“If nurses and doctors care for a guy like this in real life, that’s a tribute to the health-care system,” says Ernest Harden Jr., who plays Louie in The Pitt.
Photo: HBO Max/Warrick Page/MAX
Spoilers follow for The Pitt season two episode six, “12:00 P.M.,” which premiered on HBO Max on February 12.
Over 21 hours and two seasons, people of all ages and walks of life have sought aid at The Pitt, and whoever they are, the ER staff at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center offer them the best medical care they can provide. Within that high-stress environment, any smiling face is welcome. Louie Cloverfield, played by longtime film and TV veteran Ernest Harden Jr., was the smiling face, an alcoholic known to the Pitt’s staff for his self-destructive addiction and general geniality. He remembered their names. He asked about their partners and kids. He acknowledged, gently and not defensively, that his alcoholism was killing him. And in season two’s biggest gut punch yet, he dies in “12:00 P.M.” from a pulmonary embolism, an overwhelmingly bloody scene that shocks everyone who knew Louie and drives home the series’ stakes. No one is really safe in The Pitt, but every patient has a story to tell.
To break our hearts, The Pitt’s creative team pulled together anecdotes from the series’ nurse consultants about the “frequent fliers” they’ve encountered over their years working in emergency rooms, with The Pitt star, executive producer, and writer Noah Wyle making his series directing debut. The result is an episode that, like a “puzzle” — as Wyle and writer Valerie Chu put it — fits together elements of Louie’s life to provide a full portrait of a tragic man who found a family at the Pitt. “This guy is homeless. I don’t know if he can pay anything. Yet these people loved him that much that they just wanted to give him the best care they could,” Harden says. “If nurses and doctors care for a guy like this in real life, that’s a tribute to the health-care system.”
In The Pitt’s first season, the series introduced a number of ER regulars, including Louie, who treated everyone working in the department like an old friend. Harden (whose 50-year career stretches back to Three Days of the Condor with Robert Redford and the Bette Davis TV movie White Mama as well as series The Jeffersons and ER) initially auditioned for a different character but was offered Louie. He wasn’t sure he wanted to take it. “I was thinking, Oh my gosh, here it is, another Black man, drunk,” Harden says. But as he considered the offer, he thought about how Louie could become, rather than a “caricature,” a “real person that is struggling with alcohol addiction” and might subvert audience expectations. Harden took the job, and Louie in the first season is a man worn down by his reliance on alcohol but also respectful and appreciative toward everyone in the hospital. “It’s this Catch-22 of what it is to be a health-care professional,” says Amielynn Abellera, who plays the RN Perlah Alawi. “They’re coming to see you because they’re in pain, and you don’t want to see them, but you’re also happy to, because anytime they come in, they light up your day.”
In season one, Louie is “clearly part of the furniture of the ER,” says Gerran Howell, who plays medical student turned resident Dennis Whitaker. “For a lot of us, our first scene was with Louie.” After the patient’s introduction in the series premiere, he’s discharged but then returns to the ER later in the day, again under the influence, and appears to just hang out. Ultimately, Louie speaks with Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, who warns him his liver will eventually fail as a result of his nonstop drinking. “I’m digging my own grave. Let me,” Louie says, a line that hints at the things Louie won’t talk about. When Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) steals pills from Louie’s prescription for benzos, his theft is that much more unconscionable because of the trust Louie has put into the ER staff.
When it came time to decide which frequent fliers would return for season two, The Pitt showrunner and creator R. Scott Gemmill says they couldn’t “bring back all of them, because that would seem a little contrived.” Louie, however, would “give Langdon a soft opening for his apologies,” Gemmill explains. The returning cast was thrilled to see a familiar face but could only hope he would stick around. “When you have a character who’s so lovable, you do have suspicions,” Howell says. “You go, It would really suck, and it would be very dramatic, if he died. That was always in the back of our minds.”
