When the cast members and creators of the 1990s “X-Men: The Animated Series” reunited at the 2019 Hill Country Comicon in New Braunfels, Texas, they went out for dinner and collectively yearned to one day work together again.
“We said, ‘Let’s put it to the universe: Universe, why don’t you manifest that somebody buys the rights to the show and decides to reboot it and bring us all back.’ We toasted the universe and here we are,” recalls Canadian actor Lenore Zann, the voice of the irresistibly tough Rogue, during a recent video call while visiting Los Angeles.
The result of that metaphysical request is Marvel’s “X-Men ’97,” which debuted in 2024 on Disney+, not as a reboot but as a continuation of the original 1992 classic animated show.
The first season of this new era for the X-Men received an Emmy nomination for animated program. Now, the long-awaited second season has arrived, with the fourth episode streaming this week. Even after the controversial firing of showrunner Beau DeMayo, “X-Men ’97” has already been renewed through Season 4 and the voice cast has started recording their lines for Season 3, Zann says.
The show’s success with both fans and critics is in large part due to its commitment to honor the original ‘90s show, about a group of mutants fighting for themselves and for humanity, not only by preserving its hand-drawn animation style and mature themes but also the voices and personalities of the characters.
“When I pitched the show to Kevin [Feige], he got it immediately and his first question was, ‘Are you going to get the original cast back?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, we are,’” says Brad Winderbaum, head of Marvel Television, Animation, Comics and Franchise at Marvel Studios.
Several voice actors from the original “X-Men” animated series returned for “X-Men ‘97,” which has returned for Season 2. From left, Beast (George Buza), Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith), Rogue (Lenore Zann), Professor X (Ross Marquand), Magneto (Matthew Waterson) and Nightcrawler (Adrian Hough).
(Marvel)
Not everyone was still around to return — Norm Spencer, voice of Cyclops, died in 2020 — but in addition to Zann, actors George Buza (Beast), Alison Sealy-Smith (Storm), and Cal Dodd, the voice of the lovable clawed grouch Wolverine, have reprised their roles in “X-Men ’97.” Their emblematic voice performances, Winderbaum says, are baked into his psyche.
“Any time Lenore says the word ‘sugah,’ it just makes me melt into a puddle on the floor,” Winderbaum says, laughing. “She is Rogue and, when she turns it on, she becomes an icon.”
Busy with her political career as part of Canada’s parliament, Zann stepped away from the entertainment business for over a decade. Zann was back home in Truro, Nova Scotia, figuring out her next chapter when she received an email from a friend who said producers at Disney were looking to have her audition for a show. She was skeptical.
Zann eventually got a call from casting director Meredith Layne and a screenplay with lines that were instantly familiar from her time voicing Rogue, the spunky heroine whose touch can be deadly, in the ‘90s.
”I thought, ‘I guess they’re looking for Rogue, so I’ll just give them Rogue,’” she recalls, laughing. “And I did my Rogue voice, which is basically just my own, but with a bit of a Southern accent thrown on,” she adds with a slight twang.
The producers then asked her if she would reprise her superhero for a new generation of kids.
Doing her Rogue voice, Zann recalls: “I said, ‘You had me at hello, sugah.’”
She revels in the similarities between her and Rogue. “We’re both social justice warriors. We really fight for people to be accepted as who they are.”
In 2024, Zann published “A Rogue’s Tale: A Memoir,” a tome recounting her storied life, titled after a memorable episode in the ‘90s series that revealed her beloved mutant’s backstory.
Wolverine in a scene from Season 2 of “X-Men ’97.”
(Marvel)
For Dodd, leaving behind Wolverine after five seasons of the original show felt like losing a part of himself. “X-Men ’97” offered him a chance to feel complete once again.
“I was so happy because when I first created the voice of Wolverine in ‘92, he became very quickly like my brother or my right arm,” Dodd says during a recent video call. “I got my arm back, and my brother.”
