In the role of Dr. John Carter, actor Noah Wyle had one of the most impressive characters arcs on ER.
From acting as the audience’s sympathetic point-of-view character into the medical drama’s visceral world of big emotional stakes and jargon-heavy traumas, Carter became an instant fan favorite. The eager but floundering doctor famously evolved from being a green-gilled surgical resident under the exacting oversight Dr. Benton (Eriq La Salle) into one of Cook County Hospital’s most confident and skilled physicians by the end of ER’s run. Equally impressive was Wyle’s devotion to authenticity, and making sure it looked like he really knew what he was doing when performing procedures like suturing or intubating patients.
Here, in honor of ER turning 30, the five-time Emmy nominee shares memories from his time on the landmark NBC series.
Television Academy: Do you recall what your audition was like for the show?
Noah Wyle: I remember it like it was yesterday. I auditioned twice. The audition scene was me putting the I.V. into a cop who had accidentally shot himself, played by Troy Evans, who then subsequently came back and played Frank, [one of ER’s] desk clerks.
And from there, were you brought to the network?
I was brought to the network and I tested against another actor named Raphael Sbarge, who's very talented. And I've told this story many times about Raphael, he started to do Tai Chi in the waiting room. And I got all freaked out because I didn't know Tai Chi. And he was all Zen’d out, and I was freaking out. And Michael Crichton walked in the room and looked at Raphael freaking Zen-ing out — and me freaking out — and [Michael] came over to me. And without saying another word, he just said, “you know, I was recently reading about this woman who lived in Tibet 400 years ago. And she was a potter. And what's interesting about her is — and nobody knows if it was something indigenous to the clay in the region where she worked, or if it's something specific in her kilning process or if it was a specific glaze that she employed — but many of her works are not only indestructible, but still in practical use today.” And then he turned, and he walked away.
And I kind of shook my head for a second and thought, “what the fuck?” I then realized that he'd just done the greatest service to me. He walked in, and he saw an actor who knew how to relax doing Tai Chi and an actor who was really not centered. And he said to himself, “I'll take this kid out of his head for him. I'll take him on a little trip to Tibet and introduce him to somebody who used to make pots.” He never confirmed or denied it but I was so grateful that he had done that. I was so relaxed when I went in. I just went in and got my job.
After I was cast, and we were shooting, I remember saying to him: “I'm playing you, right? I mean, it's so obvious that you wrote this in '75 after you were a third-year medical student. [Carter is] the third-year medical student. So I'm you, right?” And he'd say, “they're all me. I'm a little bit Ross. I'm a little bit Hathaway. I'm a little bit Lewis.”
John Wells mentioned that I should ask you about the pig’s feet on set, and how you got really good at suturing them.
Back in the early days, the one thing we all had in common was the sincere desire to try to make everything look as authentic as possible. And [it] almost became a sort of competition between us to see, if they were going to feature our hands, who could do the procedures the most elegantly. I took that as a serious challenge. I would go to the store, and I'd buy all these chickens, and I'd cut them up, and then I'd sew them up and practice at home.
I got so good at it that they started putting me in the background of scenes with a pig's foot because a pig's skin has the most comparable elasticity to human skin. I sewed up a lot of pig's feet on set which — after about eight, nine hours under the set lights — it's really ripe.
Carter has this famous scene in the pilot, where he is sitting on a curb outside the rain-slicked ambulance bay, and Dr. Greene monologues to him. What was it like filming that scene?
That wasn't originally [set] in an ambulance bay. That was in, like, this weird alleyway — a steam tunnel outside the Linda Vista [Community] Hospital in LA [where the pilot for ER was filmed]. We recreated that moment twice more over the series life. And [directed Rod Holcomb] played off the reflections that you got in that puddle.
How was your experience watching the pilot for the first time? Because there are some structural changes to scenes in the final cut compared to the script.
We all had a party at Eriq [La Salle]'s house. Eriq was living in this house on Kilkea Drive in L.A. He rented a big screen TV, and we all went over there and watched it together. We did everything together.
John would screen the episodes for us every Wednesday on our lunch hour. We would all sit in his office and watch them exactly one day before the rest of America. Because we'd watched them just together, we kept each other honest. We were really harsh on each other's performances and sometimes critical. It really forged a tight ensemble because we were the continuity week-to-week in terms of keeping ourselves honest to what our intentions were.
In terms of keeping yourselves honest, what was the response or reaction amongst your castmates when you realized, “Oh damn, this is a hit show?”
