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.