After all these years, Dodd was also pleased to see how the most important character of his career looked in the new series. “Out walks Wolverine and I just went, ‘Holy crap, you look great, bub,’” he recalls, laughing about his first time recording lines for “X-Men ‘97.”
When he first auditioned for the role in the ‘90s, Dodd had no idea who Wolverine or the X-Men were. At the time, he was making a living as a singer for commercials and jingles in Toronto.
Dodd remembers the lines he was asked to deliver were directed at the villainous mutant Sabretooth. He had never seen an image of Wolverine or any of the characters. “At one point, I said to them, ‘Is this an animal cartoon?’ They just thought I was a complete imbecile,” he recalls with a chuckle.
In that initial scene, where Sabretooth attacked Jubilee, a member of the X-Men who Wolverine sees as a daughter, his line was: “All right, you egg-sucking piece of gutter trash. You always like pushing around people shorter than you. Well, I’m shorter. Try pushing me.” Dodd recites it from memory in Wolverine’s voice with a growl.
“The lines I was reading, I’d heard them before in the small town that I grew up in Canada; it’s a fisherman’s town, a tough little town,” says Dodd about his reference for Wolverine’s voice. “I knew guys that were exactly like him, and I knew the way they sounded.”
Even without any notion of the X-Men, he nailed it.
“The next morning, they called me and said, ‘We would love to have you as our Wolverine for the very first X-Men animated series,’” Dodd recalls. “And I said, ‘I would love to be your Wolverine, whoever, and whatever he is.’”
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1.Cal Dodd, voice actor for Wolverine in “X-Men ’97.”2.Lenore Zann, who voices Rogue.(Pauline Aguirre)
When Rogue came into Zann’s life, she already had a notable career as a screen and stage actor. Zann had starred as Marilyn Monroe in a rock opera about the actor’s life, for which she received much praise. “My agent called me and she said, ‘Lenore, they’re doing this animated series, and they’re looking for “a woman with a deep husky, sexy voice who can do a Southern accent,”’” Zann recalls, laughing. “And she said, ‘That’s you!’”
Back then, Zann wasn’t interested in doing voice work, so she missed the first auditions. But about a month later, she says, her agent called again. They still hadn’t found the right voice, so she pushed Zann to audition. She walked in and looked at a drawing of Rogue that Larry Houston, the storyboard artist and director of the show, had drawn.
“She had a very sassy attitude, and she had her hand on her hip and her head back with the hair flowing. I was like, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ And then I went into the studio, put the headphones on, and opened up my mouth, did the first line: ‘I remember I had a boyfriend, when I kissed him, poor boy went into a coma for three days,’” she says in Rogue’s voice. That was enough for her to land the life-changing part.
At the end of the first season of “X-Men ’97,” both Rogue and Wolverine find themselves in difficult times. Wolverine’s clash with Magneto, the perennial antihero, left him severely injured, physically and mentally.
“He’s as tough as nails and he is more pissed off than anything that he was the only one that stood up to Magneto. He’s disappointed,” says Dodd. “And it’s a struggle for him in Season 2 for a lot of it. And then you see what happens. He’s in a funky place, but he’ll handle it.”
Part of that healing process will involve leaning into the humor tat Dodd imbues in his delivery. “What I think is surprising when you go back and watch that original animated series is how funny Cal is,” says Winderbaum. “Wolverine has amazing one-liners throughout that original series.”
As for Rogue, she is grieving the loss of Gambit, a.k.a. Remy LeBeau, who died in the first season. To voice Rogue’s sorrow, Zann leaned into her own grief over the passing of her 17-year-old niece from cancer. In Season 2, Rogue is trying to move forward.
“She’s still basically on a hero’s journey wanting to get justice for what happened to Remy and for the genocide that she witnessed and that she is a survivor of,” Zann says. “She still got survivor’s guilt, and she’s still trying to find her place within the X-Men now that the one that she loves is gone.”
At comic conventions, Zann and Dodd often meet fans of the original show, who are now adults, and their children, who have also come to love the characters. The emotions that people share with them are at times overwhelming.
