The Pitt Season 2's Most Challenging Scene To Shoot Isn't The One You Think [Exclusive]

This article contains spoilers for "The Pitt" Season 2 finale, "9:00 P.M."

The staff of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, the fictional hospital where HBO Max's "The Pitt" takes place, doesn't typically have easy days. The same can be said for the folks who make the show. Whether it's building an immersive emergency department set, creating elaborate prosthetics for on-camera operations, or trying to maintain a documentary quality during complicated surgical procedures, "The Pitt" crew has its hands full. This behind the scenes video provides just a tiny glimpse at the complex orchestration necessary to achieve the show's goals:

Season 2 introduces a host of complications, including a baby that was abandoned in the hospital, the introduction of AI into the workplace, the deteriorating mental health of Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), and the revelation about what's really been happening with Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi). But when I recently spoke with Johanna Coelho, who has served as the cinematographer of "The Pitt" for every episode of the series so far, she revealed that the most difficult moment to shoot in Season 2 was not one of the surgeries where someone's chest was ripped open, like I assumed. In fact, the toughest moment of the season didn't even happen inside the walls of the Pitt.

I asked "The Pitt" DP Johanna Coelho if there was any Season 2 scene that required an unexpected solution or some extra creativity to achieve. After mentioning that the post-credits karaoke scene was fun because it was so different than what they normally do, she highlighted the toughest scene of the season:

"A challenging scene, we had one also in Episode 15 where Digby is walking in the park away with the mannequin. Weirdly, it was a little hard to light this one, because the mannequin is so clean and pure, it takes so much light, and then Digby is a little dirtier and darker skin at that moment and all of that. So that was really hard to light in a natural way that we could just follow this move like this. I didn't expect this to be so challenging, and it ended up being challenging.

I thought the rooftop scene where they're watching fireworks was going to be more challenging, and that turned out to actually be a little easier to shoot. [laughs] So sometimes you never know what happens. It might be a specific situation and you haven't been in that specific situation. For me, that was that mannequin that took so much light, whereas the character didn't and I felt we kept being distracted from the mannequin to just looking at Digby as well."

There were likely more emotionally taxing scenes to film — Dana (Katherine LaNasa) speaking with the sexual assault survivor, for instance — but it's ironic that the toughest moment to actually shoot wasn't an amputation or even the arrival of a helicopter, but just a guy walking down a sidewalk.

Season 2 of "The Pitt" is now streaming in its entirety on HBO Max.