans approach him at the Becky Shaw stage door and hand him bracelets — or even a stuffed animal dressed like the character his real-life girlfriend, Elysia Roorbach, played on The Pitt, which he also showed me (you’ll have to watch on YouTube) — they are gifts worth far more than whatever they cost.
“When you’re making TV, we live in our little fluorescent box on the Warner Brothers lot — we’re sort of removed from the people who are actually receiving our work,” Ball tells me on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast. “Then you walk out of the stage door, and everybody who has become so supportive of The Pitt, they’re all there. It’s been such a blessing.”
Like so many of his co-stars on The Pitt, the 36-year-old Ball was an anonymous, struggling actor before the award-winning series changed everything. Even for the TV veterans on the show, like Katherine LaNasa and Shawn Hatosy — both of whom won Emmys for season one — getting cast on The Pitt happened after years of failed auditions and self-tapes that went nowhere. A few weeks ago, Ball — who was born in North Carolina and attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro — went viral for another interview in which he got choked up talking about how his work on The Pitt allowed him to achieve a once-unthinkable dream: paying off his student loans.
Not every actor likes admitting to the years of toil that sometimes precede what looks like overnight success. But Ball tells me it’s felt important to be honest about what it took — and what it cost — to get to this point. “I got my break on The Pitt when I was 35 years old, and I had spent the last 15 years hustling and auditioning and traveling across the country,” Ball, who primarily worked in theater before The Pitt, tells me. “I would go to play the lead in a play in St. Louis, and then move back to Brooklyn and not have a job. It was having to turn around and be like, okay, I’m no longer the star of the show. I’m now the barista, or I’m standing on the docks of the East River, tearing tickets for people getting on and off the ferry. I was running a mobile axe-throwing trailer — I’ve done a lot of things to survive. That is the experience of many people trying to make it in this business.”
Ball and I also talk about his roots in North Carolina (he’s a Carolina Panthers fan, bless him), and where The Pitt leaves Langdon at the end of this season — in an early stage of addiction recovery that Ball looks forward to exploring even more in seasons to come.
Not that he knows what’s in store for season 3, he promises: “I am in the lurch with you. I have no idea what’s coming.”
Hear that and much more on today’s episode, which also includes a conversation between me and my old friend and podcast co-host David Ehrlich, who has been catching up on all of Hacks just in time to talk to me about the fifth and final season. I suspect it’s poised to rack up a ton of Emmys with The Studio not in the mix this year, but as David and I discuss, there are plenty of worthy comedy contenders out there — and we are not taking it for granted that they are actually funny, either.