“Many times, they tell us that this show saved their lives. They were either LGBTQ+ or they were bullied, or they just felt othered,” Zann explains. “A lot of folks who are Latino tell me that when they were little kids, their parents were agricultural workers, and they learned how to speak English from watching our show. We made them feel it’s OK to be different.”
“I see grown men in tears. They’re in their 40s and they’re crying,” Dodd says about meeting lifelong fans. “I can tell you that Wolverine can cry as well.”
Zann believes the X-Men are like modern-day mythological heroes. Through their fantastical ordeals, the X-Men illustrate qualities that inspire viewers, young and old.
“They are a group of misfits who band together to learn how to control the things that make them different and learn to accept and love themselves,” she says. “It’s an honor to be part of this incredible group of people and these characters that can really touch lives and help change them for the better.”
Memorizing your lines seems like such a foundational part of an actor’s job that there wouldn’t be much to say about it. Yet when a group of performers recently got onto the topic during The Envelope’s Emmy Limited Series / TV Movie Roundtable, it turned out everyone had their own way of doing it. And all were eager for tips and tricks, whether it be an app, a line-drilling coach (“Can I have that number?”), writing down the first letter of each word or even writing a monologue backward.
“We have to share tools, guys,” said Camila Morrone, who plays a bride-to-be who learns her fiancé’s family dark secrets in the horror thriller “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen.” “It’s funny that we all have such different methods.”
Joining Morrone were Jamie Bell, who stars in “Half Man,” about the extremely dysfunctional, toxic relationship between two stepbrothers; Linda Cardellini, who appears in “DTF St. Louis” as a dissatisfied woman caught in a dangerous love triangle; Michael Peña, who plays a detective assigned to the case of a missing child while his own boundaries are tested in “All Her Fault”; Andrew Rannells, who is a man coming to terms with his own life while helping to plan a funeral in “Miss You, Love You”; and Constance Zimmer, who channels the mother of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy in “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette.” Read on for more excerpts from our conversation.
The Envelope’s 2026 Emmy Limited Series / TV Movie Roundtable: Constance Zimmer, left, Michael Peña, Linda Cardellini, Andrew Rannells, Camila Morrone and Jamie Bell.
How do you watch TV? A home theater screening room or a tablet on the go?
Morrone: When I see people on a plane watching on their phone, I’m like, “Do you know how many people worked on that?”
Zimmer: I can barely watch one on an iPad because I still feel guilty about not getting the full effect.
Cardellini: I can’t watch on my phone or an iPad. It starts to hurt my eyes. And I like to binge. I don’t like one at a time. I like to save it up, and I like a binge. I don’t have the patience.
Morrone: Oh, I love one at a time. I want to wait till Sunday night, order my favorite food, maybe have a friend come over … Guess our theories of what’s going to happen. I did that with “White Lotus” this year, and I was looking forward to every Sunday at 7 p.m.
Bell: I catch usually about 10 minutes of whatever my wife has fallen asleep to. And then I’ll get into that, and then I’ll watch a lot more episodes while she’s asleep. And then she’ll wake up, and we’ll be completely out of sync in terms of what we’re watching.
Jamie, “Half-Man” is such an emotionally intense show, and it seems like that would be a really hard head space to exist in. Are there things that you do for yourself to maintain your own sanity?
Bell: Me and Richard [Gadd], who wrote the show, are big soccer fans. So I brought a soccer ball to set a lot, and just whatever space we’re in, we just kick a ball to each other every now and then. So, a lot of that wasn’t even us really speaking to each other, but just passing a ball backwards and forwards, which was quite a nice way of just taking our minds off of whatever scene we were doing and still enjoy the space with each other and do something that was physical that didn’t really require us jumping [around] too much.
Camila, “Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen” is also a very intense show. It’s not so much a scream queen kind of horror; it’s this foreboding horror. Was that a difficult space for you to exist in?
