Not too long ago, Noah Wyle was out to dinner when an elderly couple approached. “We love the show,” the exchange began. Then came the request: “I just had knee surgery,” said the woman. “Would you mind taking a look?” According to the Pitt star, she rolled up her pant leg right there, and Wyle assessed the incision. After all, he’s played a doctor for well over a decade, first on ER and, now, on the Emmy-winning HBO Max drama. That Wyle has no actual medical credentials didn’t seem to matter.
Turns out, being conflated with the characters one plays is not uncommon, at least for the TV stars gathered at THR‘s Drama Actors Emmy Roundtable. That group, which also included Charlie Hunnam (Monster), Richard Gadd (Half Man), Paul Anthony Kelly (Love Story), Kit Harington (Industry) and Tom Hiddleston (The Night Manager), discussed this and much more on a late April morning at The Georgian Hotel.
What’s the craziest thing you’ve all done to land or prep for a gig? Charlie, did I hear you spent time in solitary confinement for a gig?
CHARLIE HUNNAM I didn’t go in a prison. I just was the pain in the arse that refused to leave the set while I was shooting a solitary confinement scene. I said I was just going to stay in the cell for the duration of the shoot, about 10 days.
You slept there?
HUNNAM Yeah, and peed in a bucket. It was just a complete nightmare for everybody involved as they tried to light the scene and paint the walls and stuff.
TOM HIDDLESTON What was that for?
HUNNAM An adaptation of Papillon. Obviously an important sequence of the book is that solitary sequence, and I just wanted to go for it.
RICHARD GADD Did it have any impact on your [points to head]?
HUNNAM I think so. It became lonely and weird in the best way, and it allowed me to own that section of the film — like, own the space. It became a bit of a battle between me and the crew because often the crew owns the space until you arrive and then you take over and we do our thing. But it felt as though, if you were living in solitary and your entire existence resided in that small box, the sense of ownership you would have over that would be pretty extreme.
HIDDLESTON What’d you do for food?
HUNNAM Starved myself. I got down to about 144 pounds.
HIDDLESTON Wow, that’s pretty skinny. Respect, man.
Wyle styling by Mark Holmes. Brooks Brothers jacket; Todd Snyder shirt; Rag & Bone jeans, belt; his necklace; Thursday boots.
Photographed by Beau Grealy
Anyone else go to wild lengths?
HIDDLESTON I worked early on with a brilliant British director called Joanna Hogg. She was making very intense, quiet, but complex stories about families and family dynamics and [for Archipelago] she asked us to live in the house that the family was staying in. So, we’d be in this house for real and then the crew would turn up in the morning. Obviously, I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t starving myself, so it was remarkably less challenging in that way, but there was this quality of, like you say, ownership, the way you go into the kitchen and put the kettle on – the naturalism that I guess we chase was just there.
HUNNAM Anything you can do that limits the amount you actually have to act. (Laughter.)
KIT HARINGTON I think I inadvertently gave myself a leg up with the character of Jon Snow, but it was completely unintentional. I’d gotten into a fight the night before the [Game of Thrones] audition. One that I hasten to say I lost. This guy gave me a black eye, so when I turned up to the audition, I looked a bit rough. And they’d probably watched a million tapes of all these different actors, and something like a little mark, they say, “Oh, that guy with the black eye was good.” So, whoever that guy was, thank you.
GADD When you were further along in the process, did they ever mention the black eye?
HARINGTON They might have. Maybe the next job I really want, I’ll get beaten up again.
PAUL ANTHONY KELLY Maybe it can work for you.
GADD Baby Reindeer was all pretty extreme reenactments, but I also shrunk down for it. I was 68.8 kilograms [roughly 151 pounds], when I shot that. When I’m acting and you turn up in your own body, or they put you in a shirt, a bit of gel in your hair and you go to set, I’m always like, “Ugh, I just kind of feel like myself.” [But with that,] I felt so frail and vulnerable, and before you know it, you feel like you’re a different person. And when I did Ruben for [Half Man], I was at my heaviest, 109.8 kilograms [242 pounds].
NOAH WYLE That’s a big jump.
GADD Oh yeah. But I’m big into that “feel character in your body first” — the way they walk and carry themselves.
How were you received differently as you moved through the world — and how did that inform the character?
