This week’s Take Ten guest is The Pitt‘s Patrick Ball. Currently Emmy-nominated for his role of Dr. Frank Langdon, Ball has portrayed Langdon’s struggle with addiction while battling one of the most stressful jobs out there: an ER doctor.
When he joins us at the Deadline studio, it’s a quick pit-stop (pardon the pun) on his way to the LA set of the HBO Max mega-hit show’s Season 3. The Pitt is the most-Emmy nominated show of the year, with a total of 25 nominations, with a staggering 10 for acting — including its lead, Noah Wyle, supporting roles and the guest star categories.
Patrick Ball as Dr. Frank Langdon in ‘The Pitt’
Warrick Page/HBO Max
As we sit down for this Take Ten episode, Ball explains his head is in the medical training the show’s actors get from medical consultants and right now he’s working on something very tricky and surgical. That level of dedication to this role has paid off, not just in his first ever Emmy nomination, but in the reactions from fans. He recalls meeting a fan at the stage door during his recent Broadway stint as Andrew Porter in Becky Shaw: “They said, ‘You know, my brother is an addict and I’ve watched him struggle for years and years and years, and your portrayal of of just how complicated those early months and years of recovery can be meant a lot to me and my family.”
On a lighter note, another fan presented him with a shirt that said ‘M.I.L.F.’ on it. “It stood for “Man I Love Frank,” Ball explains, with a wry smile.
My job was to corral a bunch of drunk people into throwing sharp axes around until the early hours of the morning.
And on The Pitt set, it’s not all serious all the time. Case in point: The mystery of the Noah Wyle headshots. “I would walk into my dressing room, and every day I would find a new picture of Noah Wyle taped to my dressing room wall, and so there became this growing sort of Noah Wyle shrine in my dressing room, and I had no idea where this was coming from, but I was too scared to say anything, and so I just sort of rolled with it. Then it became a little bit of a whodunit and we finally did get to to the bottom of things, and it was Becca, the head of our base camp, and I’ll just leave it at that.”
Patrick Ball, left, and Noah Wyle in ‘The Pitt’
Warrick Page/HBO Max
Ball also looks back on some of his past jobs before The Pitt, including…. axe-throwing? “I’ve had about a million day jobs,” he explains. “I’ve done a lot of things, and I’ve done a lot of things poorly. During a stint helping his parents renovate their home in North Carolina, and needing cash to make rent on his own place, Ball connected on Craigslist with two guys who’d created “a mobile axe-throwing unit that they drove and parked outside of breweries. My job was to corral a bunch of drunk people into throwing sharp axes around until the early hours of the morning, and that is how I paid rent. If anybody is hiring for that, I can throw an axe.”
Finally, for the record, Ball wants to confirm his height of 5 feet, 11 3/4 inches. “Every once in a while, I will get updates from Wikipedia that I will go from being 6’1″ to being 5’6″ and back. And so that is something that should be clarified.”
And when asked how he gets his hair to look so good, he says simply, “I woke up like this.”
To watch the full interview, including which Pitt characters he loves most and the TV comedy show he’s currently obsessed with, click on the video above.
Season 2 of The Pitt is currently streaming on HBO Max.
