Sepideh Moafi Says the Frustration Around ‘The Pitt’ Points to a Bigger Hollywood Problem

Performing, at times, can mirror the energy of a busy emergency room in Pittsburgh’s North Side, making endurance and stamina key. Both are something The Pitt actress Sepideh Moafi says she picked up early as a stage performer before she became a fixture of the popular HBO series as attending physician Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi. “I think whenever you train in theater and opera, you know how to explore and express in a much more athletic, muscular way,” she says. “With television and film, it’s all distilled for the size of the camera.”

In the days before her TV career took off, her stage work — which she recently returned to for a monthlong run in the off-Broadway production of New Born at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre — was a defining experience. “It immediately gave me a sense of belonging that was not attached to what I looked like. It was linked to my work ethic and natural talent,” Moafi says. “But natural talent is not enough. You have to train, and I loved the training. I loved the falling and getting up and being humbled by this thing.”

At the time, Moafi didn’t realize how that training would lay the groundwork for a career mainly in TV and film. Shortly after getting her MFA from UC Irvine, she booked her first onscreen credit, a guest stint on CBS’ Blue Bloods. Other roles steadily followed, first a string of broadcast procedurals (Elementary, The Good Wife) and later streaming dramas (Black Bird, The L Word: Generation Q, Class of ’09). It was booking David Simon and George Pelecanos’ HBO drama The Deuce that gave Moafi her first sense of visibility on a set.

“Everybody had the same intention, which was that we’re all there to do the best work possible, and this is a team,” she recalls. “I work well in those kinds of environments, when people put their egos at the door.”

As a fledgling performer, Moafi says series like The Wire, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under showed her real people. “They were mostly white people, but they were worlds that felt accessible. People who were explored through an untraditional lens, or people living on the margins … who are repressing, hiding. That’s something I’m interested in,” she says. “I’d always associated film and TV with celebrity, with beauty, whiteness and glamour. These genres really opened my eyes to my own potential in this medium.”

The Pitt, then, is a fitting gig, with its gritty portrayal of a hustling ER full of vulnerable patients and clinicians collectively muscling through. Fans of the show, however — and its particular representation of women of color — have called into question whether a series of cast departures (Tracy Ifeachor, Supriya Ganesh) indicate a kind of treatment on the HBO medical drama. For Moafi, the answer lies within the very foundation of the series.

“We’ve known since season one that Dr. Robby [Noah Wyle] is our anchor in the show. … The world has always lived around him and through his point of view, and that’s been television since I’ve been here,” she says. “Recently, Cate Blanchett said something like, ‘There are still 10 women on set against 70 men.’ It’s disproportionate. So this is not about this show. It’s about the culture. It’s a system in which misogyny and patriarchy are baked in so well.”

The actress is firm in that “the setup for The Pitt wouldn’t have been made without Noah Wyle and Dr. Robby” but adds, “The people who feel a similar frustration around the way that Hollywood expresses itself over and over again, we [need to] sit down with our fucking pens and our computers and become the solution, like Issa Rae, Michaela Coel and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, because there are certain ideas about women and their place that are subconscious, especially for women of color.” 

Moafi has, in her own way, been doing that for years. The Iranian actress says she’s felt proud “every time I got to change a casting director or producer’s mind about if this character’s supposed to be this color or this shape.” She’s also helped define other aspects of characters’ identities. For example, for Dr. Al-Hashimi, Moafi tapped into her experience as a child of refugees and as an International Rescue Committee ambassador for her character’s work with Doctors Without Borders. She also helped the writers capture the nuance of a multicultural doctor with temporal lobe epilepsy.

“Dr. Al-Hashimi was written as being of Iranian descent, but she had an Iraqi or an Arab name. So I asked if we could do half-Iranian and half-Iraqi,” she says. “I have friends who are half-Iranian and half-Iraqi living with that cultural similarity but also dissonance. The way that these two countries have been at war with each other, both have been bombed by the U.S., both have lived with war, displacement and collective trauma.”

It’s entry points like this that have given Moafi a pathway to generate the visibility viewers often yearn for.

“Even though I haven’t lived with some kind of disability, I have lived with lifelong shame and hiding and being embarrassed and being othered and being told I don’t belong or being discriminated against,” she says. “I haven’t lived in war, but my parents have. They’ve lived under revolution, under political persecution. It’s in my DNA. Tapping into that, it’s almost like shining a light on certain parts that exist inside and bringing that out so that these specificities become more of the collective experience.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.