Morrone: I think there’s an underappreciation for horror performances. I think some of the most incredible performances, especially by women, have been done in the horror genre. And I think it’s a really specific thing to do because if you’re playing only one level of horror throughout an eight-episode series, I think it’s incredibly boring. And I think I had this notion of like, “God, I don’t want to do these jump scares,” and kind of the cliches of what we imagine horror is like. But horror can be really deep and really internal, and I think there’s a lot of ways in which horror and fear manifest. And I think it was interesting to try and find levels to it and to have the audience come with you, but not dramatize or exaggerate an emotion.
Michael, in “All Her Fault” you are playing someone who could be a much more conventional detective character, but reveals more layers. Was there a moment in your career when you realized, whether it was going for certain roles or not going for certain roles, where you wanted to break out of feeling like a sidekick character or more stereotyped characters? Was there a moment where you made an effort to start going for a different kind of role?
Peña: Back when I started acting, the breakdowns for actors, it was like “Caucasian only,” “Caucasian only,” “Caucasian only,” and we weren’t allowed to audition for those. And it was only until the 14th part that it said, “Open to other ethnicities.” So there’s like a thousand of us going for the 14th place. Ten years of that, you kind of think, “I guess I’m meant to be a supporting character.” But then my mom, right before she died, what she said is, “If you’re going to do that, just make it real. What’s the best you can do with that part?” I said, “Make it a three-dimensional character.” She’s like, “Just do that.” And she’s like, “Nobody remembers your bank account.” And I was like, “Oh, these are two good pieces of advice, Moms,” and so that’s what I did. And with “Crash,” he was a gangster and I was like, “Screw it. I’m just going to do the work and try it out, and all the stuff that I was learning in acting class, I’m going to apply it to this particular role.” And I was happy with the work, so then I kept doing that.
For the rest of you, was there a moment where you had to make a decision about the kind of career that you wanted for yourself and the kind of roles you were going to go up for?
Zimmer: Sorry. It just makes me laugh because we have no control, as actors, over where they believe that we belong. I wish that we could say, “I’d like to try this now,” but it’s basically where they believe they would like us. And then you get put into an area, or a path, or a box, and you can’t get out until somebody else decides, “Hold on. We’re going to give you that shot to try this, even though it’s not necessarily what you normally do or are known for.” Then it takes that for everybody to go, “Oh, you can do this, too?” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s my job.” My job is to do a lot of things, not just one role, or one type of role.
Rannells: You’d like to think that you’re more in control of those decisions, but sometimes things just happen.
Constance, as Ann Messina, Carolyn Bessette’s mother in “Love Story,” you have this speech that you give at their wedding dinner. It’s such an incredible scene, and I’m wondering, what was it like for you when you first read that in the script?
Zimmer: That monologue was actually my audition.
Peña: Oh, I love when that happens like that.
Zimmer: So I knew it very well, getting on the set with it. I think that I only saw two scripts out of nine episodes, and they were just the ones I was in. And I remember my team saying, “This might be it. We don’t know if there’s anything else that you’re going to do on the show.” And I said, “If this is the only thing I do, it’ll be worth it,” because it was so layered and it was so well-written by Connor Hines and Juli Weiner, I was kind of like, “This is all that matters anyway.” So, to be able to feel like I could pour the entire character into one moment in time, it allowed me to try and give her as much as possible because I was like, “This might be it.” So when I read it, I was like, “Oh, OK. That’s like those five-page monologues that you don’t get very often to do for one character in one episode.”
Linda, your character on “DTF St. Louis” has this habit of saying, “No way, José,” and it’s oddly catchy. And she also is always asking people to speak up. Is it difficult to take what seems, on the page, maybe like tics or weird habits and make them feel natural?