GADD Oh, it was crazy. You’d go down the middle of an airplane and everyone would simultaneously put their heads down as you walk past. Or even as you go through a checkout, and you’d be paying for food and people would be flustered or anxious. It’s crazy how much people see bigness as a symbol of something to be feared.
HUNNAM I had an experience like that. I was staying at the Four Seasons when I shot Ed Gein, who has a pretty extreme look, like a classic serial killer haircut, and I was incredibly skinny. Then I’d go home to the Four Seasons, which was just kind of a weird vibe but also lovely. And I got into the elevator at about half past midnight with this very well-to-do older couple, and I gave them a big smile and said, “Oh, hello. Hope you had a nice night.” And they just sort of looked at each other and looked down, and I thought, “Man, rich people suck. Can we all not just be nice to each other?” Then I got to my room and [realized I] hadn’t washed my makeup off. I had a big blood streak down [my face] with the serial killer haircut. I just terrified these two people.
Paul, before Love Story, which has catapulted you into the zeitgeist, you spent a decade hearing no. How close did you come to walking away?
KELLY I was ready to give it up days before I got the callback. A year ago today, I had no idea what I was doing. My wife and I had to evacuate [post-fires] and move to where we live now [Portland, Oregon], and we were like, “What do we do?” I was a model at the time. It kept the lights on, but it wasn’t fulfilling. And we were planning on starting a family, which we’ve now done, and I’m Canadian, so we were like, “Do we just go back there? The health care is free. The education system’s good. We have family there.” Several days later, I got an email for a callback for John F. Kennedy Jr., the same day that we found out we were pregnant. Thirteen years of no, of getting close to things, it was great practice. But, yeah, it’s wild how quickly things can change. The success of this show was just like strapping yourself to a rocket. I never thought it would grow the legs that it did and start running at the speed it has, but I’m so here for it.
Harington styling by Bailey Moon. Giuliva Heritage top, pants; Patek Philippe watch.
Photographed by Beau Grealy
Who else has seriously considered walking away from all of this at any point?
HARINGTON Many, many days.
HUNNAM Every day, right?
HARINGTON There are at least four or five days on any given job where I’ll walk off set and go, “That’s it. I’m done. Thank you. I’ll do something else.” I’ll go have a sulk, and then I’ll pick myself up again and do the job.
HUNNAM Then you have that one good day, and you’re like, “Maybe I’ll do it for another week.”
HARINGTON I don’t know about you guys, but I’m always looking for that plan B and I can never find it.
GADD I got into the industry through comedy and there’s no feeling like going for 10 years and still performing to about five people every night. You’d trek around the country. I’d be staying in Glasgow, and I’d drive to Birmingham in an evening, only to perform to about three people to silence, and then drive all the way back.
HUNNAM That’s a long drive home.
GADD Yeah, and I’ve still got the car. It’s a 2007 Skoda Fabia and I still drive it because it was with me through all that pain. But God, those drives were just existential, like, “What am I doing?”
Did you ever flirt with walking away, Noah?
WYLE I never wanted to do anything else, but there were many times where I felt the industry was quitting me. I couldn’t figure out how to be relevant or what my place was. When you have a very front-loaded career like I did — ER was such a tremendous success so early on — it spoils you into thinking that that’s going to be a constant or a given. When that proves not to be true, you have to do that work that allows you to get validation from something other than the external, which has been something I’ve grappled with forever. When I’m working, I’m at my best. So, I try to work whenever I can.
HIDDLESTON Forgive me for not knowing, how old were you when you were doing ER?
WYLE I got that job March 17th, 1993. I was 22. I did it from 22 to 38, 260-some-odd episodes.
HIDDLESTON Wow.
WYLE Yeah, a really significant chapter of my life. Not until The Pitt has lightning felt like it struck that way again.
GADD When you do a series for that long, is it like clockwork? Or do you still have to find the inspiration every day?
WYLE I find there’s more infinite complexity in repetition. A film, it’s so finite. You’re telling one story, and then those relationships only last for three or six months. TV affords you this wonderful opportunity to build almost a surrogate family, and everybody throws in together, and that energy is what I’m absolutely addicted to.
You’ve said your ER co-star George Clooney taught you how to be famous in a healthy way. What did that entail?
