‘The Pitt,’ Nurse Dana & an Actor’s Breakout Turn in Her 50s
Katherine LaNasa was once on ‘Seinfeld’, married to Dennis Hopper and endured a major audition dry spell before nailing the unforgettable Nurse Dana
Katherine LaNasa knows when John Wells needs a puppet show.
That’s what LaNasa says to the series executive producer when she’s in the background of a shot on The Pitt — “Hey John Wells, do you want a puppet show over here in the back?” What she means is showing her character, head charge nurse Dana, hard at work in a lot of shots, managing the busy emergency department of a fictional PIttsburgh hospital. As LaNasa told me in a recent call from her Atlanta home, “I think the first six weeks that we were there, I had one day off and went home early twice. Meaning I was there from top to toe much every day.”
For fans of The Pitt, that’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect to hear from the woman who plays Dana, the nurse so unflappable and devoted to her job that she is back on her shift just an hour after being slugged in the face by an angry patient. Every character on The Pitt has inspired devotion from fans, but Dana seems to occupy a higher plane; as this TikTok earworm sums it up nicely, “Nurse Dana, I would die for you.”
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LaNasa may now have become Nurse Dana in the eyes of millions, but it’s almost certain you’ve seen her before. She moved to Los Angeles from her native New Orleans at the age of 22, having married Dennis Hopper and in the process of transitioning from a career as a dancer to becoming an actor. Since booking her first roles in the early ’90s, LaNasa, now 59, has shown up just about everywhere, from a current run on Disney+ series Daredevil: Born Again to an iconic episode of Seinfeld.
She’s built her career the way many working actors have, toiling through auditions and a constantly changing industry. A few years ago she relocated to Atlanta with her husband, fellow actor Grant Show, which means her audition for The Pitt happened, like so many post-pandemic auditions, via self-tapes and Zooms. For The Pitt it worked out, of course, even though her first Zoom with Wells happened while she was in Palm Springs and had “no Dana clothes — literally just a big flower jumpsuit.” But LaNasa is frank about the toll of the move to self-tapes on working actors, even those with resumés as long as hers.
“For three years I pretty much didn't get anything off tape,” she tells me. “I was just in an abyss, and I felt like I had fallen off a truck, and the truck had just gone off without me.” LaNasa and Show both have long acting careers and assumed that in their 50s “we had every right to have all our eggs in this basket,” she says. “We didn't feel like it was a risky proposition 30 years in.” Instead, it’s taken as much struggle and dealing with dry spells as it ever has — until, of course, The Pitt arrived to change everything.
‘I Think We Have a Show’
Once LaNasa arrived in Los Angeles for production on The Pitt, she spent time shadowing Kathy Garvin, a real charge nurse at Los Angeles General Medical Center. Parts of Dana are based on Garvin and the other nurses LaNasa met, particularly their “emotional efficiency, so that they could keep their department running,” she says. But LaNasa was also inspired by her own aunt André, a New Orleans native who got her pilot’s license as a teenager and was fond of calling her own mother “woman.” As LaNasa puts it, “she just was tough and cool and capable and sexy, and I just imagine that young Dana was young André.”
Dana and the rest of the characters on The Pitt all seem capable of handling just about anything, from the ornery patient nicknamed “The Kraken” to a devastating mass casualty event that dominates the final episodes of the season. Navigating Hollywood is not the same as a 15-hour ER shift but LaNasa allows that she’s developed her own ability to rise to a challenge across a three-decade career.
“I'm brave, and I go for it,” she tells me. “The first day I worked on Alfie with Jude Law, I had to throw him up against a wall and look like I'm going down on him. I remember just feeling like I wanted to die, and I was like, ‘Okay, this is what separates the girls from the women.’ But that is one of the things that I like about work, particularly on this show. I like it when I feel like I did a scene really well because I was able to make it work. All the technical experience and the facility that you have just from doing something for more than 30 years, it feels good to feel really capable.”
When The Pitt debuted in January, its premiere event was canceled by the Los Angeles wildfires, but the cast was back on set within a few days, wrapping up the final run of episodes even as the first were starting to build buzz. LaNasa remembers catching the eye of Noah Wyle, the show’s star and executive producer, across the hospital set. “When we got a break he came over and I was like, ‘I think we have a show.’”
Wyle had worked with Wells on ER back in the ’90s — LaNasa appeared on one episode of that show too, in 2002 — and helped assemble the series alongside Wells and showrunner R. Scott Gimmell. “I just felt really, really honored when I got picked because I just really respected them so much,” says LaNasa. “And then for the thing to blow up — it's an embarrassment of riches.”
The big question I couldn’t ask, of course, is what happens next for Nurse Dana. The Pitt has been renewed for a second season and will return in January — lightning fast for the pace of modern prestige TV, and more like the classic network procedurals it’s inspired by. But the season one finale sees Dana packing up her station, including her personal photographs, leaving it unclear if she’ll return after a grueling day of being assaulted and dealing with the mass shooting.
LaNasa isn’t giving anything away. But you get the sense that after years of enduring failed auditions or Zoom meetings that went nowhere, The Pitt has truly changed things for her. “To be honest with you, my goal in all of this is to be able to have work stability,” says LaNasa, sounding like so many veteran actors who never take a job for granted. “You can be the most wonderful actor in the world, but if you don't have any name value, it's really hard. It's a really scrappy enterprise, and I'm tired. So [now it’s] getting just a little bit easier for people to go, ‘Oh, I know her. She does good work.’ Not to have to fight quite so hard for everything would be amazing.”
Closing Credits
The real-life conclave to choose the successor to Pope Francis is looking more and more like the movie Conclave, but that’s not the only part of this story where life is resembling art. Yesterday Martin Scorsese announced that he’s participating in the documentary Aldeas — A New Story, which goes behind the scenes of two short films backed by the late Pope and captures conversations between Francis and Scorsese filmed before the pontiff’s death as well as Scorsese’s visits to his ancestral Sicily. It sounds like a whole lot to fit into a single movie, but Scorsese’s never been a guy to back down from a challenge, has he?
Much like their sibling film awards in the fall, the Gotham Awards for television have arrived very early in the Emmy season and give us a good glimpse into which shows are hanging on to their buzz among the critics, who make up the bulk of the committees that determine the nominees. There are a number of sure-thing Emmy contenders in the mix, including The Studio, The Pitt and Adolescence, as well as nods for the television equivalent of indie films, like Prime Video’s #1 Happy Family and Netflix’s 100 Years of Solitude. Among the actors I was thrilled to see none other than Katherine LaNasa, nominated along with Noah Wyle for The Pitt, as well as recognition for stars Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate alongside a series nomination for Dying for Sex. There are plenty of snubs too, of course — the Gothams have seven acting categories, far fewer than the Emmys. But with so much distance left to go in FYC season, it’s OK to just be happy for everyone who got this small boost.
Fresh off a 20th anniversary re-release of Pride & Prejudice that netted a solid $5.7 million, Focus Features has announced another plan to make it 2005 again. Late June will bring an anniversary re-release of Brokeback Mountain, the almost-best-picture-winner and tearjerker classic. For all the ways onscreen queer representation has evolved in the past 20 years, the thwarted romance between taciturn cowboys Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger has held up remarkably well, and I’m curious how it might play for new generations who don’t remember the Federal Marriage Amendment-era that Brokeback first opened in. If you want to get in the spirit early, there’s never a bad time to revisit the Annie Proulx short story it’s based on.
I love this character. I feel like Nurse Dana is five of my nurse friends rolled up in one.