Cardellini: That was the great challenge of it, and it’s the beauty of [Steven Conrad’s] writing. Like we repeat “Jamba Juice,” or “Quality Inn,” or “Garden Suites,” all these little phrases, or “Snag it.” It’s so fun to find a way to make that seem like it is natural to you. I remember I had a long monologue audition, and in there I talk about, “No way, José.” I wasn’t sure what the tone was — it’s such a specific tone when you watch the show, and it’s very Steve Conrad. And I didn’t know what it was before I met him and before you could see the show in action. So getting through that and chewing through that in my audition, doing these versions of “No way, José” that I thought felt really, really natural to me, I was like, “This is how I would say it. This is how I’m going to do it. If my sense of humor matches his sense of humor, if our tones match, then I’ll get this role. And if they don’t, then somebody else will do it beautifully in that other way, whatever that is.” Luckily that was like a marriage of tone and thought, and then those things start to come naturally. And then you want to say them more often than they’re written. There’s not a lot of improv in the show, but we would all just joke around and say it to each other.
Andrew, so much of “Miss You, Love You” is just you and Allison Janney together —
Rannells: Just sitting in a house. Just talking.
What was the rehearsal process like? How did the two of you prepare for these very long dialogue scenes?
Rannells: We rehearsed it like a play, which was really fun, and I’ve never really … I mean, we did that, I guess, with “Boys in the Band” a little bit. We had done it on Broadway and then we all kind of still knew it from when we actually filmed it. But Allison and I rehearsed it like a play, and we would just run lines like little theater nerds. It was exciting because I’ve never — to get on set and to be able to say, like, “We can do the first 25 pages just because we’ve already memorized it.” And we did for Danny Moder, the [director of photography]; we did our little play for the crew one day. Which was really fun because you don’t normally get to work like that. It’s like in little segments. And [writer-director] Jim Rash just let us run it in a way that felt really satisfying to get to do. Because sometimes when you just do little pieces of things you’re like, “I can’t quite get the arc of this, and I don’t really know.” You’re doing inserts, and you’re like, “This doesn’t feel like acting.”
Zimmer: And you’re doing it out of order, so you’re like, “Wait, I’m playing the end before I’ve even played the beginning, but I don’t even know what my beginning is.”
Cardellini: It becomes detective work.
Rannells: Shout-out to Allison Janney. It turns out she’s good at acting.
Linda, what was it like working with an intimacy coordinator in shooting what certainly look like they could have been very awkward scenes in “DTF”?
Cardellini: I like an intimacy coordinator. I think it’s wonderful. I think they’re there if you would like to use them. Everybody I’ve ever worked with in that capacity has been so helpful and considerate, and I think it’s just a nice resource to have. And we had a great one on “DTF.” … One of the first scenes I ever shot was me where I have to, we call it “weight placement,” on Jason’s face. And we were scheduled to shoot that much later, but it came up the —
Rannells: That was your first day?
Cardellini: That was our first scene together, really placing your weight on somebody in a way where you just don’t want to hurt somebody’s face. I mean, you don’t want to suffocate somebody. There’s a lot of things that could happen. But it was handled so beautifully. And Jason, of course, is so wonderful, and we had such a great time doing the scenes because we just would laugh — they’re funny. The scenes, more than even being sexual, are so awkward and bizarre and filled with these strange little kinks that it becomes funny, in a way, although you treat it with dead seriousness. But Steve Conrad had a beautiful economy about what he was shooting, and he would storyboard. It was never just like, “Oh, be intimate and go for it, and we’ll see what we use.” It was, “This is the part of your body we’re going to use right here. This will be the shot. It’s this frame. We’re not going to do any more than that.” So you never felt like you were in the Wild West doing this passionate thing that felt uncomfortable. … Because, of course, going into something like that, reading the script, you’re thinking, “It’s a little nerve-racking. How am I going to do these things?” It was much easier than I could have ever imagined.
Constance, your character in “Love Story,” she embodies the other side of the glamour and the fame and the story that we all think we know. And in a lot of ways I can’t help but connect it to your character from “UnReal” in that it creates this really interesting perspective on fame. These roles, do they make you think about that, as well? Do you start to consider your own relationship to fame and your character’s relationship to fame?