WYLE Take your work seriously, don’t take yourself seriously; keep a sense of humor and humility about you; be on time, be professional, be personable; recognize that you’re an ambassador for this show wherever you go, and that there aren’t any more private moments to be had for you publicly. To a certain extent, you are accountable, and you should live your life accordingly. Also, start thinking of your life anecdotally because you’re going to have to chunk it into talk show stories. Like, you better start looking at what was funny about the dog puking on the bed last night.
Gadd styling by Chris Brown. Mackintosh leather jacket; BDXY Studio tee; Levi’s jeans; Dr. Martens
Photographed by Beau Grealy
Paul, you were taking notes from the Heated Rivalry stars on how to handle overnight stardom. What did you learn?
KELLY Those guys are on a crazy ride. This is my first show and foray into all of this. Being in the public eye, no longer having private moments in the public, you have to really watch your p’s and q’s. They were a great template for me to glean from. Obviously, it’s different, but the structure’s kind of the same.
There’s discourse surrounding things like your chest hair on the internet. It’s wild. What’s your comfort level with all of it?
KELLY Oh, heavens to Betsy, not the chest hair! [Laughter.] No, people can think whatever they want about my chest hair — I’m keeping it. And that might have been part of me getting the job too. They were looking for a real ’90s man, and I just seem to fit the bill there. There has been a lot of discourse, but there’s also been an overwhelmingly positive reception to the show. And I got the job three weeks before we started filming, and I’m Canadian, so I had to learn a different speech pattern, bulk up a little bit — not as much as [Gadd], I’d love to do something like that, though — read everything and work with an acting coach. And for a show set in the ’90s, I didn’t do a holding cell, but I didn’t have a cellphone.
HIDDLESTON Nice.
KELLY I kept it as quiet as I could and lived within that world to keep it truthful. It was the best six months of my life, just being off-grid within the thing.
The rest of you have experience navigating fame and fandom. Any tips to offer?
HARINGTON I’m still learning within this business how to just be myself, and that being myself is OK and probably desirable. You started ER when you were 22, I did Game of Thrones at a similar time, but I spent 10 years during my 20s in the odd state of not knowing how to deal with any of it. I’m quite a shy person at heart and trying to pretend not to be shy was very difficult.
HIDDLESTON I’ve found people will idealize you and demonize you, and neither picture is accurate. It’s healthy for me just to keep all of it over there and trust yourself and the people who know and love you.
Hunnam styling by Warren Alfie
Baker. Brioni suit, shirt; own watch, shoes.
Photographed by Beau Grealy
Charlie, I’ve heard you say the hardest part of the process for you is ending a project. What is that reentry like?
HUNNAM My life makes sense when I’m working. I know who I am most readily when I’m able to put my machinery to work and I’m part of a community with a unified focus. It requires us to work 80 hours a week and, often, to travel, so we’re away and disconnected from family and our life. So you come [having] sort of let everything else get neglected and have to reenter your life. There’s always this uneasy process of accepting or rejecting the parameters of this life that I’ve created for myself. I come in and I’m like, “Oh, right, these are my clothes,” because I’ve been living out of a suitcase. Friends’ lives have gone on without you because, inevitably, those relationships get a little neglected. But it’s saying goodbye to the character that I find very difficult.
WYLE Yeah.
HUNNAM And my wife is really fed up with it. We’ve been together 20 years, and a few years ago, she just said to me, “Dude, do what you need to do, exorcize this stress and grief out of your system because when you get home, you’d better be ready to see me.” So I always just take a few days after I finish a job. When I finished Ed Gein, I definitely did not want to carry any of that character back into my regular life, so I drove up and went to his grave and said what I needed to say and then got on a plane home.
WYLE My wife sends me away.
HUNNAM Does she?
WYLE The last two seasons of The Pitt, especially, because I’ve finished them a basket case. She sent me to a beach for four days just so I didn’t have to be around anybody for a little while. You’re going at 120 RPMs, and then it’s just done and you have no place to put it. There’s no decompression as you’re coming up from those depths.
HARINGTON With Industry, I had my kids with me. They’re both very small, and I had to do some pretty drastic stuff in the fourth season. I’d come home, and they didn’t give me the choice but to get out of the character. I can’t be a prick to my kids.
WYLE Yes, kids are wonderful.
HARINGTON But I hear what you’re saying because that post-job thing can be really disorienting. You can turn into a different version of yourself that’s not the character or you. You’re just this grumpy prick.
