Warning: Spoilers for season one of Pulse ahead!
Dr. Danny Simms, the protagonist of Netflix‘s new medical drama, Pulse, is, in a word, complicated. For Willa Fitzgerald, the actor who plays her, that’s part of her appeal.
“That’s always the kind of character that I’m most drawn to,” Fitzgerald tells me over Zoom on a gloomy Friday afternoon in New York. She appears makeup-free and unfussy in a navy crewneck sweater and glasses, another Brooklyn dweller slogging toward the end of the work day.
“I think that the reason why this show works so well is because it’s not telling the audience how to feel, or telling them to like her or not like her, or believe her or not believe her,” she continues. The audience is confronted with these mixed signals, and their accordant mixed feelings, beginning in episode one, when we learn that Danny has filed a sexual harassment claim against the well-liked and capable Dr. Xander Phillips (Colin Woodell), who happens to be her superior. An audience conditioned by the Me Too era would find her story sympathetic—“believe women” echoing like the siren call of the Right Side of History. Even when we hear her tell a patient a disturbing lie about her disabled sister, Harper (Jessy Yates), a fellow doctor in the ER at the Maguire Medical Center in Miami where they both work, we remain steadfast: Victims don’t need to be likable to be believable. Right?
But over the next 9 episodes of season one, now airing on Netflix, the audience is fed scraps of truth about Danny’s professional and personal relationships with Xander. This seductive tension is set against the backdrop of typical medical drama, replete with the soapy tropes we know and love: Unbelievable disasters (episode one sees a bus full of high school soccer players careen off a bridge in the middle of a hurricane); forbidden patient-doctor relationships; cut-throat competition among residents; and the most insidious threat of them all, the dreaded hospital reorg. Pulse is juicy, bingeable TV for fans of its predecessors like Grey’s Anatomy or ER.
Early reviews, while largely positive, have lamented the show’s focus on drama to the detriment of medicine, but we’d be lying if we said that the drama isn’t the point. (If you’re looking for a medical show that’s more realistic, try The Pitt.) For Nashville-born Fitzgerald, who fans may recognize from her work in the horror genre, including films like Strange Darling and the Scream TV series, the medical drama is merely the framework for the telling of a much larger, much more complex story about romance, career, and where the two meet.
“Especially in this current moment in time that we’re all living in, I feel like a lot of us have trouble seeing the gray area that exists between either side of the debate,” says Fitzgerald. “It’s really interesting for the audience to get to make their own opinions, to change those opinions, to have a complicated relationship with what Danny has done, and to maybe change their mind.”
Keep reading for Glamour’s complete conversation with Willa Fitzgerald, where we discuss that Pulse cliffhanger, Duolingo streaks, and the Colleen Hoover adaptation she’s filming next.
I tore through the whole first season of Pulse. Tell me a little bit about what it was like working on the show, and how you came into the role.
I got sent the script while on a plane on the way to LA. The first thing I read was that scene between Danny and the coach that’s in episode one, where she kind of lies to him about her sister, and I was fascinated. I was like, what is going on here? There were so many things happening between the lines, and it was really interesting to me.
I’ve been a fan of the medical drama genre for a long time. I loved early Grey’s Anatomy. I grew up watching House. Once I actually read the script and talked to [executive producers] Zoe Robyn and Carlton Cuse about the entire season and where everything was going, I thought it was such a cool way of working within the genre and also exploding it at the same time.
It really felt like it was doing everything that you want a medical drama to do, while also giving you this very intense other story that’s carrying you through their time at the hospital. I didn’t even understand how complicated and deep it would go until I was in the middle of it, and that’s always a really cool surprise.
Talking a little bit about these early medical shows like Grey’s and House, it feels like we’re going through a bit of a medical drama renaissance. Would you agree? And if so, how are you feeling about it?
I think it’s great. I worked a lot in, I guess what you would call the horror genre. I think that genre is only confining if you allow yourself to be confined by what’s come before. That genre works by giving you a template that you then can add whatever else you want to it. It’s really just a jumping off point for exploring whatever you want to explore, and I think that’s true of the medical genre as well.
How this show functions, and what this show is interested in interrogating, is different than what another medical show is interested in interrogating. It’s just the skeleton on which you get to build everything else. It’s also a compelling skeleton because, like the horror genre, it functions on adrenaline, a fast pace, and high stakes. Those things are always very compelling as a viewer.
The show is set in Miami, and I was impressed at how well the Spanish dialogue was woven into the show in a realistic way. Did you know Spanish before filming? Or did you have to learn it?
So, I do not speak Spanish, but I will say, I tried so hard to learn Spanish. Several people in the cast did speak Spanish, but several of us didn’t. All of us who didn’t all did Duolingo together. We all had our like 100-day streaks going or whatever, and we’d be in the green room or wherever our holding was, and you’d hear the little Duolingo “ding-ding.”
