For actors, advice from peers can be invaluable … even when it starts sounding more like criticism. So, when a major talent told the cast of NBC’s iconic medical drama “ER” about an important performance tradition, they paid attention.
“Alan Alda told us about something they had done on ‘M*A*S*H.’ They called it a gut check,” star Noah Wyle remembered during a talk with the New York Times in a post-mortem oral history commemorating the end of “ER” in 2009. “Every Wednesday or Thursday the cast would have lunch in [executive producer] John Wells’ office to screen that week’s episode.”
He explained that the cast would then nitpick and deeply analyze each other’s performances, as per the tradition described by Alda, the iconic lead actor of “M*A*S*H” who did a five-episode stint on “ER” in 1999.
“Everyone took everyone else on. It could really get cruel if you hammed it up or took a moment to move your neck muscles or something,” Wyle said, noting that it made him incorporate constant movement in his scenes. “You were never supposed to stop moving until you earned the moment. I didn’t ever want it to be me. I was moving around like an alley cat.”
Internalizing Alda’s indispensable advice
Alda’s advice certainly didn’t hurt to bring a level of realism to a show set in a fast-paced, high stakes environment inhabited by emergency medical professionals with a fervent determination to seize the moment.
Alda is best known for playing army surgeon Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce on all 11 seasons of CBS’ “M*A*S*H,” and Hawkeye isn’t even the only doctor he played before “ER.” Alda appeared as a medical professional in two episodes of “The Nurses” and an episode of “Route 66,” with both airing in 1963, nearly a decade before “M*A*S*H.” Thirty years later, he played a doctor in the 1993 TV film “And The Band Played On.”
It looks like Wyle is still channeling Alda’s advice with his Emmy-winning role on “The Pitt” – another show that conveys the true chaos of the ER with a cast that virtually never slows down.