KELLY It’s overwhelming, especially when you’re stepping into someone else’s skin and you’re living like that in a different period. I now have a new child, so that’s where I focus everything. We didn’t have it after we wrapped, but it was that changing of gears and a whole new focus. It was like, “OK, now I have to step into pre-dad mode.” It was like prepping for another job, the actor dad.
HIDDLESTON The longest job of your life.
KELLY Also the best.
WYLE And you probably had hundreds of thousands of emails and texts after not having your phone all that time.
KELLY Well, I got a new phone, and I don’t turn that one on anymore. (Laughter.)
HARINGTON Because you played this character who lived and died not so long ago, when you wrapped and you said goodbye to him, would you say that there was a deeper sadness there? You portrayed him so beautifully.
KELLY Thank you very much.
HARINGTON It was so recent, and I think you did him an incredible justice. But when you said goodbye to him, was there a kind of profound, “Oh, okay, bye mate”?
KELLY Yeah, thank you for asking me that. I still haven’t said goodbye. I think there’s a lot of qualities of John that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. One of the things I learned about him is that he always wanted to be an actor and it’s the same thing that I always wanted to be. In that, I take him everywhere I go because it was him that got me here. So, I never really get to say goodbye to this character, and I think that’s a beautiful thing, but there is that coming back and being Paul again that was a bit of an adjustment. You’re just like, “What do I do now?”
Kelly styling by Warren Alfie Baker. Tom Ford suit, shirt, shoes.
Photographed by Beau Grealy
Audiences often conflate actors with the characters they play. Noah, what happens when you’re on a plane and someone asks if there’s a doctor on board?
WYLE I just flew back from New York, and as I’m sitting down, everybody’s looking at me, and I said, “Nobody have a medical emergency. I will only pretend to help you, but I won’t save you.” And this one guy goes, “You never know, you’d be surprised.” I go, “We don’t want to be surprised.”
HIDDLESTON You probably could.
WYLE My family will tell you I’m delusional in thinking that I know way more than I do.
GADD You must have picked up some stuff.
WYLE I’d rather people think I knew how to heal them than know how to fight them because I’d imagine that it’d be much harder to walk through life having that reputation …
HUNNAM That has come up a couple times.
WYLE I was talking to them and thinking about you.
HUNNAM I’m a pretty cowardly individual, truth be told, and I really panic at the prospect of having to have any sort of physical altercation. And I got broken into once at 3 o’clock in the morning by a guy who was literally twice my size and I’d been working night shoots. I had a separate structure from my house, and I had my cat on my knee and it was 3 o’clock in the morning, I was just learning lines, and we both heard something in the backyard. The cat bolted, my wife was asleep inside, and I thought, “Fuck me, I don’t know how to handle this situation,” and then [his Sons of Anarchy character] Jax Teller went, “Don’t worry bro, I do.” There was a little machete on my door frame that had been there since I moved in, so I grabbed it and because I’ve done so much fake fighting in my career, I knew how to swing this machete but not actually hit the guy. So I swiped at him, and he fell backwards, and I just said, very calmly, “You got 10 seconds to leave or they’re never going to find your body.” He left, lickety-split.
HIDDLESTON Amazing.
HUNNAM It was my one heroic moment of my life.
Kit, I suspect there was a decade there where people just assumed you were Jon Snow?
HARINGTON Yeah, that was a weird decade. And Jon Snow was almost defined by his goodness. He’s morally perfect. The hero. The trouble I had is that I didn’t feel anything like him, yet everywhere I went, people treated me like I was. I felt almost in competition with the character, which then sort of spiraled. By the end of the show, I really wasn’t very well. It’s taken a while to move past that.
HIDDLESTON And yet maybe a part of him is in you, otherwise you wouldn’t have done it and it wouldn’t have been so loved.
HARINGTON There’s a way of playing that character as just heroic, and I don’t know if I intentionally did this, but [the way I played him] was heroic but tortured. I think it was just part of me coming out in the character, but it seemed to [connect] with people, which was interesting.
HIDDLESTON A very wise man once said to me, “The only meaning in life is to reside as a good object in the minds of others.” And it’s not small that you [do]. That’s something you did for them.
HARINGTON Yeah.
HIDDLESTON It’s something that I’ve tried to never take for granted, the gift that you can give to people. When children have come up to me, and they’re so excited because they’re looking at Loki, I want to live up to whatever they can see, because actually it’s a gift to them. So, for all those people who loved Jon Snow and watched it season after season, it’s not insignificant that you reside as a good object in their minds.