Zimmer: Ann, [and] working on “Love Story” in general, really brought the price of fame to the forefront and how it can tear people apart and down and away from who they were before they became famous. And I think, in this particular story, Carolyn never set out to be famous. That was like the last thing she wanted. The scenes with me and Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Carolyn Bessette, were very much about, “How do I remind you that everything is going to change, and you are going to change?” So it made the mama bear really show up. And sadly, it’s hard to do the research about all of that and see how much media was to blame. I hate to say it, and it’s tough, especially for a woman: They really tore her apart. It definitely makes you look at things and go, “Wow, it’s so interesting what we all give up.” This is our craft. We do this as actors, yet when we step outside of our craft and our roles, we are judged on such a harsh level. We’re here for the work and to make and show these characters so that maybe you can see a little bit of yourself, or maybe it can help you with grief, or laughter, or whatever. But then, outside of our work, we are judged almost worse about how we’re aging, how we’re not aging, what we look like, what we don’t look like. It’s the hardest part, I think, of what we do.
Would the rest of you agree with that, that in some ways, it’s not the work that you’re doing, but it’s this other job that exists outside of your work, the fame aspect of it? Does that become a bigger challenge than you expect?
Rannells: So much of the promotion of things that you work on now hinges on your participation in like, “Post this picture” or “Do this video” or “Do this thing.” And that’s stuff that you just don’t think about when you say, “I want to be an actor.” You don’t think about, “Do I have to do a collab with the network?” I don’t want to do that. That’s not part of my job, but it is part of your job. That is part of it now. So that’s a tricky aspect of it that I didn’t expect.
Morrone: The other side of that coin is that there’s independent films that I’ve done, that nobody would have ever seen had I not been the poster child on social media, being like, “I love this film. Please, watch this film. This is how to watch this film.” So, then again, it can also be a really beneficial platform. And it’s such a complicated relationship because, I mean, I grew up with social media. I don’t ever remember not having a form of social media. And I wish I could be like the cool actors who aren’t on it. They’re much more mysterious.
Peña: Jamie’s not on it.
Bell: I mean, it’s not a conscious choice. I’m just not on it.
Jamie, both you and Linda have been acting since you were quite young and, in some ways, have grown up on camera. How do you know what of yourself to hold onto, what you allow the public to see? Is that something you , at some point in your career, had to make a decision about how much of yourself you were going to give away?
Bell: I’m quite a boring person. I’m a dad. When I’m not working, I’m just dad and school running and that kind of thing. And also, I enjoy working. So most of my time is spent either trying to get the next job, or thinking about the next job, or just really working hard on that because I enjoy that. So I really don’t think about any of that other stuff. And I’ve been quite fortunate in that no one is particularly interested in banging down that door anyway …which I’m quite relieved about, honestly, because I feel like I get to work in a space where I’m just coming and playing the part, and I’m going home. That’s all I’ve ever done is since I was like 12 or 13 years old, and I still enjoy that. I still enjoy that thrill of going to work and playing the character. And I have incredibly high expectations of myself and all those things. I self-flagellate a lot on the way home, like, “Why didn’t you do it like that?” I stress myself out about that kind of stuff, but I still go back the next day going like, “God, maybe I’ll get it today.” And that excitement still exists. And I think mostly that’s because I don’t have this other side of stuff that is distracting me from anything.
Cardellini: When I first started, I wondered if I would ever make a living at it. And to be able to have had it as my job and to have a job that I love and, like you said, show up and just be excited to do the work and be excited to be around other people who do the similar work or behind the camera… It’s such a beautiful community that I feel very grateful that I’ve been able to grow up doing what I love. I mean, I wouldn’t have guessed that it could have lasted this long. And people always said, like, “Oh, when you get to a certain age, it gets terrible for women.” And I still feel like I’m still learning and growing and doing new things, stuff I’ve never done before. So I just try to turn down my worry and just be so grateful in the moment, which is not always easy for me because I can live with a lot of anxiety. But thinking about it and listening to everybody here right now, I just am very grateful to have a seat at the table, literally and figuratively.
I’d imagine for all of you that you’re probably never quite sure what roles you do that are going to be the ones that hit in a certain way. Do you ever know what movies are going to land with audiences?
