Emmy voters, put down your phone or laptop or whatever way you’re reading this! It’s crunch time, with final Emmy ballots now open — and, presumably, at least some of you are still trying to catch up on everything that’s nominated. But when you’re not cramming in last-minute episodes of Slow Horses or Paradise, might I recommend a visit to the Prestige Junkie Pundits page, where we’ve got up-to-date predictions about the frontrunners in all major categories.
We’ll be having even more fun with punditry in the coming weeks, with Christopher Rosen and me teaming up for a series of special newsletters examining the state of the race. Yesterday’s first dispatch was all about the drama races, where The Pitt is dominant, sure, but in some cases might be its own strongest competition.
And speaking of The Pitt — today I’m sharing a longer conversation with one of the most delightful guests from our Women Shaping Television luncheon last week, and the owner of the most iconic bangs on television since New Girl — Emmy nominee Fiona Dourif.
Family Business
I think we need a new term for a specific kind of nepo baby: people with working-class parents who are gig-to-gig actors; a career that probably should have proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that it would be easier to go into any other business than Hollywood.
That’s certainly how it felt for Dourif watching her father — Oscar and Emmy nominee Brad Dourif — build a career in the industry.
“My father was on Deadwood for three years, and he was nominated for an Emmy, and it’s this ephemeral thing,” Dourif tells me. “He’s been in incredible movies, but he’s living his life. I’ve been adjacent to fame my whole life, and it is up and down.”
Though she had her dad take her to acting classes when she was 10 — “something where you’re like, ‘I am fire, I am water’; it was really fun” — she was scared away from acting for a while, getting into producing documentaries before returning to the craft in her early 20s. And despite working steadily for decades after that, she had every reason not to expect something like The Pitt, which has now earned Dourif her first Emmy nomination for playing the empathetic Dr. Cassie McKay.
“I’m 44 now, and I was 42 when I was cast in The Pitt,” Dourif tells me. “It’s a little better now, but women sort of age out — there are fewer roles for women who are 50 than women who are 35. I just did not think this was going to happen.”
You hear that sentiment often from the stars of The Pitt, many of whom were actors with long careers but few starry roles before the HBO Max series came calling. Patrick Ball has been open about how the show finally let him pay off his student loans, while Katherine LaNasa told me last year about the “abyss” of failed auditions she’d fallen into before the show came calling. Dourif, who had previous standout roles on True Blood and The Blacklist as well as in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, has had a similar breakthrough with The Pitt. But she also has a highly personal reason for knowing this is a role that came to her at the exact right moment.
Dourif’s mother, Joni Dourif, died in 2015 after a long illness, with her daughter as her primary caretaker for the last eight years of her life. The first description Dourif saw for McKay called the character “world-weary and wise, and she knows that no matter how bad it gets in the hospital, things could always be worse.” It immediately reminded her of what she calls the “tragedy in my family, where moving through it was shocking at every turn.” Dourif says to cope with her mother’s long illness and death, a period during which she felt “very alone,” she got heavily into meditation.
“I think it probably can lead to some amount of wisdom,” she says, about meditating. “Not that I think I’m particularly wise, but it left me, I think, with a quality that they were looking for on The Pitt. I remember reading the character breakdown and being like, ‘I can play that.’”
Doctor Is In
Part of what made The Pitt such a runaway sensation when it launched on HBO Max last year was how many of the characters felt like Dr. McKay — people who had lived entire lives outside of those hospital walls, even though we’d only get to know them during the hours of a single day’s shift.
In season one, Dourif played McKay as she juggled custody of her son with her ex-husband while dealing with a mass shooting that sent dozens of patients into the ER; at the end of the season, she even boldly disabled the ankle monitor she wore as a holdover from a previous, wilder life. In season two, McKay spent most of her time working with hospice patient Roxie (played by fellow Emmy nominee Brittany Allen), who was dying from cancer while her husband and young sons stayed by her side.
“I think some of the success of The Pitt is trying to deal with these problems that are real for all of us and are coming for all of us, in a realistic way that’s not pandering,” Dourif says. “I say this a lot in interviews, but I mean it — I think also we treat the audience like they’re smart and they have attention spans.”
Though life on The Pitt still means encountering a lot of fake blood, complicated medical jargon and working on a set that feels a whole lot like a real hospital, Dourif says she has been able to have more fun with it as shooting continues on season three in Los Angeles right now.
“It’s a little bit more playful than it was before,” she tells me. “I mean, I really like this job — I become 12 years old when I’m on set; I become pretty goofy. And for McKay, I think I’ve relaxed into it a little bit, and I feel like I know what I’m doing. And actually, I think the performance is a little better.”
To explain this next part, Dourif has to name-drop — but since it’s a recent guest on the Prestige Junkie podcast, I’ll allow it. “I was working with David Harbour, I played his wife in a movie recently (the upcoming thriller A Head Full of Ghosts). And the way he sort of treated it was just, ‘Let’s fuck around. Let’s play.’ That’s sort of been ringing in my head since, and it takes the stress out of it.”
Even as Dourif has gotten more comfortable playing a doctor on TV, she has more access than ever to a real one. After she started working on The Pitt, she met an internal medicine doctor on the way home from a meditation retreat, and they’ve been dating ever since. “It’s hilarious,” Dourif admits. “It’s a doctor and a fake doctor! He’s not an ER doctor, but he’ll explain some questions if I have them.”
Before I let Dourif off the line, I had to ask her about her most frequent photo shoot co-star: an orange tabby cat who has recently posed for Flaunt magazine and Esquire. “Well, Potato is basically my entire life,” Dourif responds immediately. “He’s the most dominant entity you’ll ever meet in your life. So if there’s anything going on, he’ll walk into the middle of it.”
And if you live in Dourif’s Los Angeles neighborhood, by now you’ve probably already met Potato — he’s apparently known for wandering into houses down the block. Maybe it’s only a matter of time before Potato has a cameo on The Pitt as well?