Well, it became clearer to some sooner than others. I didn't really have a frame of reference for what a hit show was. This was my first show. So I remember asking George whether a 40 share was good and him saying, “Yeah, buddy. That's pretty good. Basically means that one out of every two TV sets in America was watching you last night.”
And I remember coming out of doing my first talk show in New York, which was [Live with] Regis and Kathie Lee. As I came out of doing the talk show, somebody thrust that Newsweek magazine cover [toward] me, which had us all on the cover, and I thought it was one of those jokes that you make up at Magic Mountain with a fake byline over a photograph. I sort of said, “Oh, I got to get one of those,” and the guy pointed to the news kiosk that was just full of them. That was just the beginning that we knew we were on to something. But very early on, we just sort of felt like there was something special about it.
ER and Friends premiered during the 1994 fall TV season the week of September 19. Both shows kind of blew up around the same time. What was that experience like?
Well, for me, it was extremely collegiate. I knew Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston socially. Jennifer was roommates with my ex-girlfriend, and their other best friend was Matt's girlfriend. So we all used to pal around. The very first job I ever got was a two-part TV miniseries with Robert Urich and Joanna Kerns called Blind Faith, and I went to the network and tested with Matt Perry five years before ER and Friends. So it felt quite natural and quite organic to have all these people that I knew and liked, to see them be on these shows that were very popular. We were all working hard and selling them hard, and it was a great time.
I was 22. I was living in an apartment. I was single. I had a cat and a ficus tree, and you could have worked me 25 hours a day. I never wanted to leave.
Did your friendships with Aniston and Perry spark or influence the episode of Friends where you and Clooney appear as "cute doctors?" Or was that more of a thing where the network just wanted to put the two of you on that show?
Both. We would go over there and watch them tape [Friends]. We would wrap, and then we'd go over there and watch them tape their show just because we were all buddies. And I think the fact that we were there hanging out put a bug in — put the idea in somebody's mind. And, like I said, we were all extremely collegiate with each other. It was a really fun time.
You stayed for the whole run of ER, with less episodes in certain seasons than others. But, still, a 15-year run on a network show is impressive.
It was only after my son was born in 2002, November 9, that I looked at my watch for the first time and said, “Come on, everybody. What are we doing?” I realized that there was someplace that I wanted to be more than I wanted to be on set, and so that's when I asked for what I called “a divorce with visitation rights.”
I said I wanted to leave, but I wanted to leave some episodes in the balance to keep the character and the narrative alive. And John [Wells] had always been very vocal about wanting Carter to be part of the narrative and to give closure to the experience. So I knew that he would honor that down the line whenever the time would come to end the series.
Did that contribute to Carter's Doctors Without Borders-esque storyline in Africa?
That came about initially — well, [for] two reasons. One, I had been invited by a medical relief organization called Doctors of the World to spend some time in a refugee camp that they were running in Macedonia during the war in Kosovo in '98, '99. It was a very harrowing experience and very impactful on me. I came back really galvanized about how heroic these American doctors, they would just leave their practices to go do international triage medicine in war zones. And I talked a lot about it and got the writers excited about it. And, coincidentally, John had just produced a movie in Africa about a cheetah named Duma, and had money left over there in the form of a tax credit. So it all kind of worked out well.
I felt like Carter came alive when he went to Africa for the first time. That's when he found himself for sure.
Entertainment Weekly speculated in one of their stories that came out around that time, that that storyline was setting up some sort of spinoff for Carter. Do you recall any of that discussion, or was that just EW rumor?
I think that was an EW rumor, although I would have been into it at the time if they'd pitched it.
Back to the pilot, one of my favorite scenes in that episode is Carter’s long “walk and talk” with Dr. Benton [Eriq La Salle] through the hospital.
It's famous, that walk and talk — 22 takes.
And La Salle only had 24 hours prior to learn the lines, correct?
He didn't have much time to learn it. That's true. But we were shooting film back then, so magazines and film were kind of precious. You didn't really want to waste them, and we were on the last magazine that we had on the whole stage when he got to [shoot the scene]. Just as an example of how mean we were to each other, George and I teased him mercilessly that it took him so many takes to get that thing out of him. We would walk past him and make this little sign on our chest for 22 and just shamed him mercilessly for about a week or two.
Then they wrote one of those long-ass monologues for me, and Eriq could not fucking wait to crush me over it. I knew it was coming. So I learned that thing so backwards, so forwards, upside down, I could still recite it to you 30 years later.
I won’t make you recite it. But I wanted to ask about a famous, or infamous, bit of ER lore — some actors were rumored to use Post-It notes on set that contained their complicated dialogue.
