Shawn Hatosy Had 60 Failed Auditions. Then ‘The Pitt’ Called
Plus: ‘Avatar’, ‘Wicked’ and the case for blockbusters at the Oscars
After making more than 100 episodes of television together, no one may know actor Shawn Hatosy better than writer and producer John Wells — even Hatosy himself. Case in point: When Hatosy was sent details about the character Wells wanted him to play on the HBO Max hospital-set series The Pitt, Hatosy wasn’t sure he was the right guy for the part.
“I could not see myself as a guy who could play an attending physician, because my vision of an attending physician is what I’ve seen on TV,” says Hatosy, 49, who first worked with Wells during a single-episode appearance on ER, and went on to lead the Wells-produced series Southland and Animal Kingdom. It was that prior relationship, Hatosy says, that encouraged him to take the leap and play Doctor Jack Abbot on The Pitt. “Thankfully, he trusts me, and I don’t have to prove it to him. So Abbot became this very honest character, and it came to me at the right time.”
In today’s newsletter, I catch up with Hatosy, who earned his first-ever Emmy nomination this summer for his guest role on The Pitt, one of the undeniable breakout series of the year. Hatosy tells me about the dispiriting cold streak of auditions he’d been on since Animal Kingdom ended in 2021, and what it means to be “breaking out” — yet again — after more than 30 years in the business.
And stick around for the back half of this newsletter, where I get into the newly released trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash and make the case for why giant blockbusters belong in the Oscar race, even as the taste of the Academy skews away from those types of films.
Finally, a reminder that Prestige Junkie After Party, the subscriber-only hub for even more awards season talk, gossip and fun, is launching tomorrow! Subscribe now so that you can catch our first subscriber-only podcast, in which Christopher Rosen and I reveal what we’ve got planned for the After Party and some of our early Oscar season hot takes. We’re very excited to share with you some of the awards season real talk that’s previously been limited to group chats, and of course, we want you to be part of the conversation as well: reach out to me, katey@theankler.com, and let me know what you’re dying to hear us get into.
The Doctor Is In
Shawn Hatosy has been a working actor since 1995, with his first credits in film (Jodie Foster’s Home for the Holidays) and television (Homicide: Life on the Street) coming from productions that shot in Baltimore, near where he was born and raised in Maryland. Over the years, Hatosy has appeared in enough iconic movies (In & Out, The Faculty, John Q.) and TV shows (Felicity, Dexter, multiple Law & Order franchises) that surely everyone recognizes him from at least one thing. But in the last six months, Hatosy’s experience of being stopped by fans has changed dramatically.
“It is wild to go out in the world, because people are stopping me left and right,” he told me in a recent Zoom call. And it’s not just because of The Pitt, with its 13 Emmy nominations and unrivaled status as this year’s biggest breakout TV hit. Animal Kingdom, the TNT series in which Hatosy starred for five seasons from 2016 to 2022, has recently launched on Netflix, cracking the top 10 and bringing in a whole new legion of fans. When Hatosy is stopped on the street, he says, he doesn’t know if it will be for his vicious Animal Kingdom character, Pope, or for The Pitt’s calm and collected Abbot. He adds, “Sometimes they’re like, ‘I can’t believe you’re both!’”
That ability to transform is essential for any “working-class actor,” as Hatosy proudly describes himself, and particularly for someone who’s been able to build a career to take him from playing wide-eyed high school students to unflappable combat veterans. Between his role as a tough guy on Animal Kingdom and his stint as a detective on Southland, Hatosy had gotten used to playing grizzled characters — which might explain why he was surprised when Wells asked him to put on a doctor’s scrubs for The Pitt.
But what he really got was a preview of how The Pitt would set itself apart, depicting a hospital as not just a backdrop for soapy workplace drama or high-minded ideals about healing. Instead, the Pittsburgh emergency room is a place where all levels of society collide, and the doctors and nurses on duty can come from as many different walks of life as their patients.
Hatosy’s Dr. Abbot, who appears in the premiere episode and then returns during the mass casualty event that dominates the final few episodes, was a combat medic before coming to the hospital. In the final moments of the season, it is revealed that the character has been doing all that hustling around the emergency room floor on a prosthetic leg. (Hatosy is not an amputee in real life.) Though he’s a relatively small presence in the show compared to the show’s regulars, Dr. Abbot is a prime example of what The Pitt does so well, building rich, lovable characters in just a few moments.
“It was the most stripped-down version of a human I could try to portray,” Hatosy says, crediting his long relationship with Wells for allowing him to trust his instincts. “I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to convince anybody, oh, I can do this. It just sort of was the essence of the guy. It’s a wonderful feeling.”
Like his fellow Emmy nominee and The Pitt co-star Katherine LaNasa, who told me about her own moment of crisis when it came to self-tape auditions, Hatosy has worked a long time to get to his first Emmy nomination. Before The Pitt came along, Hatosy endured a dispiriting string of self-tape auditions, going literally 0-for-60. “To not book anything, it melts your confidence,” he tells me of the fallow period. “You start to question your instincts. And I’m like, oh gosh, maybe hopefully I’ll get hired as a director. It’s like you really question your identity.” (Hatosy directed four episodes of Animal Kingdom and an episode of Rescue: HI-Surf.)
Though Abbot became an immediate fan favorite, both HBO Max and Hatosy are keeping quiet about how he might fit into the show’s second season, which is now in production. He was noticeably absent from on-set reaction videos posted by HBO Max after the Emmy noms — but given that Abbot is a night-shift physician, I’m choosing not to read too much into it.
Regardless, his place in Emmy history has been recorded. “To have this happen right now,” Hatosy tells me, “it means the world to me.”
And the Blockbuster Oscar Goes To…
For those of us who are brave and/or stupid enough to try to make Oscar predictions a year in advance, the smart move for months has been to reserve two slots for two practically guaranteed blockbusters: Avatar: Fire and Ash, and Wicked: For Good. Yes, it’s not always easy for sequels to former best picture nominees to make it into the Oscar race (see last year’s misses Joker: Folie à Deux and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga). But the predecessors for both movies were so undeniable and so rewarded that the sequels are considered contenders until proven otherwise. Now that there are trailers out for both of them, those early hunches appear to be spot on.
With Sinners, the year’s fifth-highest domestic grosser, also practically guaranteed a spot in the best picture 10, that’s a lot of blockbuster firepower for an Oscar race that has been trending more in the favor of international auteurs and scrappy indies. Yes, we’re not so far removed from the Barbie and Oppenheimer year, and 2021’s comeback movie year made room for Elvis, Top Gun: Maverick and the previous Avatar sequel in the top 10. As international as the Oscars may be skewing, classic Hollywood blockbusters do tend to find their way in there.
To get ahead of any future complaints: this is how it ought to be. Unlike my colleague Richard Rushfield, I’m not usually too concerned with Oscar ratings, or the sense that the show has become more of an industry event than global appointment television. But I do think the Oscars have an essential role as a yearbook, capturing not just the films that were the best but the ones that really mattered. When you get a title that manages to do both — more of a Sinners than A Minecraft Movie, if you will — it feels like a dereliction of duty for a best picture lineup not to include it.
Now that we’re past the embarrassment of the popular Oscar and the “Oscars cheer moment,” the Academy has pretty much left it to the voters to include the movies that most people have seen. The fact that they’ve done so, and likely will this year, is not just motivation for viewers to watch the telecast, but for the studios to make blockbusters that are worth a damn. No matter how you may feel about blue-skinned aliens or green-skinned witches, that’s a power worth harnessing.