HUNNAM Maybe that conflict is built into the design, like this paragon of virtue that they chose [is] the kid who showed up with the black eye.
HARINGTON Yeah. They cast Game of Thrones brilliantly. Whether conscious or not, they picked actors who had some sort of conflict that the character had. I always felt that the actors on that were quite similar to their characters in a strange way.
GADD I remember walking through a supermarket two weeks after [Baby Reindeer] came out, and my face was on the front page of all these newspapers, and it was, “Richard Gadd struggling with the weight of fame.” I was like, “How do they know?” I felt like people were coming up to me in the street almost looking for answers because of the raw honesty of Baby Reindeer. Like, “Hey, what do you think about this? And what do you think about that?” Suddenly I was in a dangerous position because I never wanted to be the harbinger of good advice. I mean, look at the story based on my life — I never took good advice myself!
WYLE I get a bit of that with the reaction to The Pitt. It’s intense the way that it hits certain people. It’s more than just, “I like your show.” It’s, “I lost my mother last year,” or, during COVID, “I had a really hard time.” I have a tendency to “Aw, shucks” my way through life and deflect that type of thing. I don’t take it in very easily, but you feel like you’re dishonoring the intensity of the connection if you don’t stand there and acknowledge it, but that’s not organic to me.
HIDDLESTON I was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2016, and there was a party where Joe Biden walked in and made a beeline, shook my hand and was talking to me about the general election in the U.K., but with the sort of transference that I was a vetted member of the intelligence community. He was the vice president at the time, and I thought, “This is not an interaction I expected,” but he’d watched The Night Manager. The following summer, I was sat at a lunch with the head of the British Armed Forces who told me things I’m sure I shouldn’t have known because he’d seen The Night Manager. I’m not actually a spy. I’m an actor.
Hiddleston wears Ralph Lauren jacket, sweater, pants, shoes.
Photographed by Beau Grealy
What are the wildest fan interactions that you’ve had?
HARINGTON An actor’s ego is a fragile thing. I’m always amazed at the amount of interactions that start well. They’ll go, “Oh my God, Jon Snow!” “Yes, I did play Jon Snow.” Then they go, “Where have you been?” “Well, I …” and you start listing off your CV. “Not seen that one? No?” Then they go, “Wow, you are much shorter than you are on TV.” You walk away going, “I feel terrible now.”
HIDDLESTON I was at a French café, and the waiter was incredibly kind. I could see that he was quite excited to be serving the coffee and pastries. At the end, he said, “I just have to say, I’m such a big fan. I loved you in Prometheus and Shame.”
WYLE Oh God …
HIDDLESTON I just had to go, “Thank you.” No, not me, sadly.
WYLE I was at an airport, and this guy goes, “You’re Keanu Reeves?” I said, “No, I’m not.” He goes, “I got you. On the down-low, Keanu.”
HUNNAM I was in a taxi recently, and the guy thought he recognized me, so he asked me what my name was. I told him and he decided he was going to google me while he was driving.
HARINGTON Oh God.
HUNNAM He decided to play the first video that came up over the speakers in the taxi. The title was, “Whatever Happened to Charlie Hunnam?” It was just this catalog of all of my failures.
HIDDLESTON Keep it at arm’s length, Charlie.
HUNNAM I got out just as it said, “And then came the catastrophic failure that was King Arthur.”
HIDDLESTON Just rude.
HUNNAM Then this guy came up like, “Oh bro, you are so important to me.” I thought, “This is what I need right now!” Then he said, “Yeah, I watch every episode of Vikings.” [He’d been mistaken for Travis Fimmel.] But to [Wyle’s] point, I was going on a talk show the next day.
WYLE Perfect.
HUNNAM Turn this grand humiliation into talk show gold.
HIDDLESTON I don’t know if this happens to you guys, but I’ll be at a petrol station and somebody will quietly say, “I’m so sorry, has anyone ever told you that you look just like Tom Hiddleston?” I’m like, “I get that a lot.” “But you look exactly like him.” I go, “I know, it’s weird, isn’t it?” You buy your coffee and you pay for your gas and they go, “You look like him. You really do.” And then I’ll literally be driving off and they’ll be like, “It is you!”
HARINGTON But you feel like such a dick going, “Well, actually, I am.”
This story appeared in the June 16 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.