Shawn Hatosy has spent much of his career playing men who look as though they could come apart at any moment. In The Pitt, he plays the man everyone wants in the room when everything else is coming apart.
“By the end of season one Dr Abbott was the one with the clarity and understanding of what he’s been through,” Hatosy tells The National.
“In the mass casualty event, he’s very calm in the face of chaos. He’s also willing to work on himself, see a therapist and try to impart that wisdom to Robby. In season two, you see the effects of how much trauma season one has brought on these attendings, but Abbott stays strong.”
Set across a single 15-hour shift in the emergency department of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre, the hit series follows doctors and nurses as one crisis bleeds into the next. Across both seasons, Dr Jack Abbott, a night-shift attending physician and combat medic veteran, has emerged as a vital cog – and one of its most celebrated off-screen.
There was a long road leading to that Emmy-winning performance. Hatosy moved to New York at 19 to try to become an actor, a decision he later described as the biggest risk of his life. By the late 1990s, he was turning up in hit films such as The Faculty and Outside Providence, though even with that success, he still talked like someone who knew how precarious it all was.
Even at his early peak, he still found himself on the outside, unable to make it to the next level. In a 1999 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said bigger studios were reluctant to cast him and that he kept running into the same competition over and over. It was a challenge that only increased as he got older.
“A career happens in stages,” he says. “I had a lot of success younger, during that very exciting teen-movie time. Then that faded away, and you’re always trying to guess what the next thing is going to be. Then basic cable happened and I got to explore that with Southland. Then that ended, and you still don’t really know what the next thing is going to be, because it’s always changing.
“The Pitt comes along, and middle age – which seemed pretty scary a couple of years ago – has turned into this other avenue. I’m getting opportunities to play different kinds of characters with a lot of dimensions.”
The less control he had of his own career path, the more focused it made him in front of the camera. On Southland, he learnt how to deconstruct the scene and the character until it felt real. On Animal Kingdom, he learnt to go further into himself to play Pope. By then, Hatosy had become one of television’s most reliable actors for wounded, dangerous men – sensitive, aggrieved, morally tangled figures who could be frightening one second and exposed the next.
That is part of what makes Dr Jack Abbott feel like both a shift and a culmination. The intensity is still there – he's just using it to different ends. Abbott carries authority. He steadies people.
Speaking with Vulture last year, Hatosy said Abbott’s personality was more like his own than anyone he had ever played, and called that discovery “comforting and freeing”.
It came after a rough patch. Hatosy told The Ankler he had gone zero for 60 in self-tape auditions after Animal Kingdom, a dry spell that melted his confidence and made him question his instincts. The Pitt became his lifeline – and now seems to be his ladder to the career he'd always hoped for.
The Pitt, which releases weekly on OSN+ in the Middle East, continues to grow in popularity in its second season, soaring 200 per cent in viewership, according to Variety. Why do people respond to it? It's simple, Hatosy thinks.
“It’s a show about healthcare workers who are facing systematic challenges and medical challenges daily,” he says. “We really decided from the get-go that was the DNA of the show. We wanted to get the medicine part right. The characters all have interesting points of view, but it’s more about what these guys are facing day to day as healthcare workers. I think people really respond to seeing people save lives.”
In Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, in cinemas now across the Middle East, Hatosy turns that same method towards something far uglier. A sequel to the 2019 supernatural horror hit, the film follows a group of people all vying to win a demonic game to become the most powerful person on the planet. He plays Titus, a weak man from a powerful family who becomes more merciless the closer he gets to achieving that goal.
“Creating a character is always the challenge of identifying the human, even if he is seemingly a monster,” Hatosy says. “He’s a guy who struggles with his identity. He lacks independence. He’s so tethered to his dad, this world of privilege and this idea of power, and to his twin sister, that he just doesn’t know who he is. Within the family structure, Titus is very vulnerable, almost petulant, like a child. But once the idea of power is dangled in front of him, and those tethers break away, you see who he is. He was a lot of fun to carve out.”
The attraction of Ready or Not 2 was not only the part. Hatosy says it had been a long time since he had been part of “an actual film” you could see the finish line on, and longer still since he had made something that would actually play in cinemas. He was drawn to the script’s comedy and to the disturbing way the filmmakers tell a story. Then there was the reaction at home.
“I told my son I was going to do it – he was 18 at the time – and he couldn’t believe it,” Hatosy says. “It was such an important movie for him. For once I get to do a movie that my son likes, which is shocking.”
While the characters are on opposite sides of the spectrum, Abbott and Titus say something useful about where Hatosy is now. Regardless of the direction in which he's channelling his intensity, Hatosy still goes looking for the human being in them first.
And it's more effective than ever. With his career soaring and his family behind him, he's learning to love himself more and more.
Ready or Not 2 is now in cinemas across the Middle East. The Pitt's season finale releases Friday on OSN+.
