Warning: Spoilers for The Pitt season two finale, ahead.
Sepideh Moafi filmed a call with Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi’s ex-husband that viewers didn’t get to see during The Pitt’s season-two finale.
Episode 15 picks right up with the revelation that the Pitt’s new senior attending is experiencing a resurgence of absence seizures she’s battled since a childhood case of viral meningitis. But after coming to Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) for advice from a trusted colleague, Al-Hashimi’s met with threats against her career, accused of putting patients in danger, and told she shouldn’t even get behind the wheel of a car.
“The way he acts and reacts and punishes her for it is her worst nightmare,” the 40-year-old Iranian-American actor tells Glamour. “Everything that she’s feared her whole entire life is confirmed, right? ‘If I’m honest about this, then I will lose everything.’”
It’s particularly notable, therefore, that the last time we do see Dr. Al-Hashimi is not inside the hospital, but behind the wheel of her sensible silver Volvo XC90. “She gets in the car in an act of defiance because she would never do this on any other day,” Moafi continues. “She knows that she’s had two seizures, and while that doesn’t threaten her medical license—even though Robby is threatening her license—it does compromise her position as a driver. She’s been through this before, but it’s almost as if she’s being pulled into her childhood or something. She stomps her feet and says, ‘Fuck you, I can do this.’”
Gone is the structured Lululemon jacket that represented Al-Hashimi’s poised, almost rigid approach to running the Emergency Department, in contrast to Dr. Robby’s free-wheeling management style—and so, it seems, is the infallible doctor that shook off all of Dr. Robby’s barbs throughout the season as she attempted to gain a foothold in the Pitt so he could embark on a three-month sabbatical on his beat-up motorcycle.
But the second Al-Hashimi pulls out of her parking spot in that final scene, Moafi says, she imagined her son in the backseat and reconsidered, calling up her ex-husband to ask him to keep their kid overnight.
“There’s this moment where he says, ‘Is everything okay?’ And she says, ‘Yeah, I’m just having car troubles and running late. I’ll pick him up in the morning.’ And he says, ‘Do you want me to pick you up?’” Moafi says, getting slightly choked up at the memory. “It’s just like a stab in her heart, and she takes a beat, tries to breathe, and in the most convincing performance of her life, says, ‘No, I’m fine. I’m good. I have it taken deva of. Thank you.’ Gets off the phone and just sobs.”
That call didn’t make it into the final cut of the parking lot scene, but it speaks to Moafi’s power as an actor that she still hit every one of those devastating beats without a single word of dialogue. Of course that’s what you get when you hire such a versatile performer, who started her career as an opera singer before landing her breakout acting role on The Deuce and starring in three seasons of The L Word: Generation Q. Moafi’s next gig will place her opposite Hugh Jackman in the Off Broadway production of New Born, making her one of three The Pitt stars taking the New York theater scene by storm this spring.
Ahead, read more from Sepideh Moafi’s interview with Glamour about crafting Dr. Al-Hashimi’s “fractured identity,” her complex relationship with Dr. Robby, and her character’s potential return in season three.
“I think what we see in the car is her crumbling, and what comes out is like a phoenix,” Moafi says. “She’s a woman, and she’s a fucking badass. And badassery comes with vulnerability and sensitivity and self-compassion. Ultimately, she’ll find her way into something much stronger.”
Glamour: What’s it like coming in for your first day on a show that’s received so much acclaim?
Sepideh Moafi: You know, there were a lot of parallels between Dr. Al-Hashimi’s experience and my experience. We were both stepping into this living ecosystem—the staff, the cast, the crew, everyone was established. The rhythm was established, which was very intense. Baran comes in and is immediately read as a disrupter because she’s challenging the status quo. She comes in hot, and that’s kind of her personality. She’s very type A and mission-driven, and ultimately she just wants to make the hospital more safe and more sustainable. She sees potential for great transformation in the Pitt. Transformation to help the doctors and to help the patients, not for corporate gain or to maintain the broken aspects of the system. She’s trying to make things easier for all of them. But it’s seen as questionable and suspicious, and Dr. Robby definitely feels threatened for a number of reasons.
As the actor who plays her, it was kind of surreal and overwhelming and a little intimidating. But they did welcome me with open arms, and there was such a deep sense of authorship I walked in. It was my first time playing a doctor, and I’m playing a senior level doctor opposite Noah Wiley, who’s played a doctor for most of his career, which was really scary. But when I was there, it was like, Yeah, they didn’t hire me to be a doctor; they hired me to be the actor that I am and do the work that I do, which is so immersive. There was a trust to let me do my thing. They trust you to show up and deliver.