There was only one person who did that. It was George. He was the only one who did it because he was the only one who needed to do it. The rest of us learned our lines [laughs].
George was so shameless. He wouldn't just write them on Post-It notes. He'd write them on the clipboards. He was reading off of them while he was doing the exam. The more brazen one was — even after he left the show for several years — I'd look at the pillowcase underneath the patient's head, and I'd see the faint outline of some of his old lines that he'd written so he could look at the patient and read them. I did have Mickey Rooney put a big-ass cue card on my chest for the scene we played together on ER.
Carter gets a great bit of comedic business in the brief but memorable scene in the pilot involving a young teen mother, played by Shiri Appleby, where she doesn’t know she has an ectopic pregnancy and won’t even acknowledge she’s pregnant. That is, until Dr. Benton comes in and Carter has this “Oh, so you’ll tell him?!” reaction. How was that scene to shoot?
I will cop to being an extremely ambitious young actor who would try to steal a scene out from underneath everybody in the room as subtly but as consistently as possible — and the fewer lines they wrote for me, the more chances I'd have to do it because then I could just go crazy on reactions. I could mouth their dialogue. I could pretend I didn't understand what was happening. I could take notes. I could do anything. I love setting myself up for a fall. That's my favorite kind of comedy.
And then this scene in particular, I just remember setting myself up by being just dismayed that she wouldn't fucking tell me the information, but she would tell him. I remember the very first introduction for [Carter]. I'm standing there at that desk, and that bell was on the other side of the desk. I thought to myself, “Oh, man, if I move that bell, and I do a little bit with it, that'll be such a great accidental introduction.” So I worked that in early, and then I just kept looking for those moments wherever I could find them because they're so endearing.
That scene really helps solidify the beginnings of the Benton-Carter relationship, which is one of the best mentor-mentee relationships on television.
Best love story ever recorded on TV. Benton and Carter is the primary romance on that show — the one I'm most proud of. Where else have you ever seen a relationship where the power dynamic, racially, was completely flipped 180? And the white guy was working at level for the love and approval of the Black man? Eriq always did exceptional work. But he always played the character that wasn't easy to always love because he wouldn't play him with any sympathy. He would just play him as a talented, intelligent, uncompromising man. And that stance that he took, in both the character and his own professional demeanor, was not easy for us to recognize or appreciate at first.
Only in retrospect do I realize that he was on the vanguard of giving representation to something that was really nonexistent at the time. I think he deserves a lot more credit for creating that kind of character, and giving that character to the world, than he ever received because he never got a trophy or anything for it. It was not an easy thing for him to do.
Another memorable, and very emotional, moment from Carter’s tenure on the series — the episode when Carter reads the letter notifying him and the rest of that staff that Greene has died from cancer.
That was a good acting day for me. I was on fire that day. Take after take after take, every angle, that well never dried up for me that day.
There was something so beautiful about the way the letter was written — the structure of the scene, the surprise element to it. Also, the fact that I got to see [the letter] before anybody else did — which meant that I had to both have the feeling and hide the feeling, which was impossible. It just made it very elegant. Very elegant.
When the series wrapped, did you keep any of the props from set?
Are you kidding me [laughs]? I have everything. I've got a room in my house where the door to the room is County General’s emergency swinging door that we used to bust through. I've got the exit sign. I've got the floor plan. I took the CPR practice dummy that we all learned on. I've got two square panels of the trauma room floors. When they tore the set up, I asked for those.
I'm a very sentimental man. I took it all. And I had to take it because if I didn't take it, [John] Stamos was going to take it. That guy was grabbing gurneys and operating room lights. He was shameless. I think he got the emergency room ambulance bay sign that was in the ambulance bay. I think that's in his backyard. We knew when they were going to demo the set, and I just gave them a laundry list of the pieces I wanted.
I've got all the notes that [executive producer] Steven [Spielberg] wrote — he wrote me after the pilot. And the one I love the most is he wrote me one after the [season four] episode “Exodus” that said, “Watched the episode last night. What great acting chops you have. One day, I'm going to make a movie about the Seventh Cavalry, and you're going to lead the charge.”
How involved was Spielberg in the early days?
Steven's camp was really not sure about whether they wanted to embrace it. Up until that point, to be fair, he hadn't had the most success in television. Most recently, at that time, he had SeaQuest and Earth 2. There were a lot of big swings that it almost happened, but didn't. So we sort of cemented his reputation at Amblin Television for him. I didn't see him on the set until episode six or seven. But when he did come on, then he talked a lot about having worked in emergency rooms in Arizona when he was a teenager and that this was something he was really behind.
