When Season 2 of “The Pitt” began, the only thing Supriya Ganesh had mapped out with show creator R. Scott Gemmill was that her character Dr. Samira Mohan had some major friction with her mother. And she was immediately excited to dive in.
“I think she centered a lot of her life plans around going back to New Jersey and having this life there with her mom, because it’s really just the two of them left in their family. I think that’s part of why she never really felt the need to put roots down in Pittsburgh,” says Ganesh. “It was interesting seeing how her mother making a decision to not involve herself in this life plan kind of blew everything up for her.”
Ganesh was thrilled to show a deeper, different side to Mohan, who is always depicted as being a very empathetic doctor, prioritizing her patients above all else.
“I liked that with this mom interaction, I could make her a bit prickly and a little bit less palatable outside of a doctor-patient interaction,” she adds. “She is a little bit socially stunted and awkward and doesn’t really have a lot going on outside of work. Because of that, she’s pushing people away.”
That tension with her mother, which is illustrated by her phone constantly ringing throughout her workday, hits its climax with Mohan having a panic attack in the ninth episode. Ganesh was told that she’d be acting that out the day she received the script — and, no pun intended, “I panicked,” she admits.
“I have an anxiety disorder. And I had to sit back and go, ‘OK, well, do I really know my panic attacks are coming? No.’ They come out of nowhere. I decided to tackle it with that sort of mentality — this is unexpected, but that plays into the reality of what this thing is,” she says. “I definitely wanted to make sure I was portraying it as accurately and with as much sensitivity as possible, because the few times that I have experienced it, it’s just so scary. It really does feel like something’s just very deeply, horribly wrong.”
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She then did a ton of research — “because I started having imposter syndrome, about my anxiety disorder,” she says. Ganesh read up on many different ways people experience their own panic attacks and tried to incorporate different symptoms.
Filming the panic attack “felt very real,” she says, admitting the whole arc was “quite a lot on my body.”
The season overall took a toll on Ganesh, since the body doesn’t realize the trauma her character is going through isn’t real trauma.
“I think, in a strange way, mentally, it was hard for me to separate myself from her. It’s very strange, because I felt this deep sense of just sadness. Feeling the weight of this character on me, I didn’t realize that’s what it was until the end of episode 13, where she exits the hospital,” she says. “She exits the hospital, she kind of allows herself to cry, because you don’t really want a doctor crying in the workplace. Before we filmed episode 14, I thought, ‘Oh, she would have just been crying.’ And so I let myself have a little cry before and was so surprised at how much I was carrying her.”
Ganesh won’t be returning to “The Pitt”; in the finale, her character tells Noah Wyle’s Dr. Robinavitch that maybe she’ll go into geriatrics. Ganesh hopes Mohan “finds a way to go back into racial disparity research,” she says. “I think that was really right for her. It made sense that funding was cut, because in the real world that we all live in, that is certainly something that we’re all experiencing and seeing. I would love that for her.”
As for whether she’d pop back in to “The Pitt” in the future, “it’s up to the writers,” she says.
“It’s really whatever they end up wanting to do. I’m just so grateful — this whole team took a chance on me. It’s my first role in a TV show as a series regular. I couldn’t ask for a better introduction to the industry,” she says. “If the opportunity comes around and I’m available, absolutely. But ultimately, it’s up to them.”
