Interview: ‘The Pitt’ actress Rebecca Tilney on the full circle moment that changed her life
ER legends Noah Wyle (Dr. John Carter), John Wells (producer), and R. Scott Gemmill (producer) reunited for the new series, The Pitt, after leading the long-running NBC medical drama that aired three decades ago. Each episode of The Pitt catalogs an hour of a single shift inside the emergency department at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Centre and brings audiences in for a look at the challenges that frontline workers face. All three serve as producers on The Pitt. Gemmill is the showrunner, Wells also directs, and Wyle is back in scrubs as Dr. Michael “Robby” Rabinavitch. There will be 15 episodes in total.
Rebecca Tilney joins in on The Pitt reunion since appearing on ER 27 years ago. Tilney starred as Judy Cochran in season 4 in the episode titled “Carter’s Choice.” It was the actress’s first guest-starring role. Coincidentally, it was John Wells’ first time directing, too. Tilney spoke to Hollywood First Look about how amazing it was to reunite for this and how both roles seemed universally aligned to her journey in real life.
In The Pitt, Tilney appears as Helen Spencer, the grieving daughter of an elderly patient brought into the ER from a nursing home. It’s a role “close to her heart,” she tells Hollywood First Look. Not only was her father a renowned kidney transplant surgeon, but the actress lost her mother to cancer at age 46. Tilney was just 24 and forced to make one of the hardest choices of her life.
No matter how prepared you are for the passing of your parents, Tilney says it still comes as a complete shock and wave of emotions. “The role I got to play has this fantastic emotional arc. It was challenging,” Tilney explained. “I shot for five weeks, and I was carrying around this grief for this character the whole time. Also, it’s linear. Because of the way they shoot that show, it’s almost like a play. Even if you’re not talking, you get rolled up in the world of the trauma center.”
Tilney decided she was going to play this part in the most authentic way possible, which meant choosing to ditch the makeup on screen. In the show, her character gets the news about her dad and heads down to the emergency department early in the morning. “She’s been woken up, and they say, ‘Come to the hospital. Your father has been brought in; he can’t breathe. She’s going to jump out of bed, throw some clothes on, and go. She’s not going to sit there and put her face on.” The actress suggested the idea of going natural on set, and this was met with praise. “It’s a real drama,” she added. “We want it to be real. So it should be real in every way.”
Tilney looks back on her life’s journey to the full circle moment of today and is grateful for the path she took. “After my mother died, it was a real wake-up call for me. In your 20s, you think everybody, including yourself, lives forever, and that’s not how it is. Life is short and very fragile, and you never know when it will change. I lost my father in 2013. It was another painful letting go moment.”
Tilney went from being a full-time student and working at Glamour magazine in New York to a budding acting career in Los Angeles. She admits that life might have been different if she hadn’t been faced with loss at an early age. “It’s not easy,” Tilney elaborated. “But I feel like I’ve been very lucky to have been able to do it [act] for as long as I have. Every job is new; it’s a new experience. It’s a new set, it’s new actors, new people, and it’s really fun. It’s really exciting. I love that about it, and because I had not worked for a bit before I got The Pitt, doing it made me realize how much I love doing this. I mean, I really love doing it. So, it was a huge gift in that way.”
Like Tilney once did, her character also had to face some hard decisions. Coming to terms with life’s inevitabilities and how we handle situations we can’t control – it doesn’t get more real. “The people around you matter,” she added. Thankfully, shooting The Pitt, I was surrounded by the most supportive group of people ever. It was a fantastic experience that I will never forget.”
Next up, Tilney will be in an upcoming episode of Ryan Murphy’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story (Netflix) with Charlie Hunnam.