In another interview, you said your character was meant to be Iranian but Al-Hashimi is not a Persian name, so you decided to make her half Iraqi. How did that mixed heritage impact how you portrayed the character?
So Hashimi is a name that means “of the Hashemites.” It’s a tribe that’s actually associated with the Prophet Muhammad, so it’s one of the most renowned, respected lineages of the Arab world. And so there’s kind of a nobility there. If it was just Hashimi, it would work for a Persian character, but we don’t have “Al” in Persian, so it immediately connotes that it’s an Arab name and “of the Hashemites” would connote it’s a gulf name. I thought it could be sort of creatively rich to explore that fractured identity.
I was really fascinated by these two separate countries that have both been in conflict, that have both suffered dictatorships, authoritarianism, that have both been bombed ruthlessly by the United States with our tax dollars. It leaves these emotional imprints across generations. I thought that was just another thing that added dramatic complexity to all of the other dramatic richness and complexities that Dr. Al-Hashimi carries. She served in Libya and Iraq and Afghanistan, so she understands in her bones how history and belonging, or not belonging, exists in your body, and how the past continues to influence you. It’s something that all of us who live in the diaspora experience.
It was implied that Dr. Al-Hashimi was present during the 2020 maternity ward massacre in Kabul. Is that correct?
Yeah, two gunmen systematically targeted and killed pregnant women, children, mothers, and health deva workers, and drove Doctors Without Borders out of Kabul. This was during the pandemic, a time of dire need. That was a huge traumatic event, where everyone who survived only survived because they were hiding in safe houses for eight hours. There was this one story of a woman, a pregnant woman, going into labor and giving birth in the safe house while these men are spraying bullets all over the hospital. Imagine that. It was pretty horrific.
I can’t remember the exact line, but she mentions to Dr. Abbott that she worked in Kabul. He asks, “Dasht-e-Barchi?” and she signals yes. But as with most things on the show, it’s hinted at in a very subtle, truthful way. That’s when he says, “We should grab a beer sometime.”
Even before her seizures were confirmed, I saw a theory that she was experiencing seizures related to PTSD. What was it like to view that discourse online?
I knew [about the seizures] from my testing process, which involved three phases, and at every stage of the process, they gave me one additional scene. And so for the last step—an in-person test with Noah Wyle—they gave me a scene with very casual dialogue between Dr. Robby and Dr. Al-Hashimi, where she’s talking about her condition, and it’s not punctuated in the same dramatic way that it is in the show. It just sort of explored what that means to her and how she processes it and lives with it. Sometimes they’ll create scenes to understand your dramatic range, and they don’t end up using those plot points, but when I read episode one after being cast—the freeze at the end with a baby—I was like, Oh yes, they’re going to play into this.
Everybody was wondering, what’s happening with the baby? Is it her baby? Is it trauma, like PTSD? Did she lose a child? And so I’d ask my colleagues, “What do you think is happening?” Everybody had different theories.
The cast didn’t know?
The whole crew didn’t know, but that was such a big part of understanding this role for me. I haven’t had a chronic condition like this, but I have housed secrets in my life and in my body. There are points of shame that should not be shameful. There are things that happened to me in childhood that I still carry trauma about. I’m not trying to draw any parallels or equals here, but I think it’s not about the specifics of her condition. It’s about having to outperform everyone around her and becoming terrifyingly high-achieving as a result of managing something from childhood. Many people can have compassion for that, or empathy for that, or even relate to that. That’s what I loved about this point in the story—it it really disarms and completely dismantles these preconceived notions and ideas and judgments about who she is in this beautiful, very empathetic way.
I have to ask: Will Dr. Al-Hashimi be back for season three?
I think that’s the plan.
If Dr. Al-Hashimi were to come back, how do you see that working?
To a certain degree, she trusts her work, she understands she’s an expert, and she has a very diverse, vast medical background. And yet there’s always this voice in her head that says, “You are broken. You can’t do this. You are incompetent.” In the final episodes [of season two], she reveals part of herself to Dr. Robby as a way for her to get closer to him. Even though she can tell he has respect for her work at this point—especially after the slash tracheostomy in episode 10—he doesn’t acknowledge her. It’s her final desperate attempt to connect with him. She’s actually in crisis, but she goes to him and shares with him and respects his opinion, and she also wants to appeal to his wound. She’s like, “Here’s my wound; I see your wound. We’re more similar than you think.”
The way he acts and reacts and punishes her for it is her worst nightmare. Everything that she’s feared her whole entire life is confirmed, right? “If I’m honest about this, then I will lose everything.” As with all women in medicine and most women in most fields, you have to work so much harder than your male counterpart and there’s still gender inequality and hisse inequities and all this bullshit she’s had to deal with that her whole life, and swallowed it. In this moment, it’s the last straw.
