Jennifer Stone brought an unusual qualification to her audition for The Pitt: she was already working inside a real emergency room.
The former Wizards of Waverly Place star, who is also a registered ER nurse, revealed that she auditioned for one of the HBO Max medical drama’s series-regular roles. Stone was still working hospital shifts at the time and sometimes used brief stretches between patients to study her lines.
The audition became unexpectedly difficult when Stone reached the final pages of the pilot script. Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch experiences traumatic memories connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Stone said reading the sequence brought back memories of her own time working in healthcare during that period.
Stone told the story during a recent CHEERS! with Avery interview, where she also explained why the finished series can still be difficult for her to watch. She did not get the role, but she praised The Pitt for portraying emergency medicine in a way that feels unusually close to her real job.
Stone Studied Her ‘The Pitt’ Lines Between ER Patients
Stone said she was working through the audition material during a hospital shift while waiting for a patient to be admitted. “I auditioned for one of like the series regulars for The Pitt when that first came out,” Stone recalled. “As I often do, I was reading the script and like, working on lines while we were waiting for a patient to get admitted or something like that.”
She described those periods as the brief “pockets of time” she gets during a shift and did not identify which character she was auditioning to play. Entertainment Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter reported her account as an audition for one of the show’s series-regular roles without identifying the character.
The Pilot’s COVID Material Triggered a Panic Attack
Stone said the experience changed when she reached the last few pages of the script and read the section involving Robby’s COVID-related memories. “I started having a panic attack,” she said.
Stone recalled developing heavy breathing and having to ground herself by identifying objects around her. “Even just hearing about that, I started having like the heavy breathing and I started having to do like, ‘Okay, this is the floor. That’s a table,'” she said. “I started having to like talk myself down ’cause it’s still back there.”
Her experience working in healthcare during the pandemic also affects how she watches the completed show. Stone said she has a “hard time” with The Pitt because “it’s too close to home a little bit.”
By comparison, she said Grey’s Anatomy is easier for her to watch because it has more of a “fantasy aspect” and entertainment value. Stone even said she repeatedly watched its first two seasons while she was in nursing school because the show helped her become familiar with medical terminology.
The realism is built into The Pitt‘s structure. Warner Bros. Discovery describes the first season as following one 15-hour emergency-room shift, with each episode covering approximately one hour of Dr. Robby’s day.
Nursing Became Stone’s Second Career After Her Own Diagnosis
Stone’s path into healthcare began after she had already become known to millions of Disney Channel viewers as Harper Finkle, the best friend of Selena Gomez’s Alex Russo.
Stone was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 20 and has said the experience changed her career path. While dealing with the uncertainty surrounding her own health, she spent significant time around nurses and remembered the ones who took additional time to help her understand what was happening.
“When I got sick, I spent a lot of time with nurses,” Stone told Avery Woods. She said the most difficult part was “not knowing what was going on and not having a plan.” “The nurses that I had that took the extra time and the extra care were so calming in a time that was so tumultuous and scary,” she said. “So that was something that I wanted to kind of pay it forward.”
Stone graduated from nursing school in December 2019 and obtained her nursing license in 2020, putting the beginning of her professional nursing career directly alongside the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. She has continued to balance both careers rather than treating nursing as a permanent replacement for acting. Stone described acting as “the kind of thing I get to do for me,” while nursing is “the kind of thing I get to do with other people.”
Stone Returned to Harper Without Leaving the ER
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Stone recently returned to one of her best-known acting roles, reprising Harper Finkle for the four-part finale event of Wizards Beyond Waverly Place. Disney announced that Harper would return alongside other familiar characters for the show’s final chapter, which premiered Aug. 4 on Disney Channel and became available on Disney+ the following day.
After the episodes aired, Stone thanked viewers for the response to seeing Harper again after more than a decade. “After so much time away, I couldn’t be more grateful to step back into acting and be met with such a warm welcome,” she wrote.
But the Disney comeback did not mean leaving healthcare behind. Stone said she spent the weekend after the episodes aired working shifts in the emergency room and was trying to follow the reaction from the hospital. “I’ve been on shift at the ER all weekend, but y’all have had me smiling ear to ear between patients,” Stone wrote.