He eventually became extremely hands on, watching all of our dailies. I used to get messages about him watching our dailies while he was shooting Schindler's List and [I was] thinking: "What kind of an artist that could hold the breadth of those ideas in their mind at the same time, that you're over there in Poland shooting Schindler's List, and you're looking at our first season dailies every day. I've had the opportunity a few times working on his properties. He produced this other show I did called Falling Skies. So there was a while there where I felt extremely fortunate to be in his perpetual stable for about 20 years.
For ER fans, the first season's standout episode is "Love's Labor Lost"— where Dr. Greene [Anthony Edwards] struggles and fails to save a pregnant woman and wife after a complicated delivery. What are your recollections of working on that installment? How aware were you and the rest of the cast in terms of how significant that hour of television was going to be?
“Love's Labor Lost” just felt incredibly intense. The narrative structure of it and the progressing, harrowing, tragic storyline was singular — we hadn't done one like that up until that point, where we really focused on just one case going south. I had mononucleosis the whole time we shot it. I had 104-degree temperature, and I was passing out. At one point, I turned to our technical adviser, [Dr.] Joe Sachs, and I said, “Joe, you got to give me something. I'm not going to make it.” He said, “There's nothing here.” Then he goes, “Well, I guess I could hook you up to one of these I.V.s.”
So he took one of the prop I.V.s, and he put it in my arm. I put the bag in my lab coat pocket while we were shooting, and then they'd say "cut," and I'd hang it on the hook. I did that all night long one night. But that was the commitment level. That was the buy-in. I never even thought about going home. And nobody ever thought about asking me if I wanted to go home. I got Polaroids of me getting that IV from the medic. There is a scene towards the end [of the episode] where I tell Mark Greene that I think what I saw him do is heroic. And I get sort of misty-eyed. But really, it's just fever. I look at that shot, and I see nothing but 105-degree fever just burning through my eyes.
Also, the guy that was the special effects makeup artist on ER was an old German guy named Werner Keppler. And he had done the alien baby for [the NBC sci-fi miniseries] V. And when we did “Love's Labor Lost,” as a practical joke, we swapped those babies out. It's in the gag reel of that first year. It was pretty fun.
What are you recollections about the season six episode "All In the Family," where Carter gets stabbed and Dr. Lucy Knight [Kellie Martin] is killed?
Yeah, that was huge — Laura Innes's directorial debut. [Editor's note: Innes played Dr. Kerry Weaver]. Like I said, we were a tough ensemble. If you were going to step out of your lane and try something like that, you couldn't be dilettantish about it. We took it way too seriously to allow there to be a weak link in the chain. So Tony [Edwards] went first, and he had already directed. His episode came with a really intense challenge to try and shoot an entire act as a oner, which he pulled off. So he earned his stripes early on as a director and earned our respect.
Laura commanded our respect immediately from the quality of the actress that she is. Oddly enough, I never sat in on an audition for ER, except one time, and it just happened to be hers. I was in the casting session room when Laura Innes came in to audition, and she was so fucking good. She just walked out with the role. There wasn't even a question. So when she [directed], she was so prepared because she just wanted us to have great confidence in her. As a result, it's an extremely dynamic episode. There's some really strong creative choices in there that she made that I think really, really sell it, not the least of which is that music that's playing all through that last sequence. That song from Massive Attack.
And I'll tell you a little anecdote about what I used for my performance, when Carter was stabbed — I'd done a movie years ago called Swing Kids in Czechoslovakia. It was late one night when we were shooting and I was working with this English actor named Karl Brincat, and we were changing. When he took off his pants, I noticed that his leg was just shredded. He had scars going up and down all over the place, nasty scars. I asked him about it, and he told me that he had been in a bar fight years earlier and that he felt like he'd been getting the upper hand. But he felt like the guy kept tickling his leg while he was beating him up. So then [Karl] looked down and he realized that the guy wasn't tickling him. He'd been shredding his leg with an X-acto knife. But he hadn't felt it at first. Then suddenly, when he realized what had happened, the pain was instantaneous and overwhelming. That image of feeling something and not registering it as pain, but as a tickle at first? If you look closely when [David] Krumholtz [who played Paul, the schizophrenic patient] first stabs me, that's kind of what I play. It's this dawning awareness of what's just happened to me that comes from a place of almost pure innocence as opposed to terror that lets it get to terror really quickly. But I have Karl Brincat to thank for it.
All 15 seasons of ER are now streaming on Hulu and Max.
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