Interview: Patrick Ball on Hamlet, The Pitt, and Doing Both at Once

For viewers of HBO Max’s new hit medical drama The Pitt, actor Patrick Ball might appear to be an overnight sensation—a breakout star whose magnetic turn as the competent-but-shady Dr. Frank Langdon has quickly become one of the most talked-about performances of the year. But for those in the regional theater world, Ball’s arrival isn’t a surprise, it’s a longtime coming. Theater has taken Ball across the country, from the Berkshires to San Diego, and he now finds himself in the position of juggling his first major TV success with the role of a lifetime, Hamlet.

Ball stars in Robert O’Hara’s bold new production of the Shakespearean tragedy at Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum in Los Angels. A true-crime revisal, O’Hara’s script-flipping take on the play presents the first 80 minutes entirely from Hamlet’s perspective, before suddenly becoming, well, the kind of work you’d expect from the author of Barbecue and the director of Slave Play.

We caught up with Ball in the days leading to opening night, as he gets his bearings in O’Hara’s kingdom, while doing double-duty in his ER scrubs.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Some of the buzz about your great performance on The Pitt comes from the fact that it’s your first major television role and you’re a relatively unknown actor. But you’re a regular theater person.
Absolutely. I love the theater. I have lived exclusively in the theater for the last 10 years. When I decided to become an actor, I had no delusions of becoming a movie star. I grew up watching plays at the local Equity house, Triad Stage, in Greensboro, North Carolina. I’ve been very lucky because I’ve gotten to do great plays and travel this country and work with some incredible artists, most of whom the general television-watching public don’t know. To, all of a sudden, be put in the sort-of Hollywood awareness and then get to turn right back around and be in rehearsal for a play? I love being in rehearsal. Rehearsal is where I am absolutely the happiest.

Must be nice to know that you don’t have to recite Shakespeare while shoving a tube down someone’s throat.
Well, I don’t know. Me and Noah Wyle [star and executive producer of The Pitt] would be on set quoting Richard II back and forth to each other. It’s a complicated dance that I’m doing with Hamlet right now. It feels like it’s using the same muscle. The main difference is that in theater, you get to fly for two hours and then you come down on the other side. You never fully get that experience in TV.

How did Hamlet come about for you? Had Robert O’Hara seen The Pitt when he was casting?
No. I auditioned while I was shooting The Pitt. I sent in a self-tape in November, and it was one of the more deranged self-tapes I’ve ever done. I made my phone Gertrude’s point of view and took her around my apartment and into bed and did all this stuff. I walked away from the experience being like “I don’t know if I’m gonna get that job, but I had fun doing it.”

And then, in February, I got an email from the showrunner of The Pitt saying “Hey man, congratulations, we’re so stoked for you and we’re gonna figure out a way to make this work.” They know how much of a theater guy I am. But I had no idea what they were talking about.

It took about two weeks of back and forth with my agents and Warner Bros. and CTG for them to find a way to make this work. I’m going to be doing both at the same time for next month. We open Hamlet on Wednesday, and then Thursday is my first day back in the lab and I have to be on set at 7am [for the second season of The Pitt].

Eat your Wheaties, man.
Yeah, I know. Yesterday morning, a few of us from The Pitt did a hospital visit at St. Joseph’s here in LA. While we were there, Noah says to me “Ball” — he calls me by my last name — “You’re looking skinny, man.” And I’m like, “I’m playing Hamlet, dude.” And he’s like, “You need to make sure you are eating and taking care of yourself because we’re about to work you like a dog.” I do need to be better about eating and sleeping, but I’m moving fast right now.

So, tell me about playing Hamlet.
It’s a very full-circle, white whale moment for me. I did seven Shakespeare plays in drama school. I was kind of like the Shakespeare guy at Yale School of Drama. I actually auditioned for Yale with “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.” Hamlet the Mama Rose of Shakespeare.

I’m not only getting to do Hamlet, but I’m getting to do Robert O’Hara’s Hamlet. I love Robert. I saw Slave Play twice. I saw his Raisin in the Sun at the Public and I’ll never forget what he did with Walter Lee’s big monologue, and how it clapped down into a hard spot and turned into, like, a straight minstrel show. I was doing a developmental workshop at the time with the actor who played Walter Lee, Francois Battiste, so I saw the show and the next day I couldn’t even talk to him. I was just like, “Damn, dude. That was one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.”

What does a Robert O’Hara Hamlet look like?
It’s tough to talk about without giving too much away, but it’s a spicy, spicy take. For 80 minutes, it’s William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and then it becomes an entirely original Robert O’Hara play that is a David Lynchian, film-noir interrogation of Hamlet. It becomes a treatise on perspective and race and gender. The audience sees me playing Hamlet and takes that as reality, and then we see Hamlet perceived by everyone around him, and how, at the end of the day, he’s a highly privileged, straight, white, male, nepo baby.

It’s a big gamble. Hamlet has a line in the speech to the players about holding the mirror up to nature. Shakespeare never intended for these plays to live in a museum, right? The job of these plays is to hold a mirror up to the world as it is right now, and I think that’s what Robert’s doing.

Are there similarities between the theater rehearsal process and the medical rehearsals you had to do for The Pitt? The repetition? The speed?
Oh, yeah. And kudos to John Wells [executive producer of The Pitt], because he made a point of hiring theater actors, which was intentional because we do move fast. Nobody’s setting up lights, nobody’s setting up a dolly track. They’ll have a doctor come in and show us the procedure. They’re like, “And then you put this here, and you’re going to switch out this prop, and you’re going to say this line.” They give us 10 minutes to learn it and then the cameras come in and we let it rip. It takes a theater sensibility to be that quick on your feet, to be like, “Let’s jam.” You just keep moving, and if you trip over somebody, you trip over somebody.