The writers’ room started work on season two in February 2025, and with Louie and Langdon both returning to the ER, the stage was set for Langdon to confess and apologize to Louie for stealing his pills. But Louie’s death didn’t feel like a real option until the room was working on episodes four and five, when Louie’s various maladies connected to alcoholism-induced liver failure included a swollen stomach and an infected tooth. An early idea was for Louie to be present throughout the season and then leave the ER against medical advice, with a final ambiguous conversation with Dr. Robby about his future. The implication was that Louie would never return. That idea was popular in the room, Chu says, but “every responsible writers’ room, you go through all the options. Somebody was like, ‘What if he died in the hospital?’”
Chu didn’t like the idea at first. “Just because you have a medical show, it doesn’t mean you should use death gratuitously,” she says. But as the room discussed it, the story started to make sense. Louie’s death would affect all the characters who had grown close to him. With Langdon, who had vulnerably admitted his own addiction to Louie, it would certainly imperil the doctor’s ten months of sobriety. (“Is there a bigger trigger for Langdon to relapse?” Wyle asks. “I don’t know that there is.”) Whitaker and Perlah, who know about Louie’s advanced liver disease and see his care as routine, will be devastated to learn Louie is gone. These character beats would be paired with an idea from season one that didn’t make it in, of a scene where nurses clean a dead body; here it becomes a teaching moment between charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) and new graduate Emma Nolan (Laëtitia Hollard). The nurses in the Pitt have spent the most time with Louie over the years, and his death would hit them hard. Gemmill had long wanted to focus on the nurses’ perspective, and placing an episode more clearly from their POV partway through the 15-episode season felt right.
Wyle, who was originally slated to direct an episode later in the season, slid down the schedule after the original director for “12:00 P.M.” had a scheduling conflict, and he helped Chu break the story further. The episode opens moments after last week’s cliffhanger, when Langdon discovered Louie unconscious. Now, Dr. Robby and his staff fight in vain to save him, and after Dr. Robby pronounces Louie dead, he announces the team will do a debrief later. As they worked on the script in May, Chu, who is also The Pitt’s executive story editor, incorporated details from nurses she had spoken with while working on the show and volunteering at Los Angeles General Medical Center, which she started doing after she was hired to work on season one. A final breath of air releasing from Louie’s body startles Emma, an idea that came from the nurse-practitioner wife of one of the doctors on the series’ writing staff; later in the season, an unhoused friend of Louie will come by to pay his respects, a plot point that came from Kathy Garvin, a charge nurse at L.A. General after whom Dana is modeled. “A lot of their stories were actually about frequent fliers who are violent and angry, who punch them and threaten them,” Chu says. “The sentiment I got from every nurse was, ‘But when they die, it guts you … You just take their presence for granted, and then one day they’re not there.’”
In a weekly release show like The Pitt, actors generally don’t know what’s coming down the line for their characters until they get their scripts, but Gemmill says the show avoids this practice. “These people are working actors, and their careers are very important. You want to be as forthcoming with them as possible.” Normally Harden would be told what was written for Louie, but the plan for his character leaked and people involved with the show were coming up to Harden to tell him how much they’d miss him. Harden went to Wyle, with whom he’d become close during shooting. “I sat down and I said, ‘Noah, am I going to die?’” Harden remembers. “He said, ‘Louie’s going to go out, but it’s going to be glorious … You’re going to affect America.’ And you know what? That was my purpose when I first took the role.”
“12:00 P.M.” was filmed over nine days in late August, and “the mood was heavy on set, but it was focused,” Chu says. “Everybody on the crew loves Ernest.” The five preceding episodes depicted Louie’s worsening health, with Harden keeping a dignified smile on Louie’s face but also moving a little slower and admitting to more pain. Now he had to play an unconscious, then dead, body. The character’s gory crash-out required Harden wear a breastplate to protect his chest during the CPR sequences. “The blood was all over me — in my hair, everywhere. I said, ‘God, this is making me look worse,’ and they said, ‘There’s nothing pretty in The Pitt,’” Harden says with a laugh. After Louie dies, Harden is still present throughout the episode as Dana and Emma clean his body and the staff eulogizes him. Through it all, Harden had to keep his eyes closed and his breathing minimal — meaning he missed out on the other characters’ reactions to Louie’s death. “I haven’t seen those things. I’m looking forward to seeing them myself,” Harden says of watching the episode.