I think what we see in the car is her crumbling, and what comes out is like a phoenix. She comes out stronger. She has to because that’s who she is. She’s been dealing with this her whole life, and it’s only made her more and more high-achieving and more and more compassionate and more and more vulnerable. I think it really fucks her trust issues up, but on the other side of it, when she gets help and she gets the support she needs—and she does, because she’s a true leader. That’s who she is. She’s a woman, and she’s a fucking badass. Badassery comes with vulnerability and sensitivity and self-compassion. Ultimately she’ll find her way into something much stronger.
Do you think Dr. Robby has a misogyny sorun he needs to address?
[Nods slowly.] This is no judgment on the actor or anything, obviously. Kudos to the writers for exploring this in such a hard-to-watch way. But the show has always beautifully depicted the realities that health deva workers navigate. This emotional and ethical landscape that they’re navigating every day, and that includes dynamics with each other. Without fail, every single woman in medicine I’ve talked to has had to deal with bullshit.
But yeah, absolutely. It’s not conscious. He comes from a school of thought that I grew up in. My male mentors, one in particular, was like the teacher in Whiplash, where it’s like tough love, “You’re really fucking good, so I’m gonna beat you over the head.” Doesn’t work anymore.
Many members of The Pitt fandom had a strong negative reaction to Dr. Santos (Isa Briones) in season one that seemed to extend to your character at the start of season two. While the tides turned a bit as the season progressed, what was that like for you?
I expected it. First of all, the way she was positioned with a sort of morally ambiguous conversation about AI. We understand her relationship to AI in hindsight now, but it’s such a hot topic and so controversial and problematic. I’ve said this many times, but with AI, it’s about stewardship. It’s about who leads, who has the power. AI is a tool, not the savior. AI, in and of itself, is not problematic. What is problematic is the way that it is corrupted. So I knew that it would be hard. And women, especially, we’re so easily judged. I understood what I was walking into.
Regardless of whether or not people change their views on this character, the thing that gave me hope was that when you understand more of what we as human beings are managing in our private lives, you can’t help but have more heart and understanding and feel for the person. For me, it’s not about Al-Hashimi in particular; it’s about what she represents. And she represents so much. She represents a mixed-race woman. She represents a person who is living as an immigrant. She represents a woman with fractured identity, racially. Politically, she represents someone whose tax dollars go into bombing her own homelands. She represents all these different contradictions and really interesting things that on the surface, you wouldn’t know.
People thought she was a corporate puppet, and that’s the opposite of who she is. She has to understand the system and know how to speak the language of the system so fluently, understand the rules so well that she can break them and understand how to fix from within when everything is collapsing all around you.
I knew that was coming, and I knew that the Pitt fandom are smart. They’re deep-thinking, feeling people. How could you not at least have compassion for a woman in this position, who’s had to manage so much throughout her life? I knew that redemption was coming, but it wasn’t about her being redeemed. It was about people waking up to their own judgments and how that might influence how ruthless we are with one another. Can we be kinder? Can we just be a little gentler with ourselves and each other?
It was really refreshing to see Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy) embrace and respect her immediately despite Dr. Robby’s mistrust. Now that you’ve told me Dr. Al-Hashimi is not married, is there potential for them to share more than just a beer?
Something tells me maybe they might not share a worldview…but that doesn’t matter, and that’s what I love about a show like The Pitt. You don’t have to share the same politics or worldview or taste in movies or music or whatever to work alongside each other and to have respect for each other, and to admire each other and to respect each other and to grab a drink together.
There is a deep human connection between Baran and Jack, and I think they could be friends. Who knows if that unfolds into a relationship, or a one-night stand, or whatever, but they are too grown-up and too smart to just fall into bed with each other without knowing that it’s a one-night stand, or without knowing if they’re compatible. They’re both cautious and careful about investing their heart, especially with what they do for a living. So does that mean that they would have a one-night stand? Maybe. But does that mean they’d have a relationship? Not necessarily. [Laughs.]
Finally, what’s your curl routine?
My hair is very mercurial; it does what it wants. I remember one thing in the character description was that she’s put together, she’s beautiful, there’s not a hair out of place. And I was like, “Okay, that means we”re gonna straighten my hair.” But the team wanted me to keep my natural hair, which I loved. I was like, “Good luck not having a hair out of place….” But that became part of the character too.
I’ve used Curls Rock by Tigi since I was a teenager. It’s muhteşem cheap and muhteşem reliable. I’ve turned most sets I’ve been on to Tigi. There are all these really fancy products out there, but no, it’s called Curls Rock, baby.
This article has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