Peña: I think I’ve done OK in that department where if I read something and it really moves me, I just want to be a part of it. I mean, they had their own success, in a way. “Eastbound & Down” was so funny. When I read the character, I was like, “Oh, this is a really cool character.” And now the meme… There’s a fart meme. Man, I swear to God, we shot that 15 years ago, and literally I do a fart noise, and I say, “How long have you been with her?” It sucks now because I’m like, “That’s all they know me for. Not ‘Crash,’ not ‘World Trade Center,’ not all the movies that were nominated, this and that.” It’s the fart noise.
Rannells: Is that going to be your In Memoriam thing?
Peña: Can you imagine? Let’s watch a clip here of Michael —
As we talk about these past projects you’ve been a part of, it just leads to the question of how the business of being an actor, the nature of this as a job, has changed for you over the years.
Rannells: When I started, and I started in the ensemble of “Hairspray” on Broadway, I never expected that I would ever get a job on television. That just seemed very far away. So the fact that I get to do it and that I have a tiny bit of control over what I get to do is a real gift because it was very unexpected. My first TV job, I was a headless stripper on “Sex and the City.”
Morrone: What episode?
Rannells: It wasn’t a Halloween episode. They just didn’t shoot my face. But I remember filming it and being like, “I can’t imagine this will ever happen again, that I’ll be on a set, or doing a TV show,” So it’s still sort of a surprise anytime I get a job that I’m like, “Someone’s going to pay me to do that, to make faces.”
It seems like everyone in Hollywood right now is talking about artificial intelligence. For all of you, is that something that you are thinking about for yourself? Have you experimented with it at all?
Morrone: I really want to believe that people will always choose us and real emotion, and that the audience is really smart and they want to see real humans and real life experiences and raw emotion. And I pray that that’s the case. I have a lot of hope in humanity, in that case.
I don’t know what it means for us in the near future. I know that we have to protect ourselves. I actually was working with Patricia Arquette, she directed me in a film called “Gonzo Girl.” And she is so hyper-aware of all of this and looking into all her contracts. So was Jamie Lee Curtis. I got the opportunity to talk to her about AI. And they were so knowledgeable and like, “Go back and look at everything that you’ve done the last 10 years, and review everything, and make sure that they can’t use your likeness in the future.” I mean, it’s something that we really do have to be aware of.
Peña: I don’t think that it’s going to be a threat because it’s working off of a database and whatever has been uploaded onto that particular AI. So, just for s— and giggles, I was like, let me see if it can write some jokes. So, I’m like, “What would Peña say in this one?” I was like, “Lame.” All the jokes sucked, and they were recycled jokes. And I was like, “OK, cool. That gives me hope.”
Since launching at the start of 2025, “The Pitt” has emerged as more than just a hyperrealistic depiction of an embattled American emergency department. Using its hospital setting as a social microcosm, HBO Max’s Emmy-winning juggernaut has explored various systemic issues — including the misogyny that women of color face in the workplace.
“Some of the stories from real physicians and nurses that I’ve spoken to are so crazy. The system feels like it’s 15, 20 years behind other industries,” says Sepideh Moafi, who portrays attending Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi. “There is still this older culture of a boundaryless style of work where [there’s] a lack of understanding and compassion,” with respect to pregnancy and childcare, for working women.
“The Pitt’s” depiction of such subjects includes unflinching attention to microaggressions and unconscious biases. Isa Briones, who plays second-year resident Dr. Trinity Santos, recalls hearing from qualified on-set doctors that “a lot of female physicians will wear their lab coats, because it makes them look like more of an authority.”
“We have a female, half-Asian doctor on our set who consistently says that people talk to the nurse in the room if they’re a white man instead of her,” adds Supriya Ganesh, whose character, fourth-year resident Dr. Samira Mohan, is mistaken for a nurse in Season 2, despite having “DOCTOR” emblazoned on her name tag.
Supriya Ganesh.