In the season’s most humanist sequence yet, the final moments of “12:00 P.M.” reveal Ernest’s harrowing backstory. During the debrief, a Dr. Robby tradition in which the ER staff remember a late patient, Robby reveals that Louie’s high-school sweetheart died in a car crash while pregnant with their first child. Louie’s drinking was a way to drown his grief. But aside from that, he was a Pittsburgh native, a man who always said “thank you,” a Steelers fan, a groundskeeper at Three Rivers Stadium, an addict who tried over and over to quit, and a husband and would-be father who never recovered from the destruction of those two identities. Harden saw the totality of Louie’s arc as “total respect” from the series’ creative team. “The fact is, they also respected my Blackness,” he says. “In other words, they wouldn’t want to make any kind of mistake that would look bad for me and Black people. They were very careful about all of that — they showed that it could happen to anybody, any one of us, if the right circumstances come about in your life.”
During the debrief, Howell remembers production bringing in warmer lights than the normal fluorescents used for the series to give the scene a “very somber, but lovely” feel. As each character spoke about Louie, Wyle framed his shots to align with that person’s sight line in the room, supporting the episode’s theme that “you only know somebody in these limited vantage points,” he says. Wyle also used a perspective unusual to The Pitt, “a high-above God perspective,” to briefly center Louie in the frame as the photo of his wife, Rhonda, is tucked into the sheet covering his body. The song “Need Someone,” written specifically for the episode by singer-songwriter Andrew Bird and series composer Gavin Brivik, features lyrics about how “you need someone / in the by and by / need someone / who’s gonna cry for you” and plays over the episode’s final moments and through the credits.
“12:00 P.M.” ends with the ER staff filing out of the room, leaving Louie’s body behind and going back to work, but this loss will hit harder. For Whitaker, who Howell says “struggles a lot” with being too empathetic to his patients, Louie’s death “messes him up.” “He has to shut down. He has to put up a wall very quickly,” Howell says, and that compartmentalization will affect the rest of his day. Abellera, who described the many takes of filming the aftermath of Louie’s death as “this weird Groundhog Day of awful,” hints at a similar exhaustion creeping up in Perlah as the shift continues. “Looking at Louie in that bed and hearing the story was so heartbreaking to me because his intention was never not caring for his life. It was just that he cared so much about other people, and that crashed down for him,” Abellera says. “This particular surprising loss cracks her armor.”
What Louie brought to The Pitt, Chu says, aligns with her own experiences while volunteering and her sense that many ER regulars are just looking for a friendly face, “a place to go or someone to talk to.” “There is no support for someone like Louie,” Chu adds. “When I was volunteering at the hospital, all the time, people who needed a meal or needed a bed would come in, and the doctors are like, ‘Let’s get you some sandwiches, and you can be on your way.’ It’s a need that is being filled by emergency rooms.” By the end of Louie’s time on The Pitt, viewers should understand him as a man who loved, and was loved — like all of us. “It’s about seeing these patients as real people,” Gemmill says. “It’s easy to forget about that when you just see them as a condition or a disease or a problem.”
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“You name a famous person in the last 30 years, especially a Black actor in Hollywood, and Ernest knows them well,” says Wyle.
For his part, Harden says Wyle told him he’d return on their last day of filming season one. “He grabbed my hand and said, ‘You’ll be back.’ You hear that from so many people, but in this business you don’t believe it until you’re actually doing it.”
Chu recalls a particularly emotional moment on set as they filmed this sequence. “There was also a line in there that I had gotten from Kathy, the charge nurse, that ultimately got cut because it didn’t feel right. Kathy had said, ‘When these frequent fliers come in and we lose them, it’s like a wound in the force.’ It was a reference to Star Wars. When Katherine delivered that line, I was bawling.”
Harden says he was recently approached by a fan who praised his performance on The Pitt, shared how much she loved Louie, and told him that the character better not die. “It’s Black History Month. I didn’t want to tell her the truth,” Harden says with a laugh.