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)
Nor is the series reluctant to show the other side of the dynamic, as doctors Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) and Langdon (Patrick Ball) lash out against their colleagues in lieu of acknowledging their own flaws. Although the women of “The Pitt” would never compare acting to saving lives, Briones believes that the experiences of women — especially from marginalized communities — share commonalities across many male-dominated industries.
“The entertainment business constantly feels like a boys’ club that you cannot penetrate no matter what you do, because it’s still always going to be these older white men who are making all the decisions,” she says. “That’s why seeing the storyline with Langdon and Robby informed my performance so much, because I know this feeling of being like, ‘Why the f— are these men fist-bumping each other? I’m also here! I’m doing my job too!’”
“As a woman in any field, if you express emotion, if you make your opinion or your voice heard, then it’s like, ‘You’re talking too much. You’re being hysterical,’” Moafi says.
Sepideh Moafi.
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)
In holding up a mirror to the healthcare system, showrunner R. Scott Gemmill also wanted to explore the linguistic diversity of its practitioners, allowing his actors of color to reconnect with their mother tongues.
“Language shapes who you are, how you see the world,” Moafi says. Al-Hashimi became a polyglot — speaking English, Farsi and Armenian — in part to curb the effects of a seizure disorder on her temporal lobe, which is crucial for language comprehension. “[Language] connects you to different registers in the body. The rhythms are different, and the emotional access is more immediate.”
During Season 1, Santos — who, like Briones, is half-Filipino — surprised nurses Princess (Kristin Villanueva) and Perlah (Amielynn Abellera) by chiming in on their gossip session in Tagalog. But wanting to show “a more vulnerable side of Santos” this season, Briones worked with her own actor father, Jon Jon, to find a Filipino lullaby that she could sing to baby Jane Doe.
To reflect the 100-plus languages spoken in the Philippines, they selected a Hiligaynon lullaby called “Ili Ili Tulog Anay.” Briones advocated for the scene not to have subtitles: “It should be just this quiet moment that you don’t have to understand [the language] to understand, but also it’s a great moment for people who do speak it to feel that little secret joy.”
For Briones, speaking Tagalog at work has opened up difficult conversations with her immigrant father, who feels shame about not passing down enough cultural knowledge to his children. “I’ve been starting with Rosetta Stone, so I can start conversing with my dad and then he can help me, because I want to be able to talk to my lola and she doesn’t have to work through English,” she says. “This show has reminded me of how important that is to me.”
Isa Briones.
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)
Ganesh, who grew up in New Delhi, felt strongly that Mohan should not be fluent in Hindi because of its similarities to Nepali, the language that doctors struggled to identify when treating a patient in the first season. Instead, the actor chose to infuse her own heritage into the character, who uses Tamil as a way to feel connected to her late father.
“She chooses to speak it with her mom, because maybe that’s the only other person she has in her life who she can speak it to,” explains Ganesh, who recalls consulting multiple generations of her own family — and even her on-set coach’s family — for the Tamil dialogue. “She wants to preserve that as much as she can, even though it’s already filtered through her being American and being born in this country.”
That part of Indian American culture will be lost next season, with Ganesh officially departing at the end of Season 2. The actor reiterates that the “creative decision” to write Mohan off was made by executive producers Gemmill, Wyle and John Wells: “They work with such intention on the show and make all the choices that they make for that reason, so I think it’s better to ask them for answers.”
“I’m going to treasure all the memories I had working with these two and everyone else,” Ganesh adds. “It’s been so great just getting all the love from the fans. I feel sad for them, too, that they won’t get to see this character.”
“The representation that you brought to the show is so beautiful,” Briones chimes in. “Seeing the fans ride for you so hard and be like, ‘This was the first time I felt represented on camera,’ it’s really gorgeous to see everyone coming out and celebrating that and celebrating you.”
For her part, Moafi believes that Dr. Mohan will be remembered for the way “she won’t compromise humanity in how she delivers care.” “The power of strength comes from vulnerability, and in order to go fast, you have to slow down,” she adds. “That’s something that is so ingrained in us, as women.”