Like, you’re in the middle of a scene and realize, “Oh my God, I’m gonna lose my streak!”
Literally, the panic of being at the end of the day of shooting and “Fuck, I didn’t do my Duolingo.”
It’s an interesting time to be working on a show that’s set in Miami and features a lot of Spanish dialogue, especially as immigrants—specifically from Spanish-speaking countries—are being villainized by the current administration. How do you feel about that?
A hospital is the front lines of every inequity that goes on in our society. Emergency room, doctors, paramedics, firefighters—they’re the people who are preventing people from falling through the literal cracks of our society.
That was never clearer to me than when I spoke with a friend who’s actually an emergency room doctor before I started shooting the show, and also when I went to shadow an actual doctor in an emergency room. You see people who literally can’t afford dialysis, so they’re coming in with renal failure and are having to get emergency medical treatment because they can’t afford routine medical treatment. The emergency room’s the only place that they can be treated for those things.
You’re seeing people come in who are unhoused, who have nowhere else to go, who have either passed out from dehydration, or drug overdose, or whatever horrible thing has occurred to them on the streets, and they’re brought in and taken care of. But you also see, and in talking to the doctor I was shadowing, the people who are coming back in time and time again for these things because there’s nothing that’s allowing them to get out of that situation.
We didn’t see as much of that in this season of Pulse, but I think that there is nowhere that is more confronted by the reality of the climate that we live in than an emergency room. Even with the hurricane at the beginning of the season, this year has already proven we have more natural disasters than we’ve ever had, and those are going to continue to increase.
It’s amazing to get to have as diverse of a cast as we have, who also all have just such different backgrounds. We also had so many amazing day players who were coming in to be on the show. There’s a lot of stories to tell; if we’re lucky enough to get a season two, I’m really interested to see what additional stories are told about in particular, what it is to be in the emergency room.
Going back to your shadowing in the emergency room—how long were you there, and what was that like?
I crazily only had like a week and a half before shooting the show, because I was coming off of a movie, and I also had to drive my dogs across the country to Albuquerque to go shoot the show. So by the time I got there, I had about a week and a half. We were doing a ton of stuff in Albuquerque to get prepped, and they were like, “We don’t know if we’re going to be able to get you in to shadow a doctor, but we’re going to really try.”
And then at the 11th hour, they were like, “We can fly you to California today. You can sleep there tonight, shadow the next day, and fly back and then work on Monday.”
Oh my God.
I was like, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” I got on a plane and went to an emergency room that was kind of in the middle of central California. I was quite nervous about it, because I’ve spent very little time in emergency rooms. I’m not particularly squeamish, but I was kind of scared that I was going to see something that was going to really haunt me for a very long time.
But the thing that stood out to me the most in my time was just the utter professionalism with which every single possible thing is dealt with. And the fact that no matter what comes in the doors, it’s met with almost the same, at least outward, demeanor, whether it’s someone who came in because they needed very routine medical care, or it was someone who came in who was bleeding out from both arteries. The only thing that maybe changed was the pace of the feet. Everything else was very consistent.
That was really something that I held onto as we were shooting the series, because obviously when you’re on set, it can be easy to get pulled into a place of heightened drama. I also noticed how much residents do. The attending was there and would be checking in, but they were mainly was putting in the orders. It was really the resident who was doing every single thing. She was the one who was running around and actually being with the patients, and the attending was really the one who was just kind of signing off on things.
Tell me about Danny’s relationship with her sister, and how Danny navigates that relationship while feeling so much guilt.
There’s a lot there. Danny’s kind of in a powder keg situation, where not only does she have this romantic relationship that’s creating conflict in her life at work, but she also works with her younger sister, and they have a very complicated home-life history. Being an older sibling, so often your responsibility is to protect, care for, and be a secondary parent to the younger sibling or siblings. I think it’s really complicated to navigate that sort of dynamic when there’s past guilt involved, and when there’s a workplace involved in the present.
Those two things come in conflict a lot, and there’s also the very real growing pains of being stuck in the past with someone who doesn’t want to be stuck in the past anymore. In some ways, Danny is handling her sister with kid gloves because of Danny’s own guilt. I think that’s a really hard thing for both parties in that situation to tolerate.
We got really so tremendously lucky in having Chris Mulkey be our dad—having that piece of the puzzle was so fantastic. In learning about Danny’s dynamic with Harper and her dad, we also learned so much about why her romantic relationship with Phillips is such a nightmare. There’s a real deeper understanding that comes from getting to have that sort of exploration into her childhood, and the ways in which she grew up, and put what’s currently happening for her in the present day.
Speaking of her relationship with Phillips, on a personal level, are you rooting for them to get together? Or are you happy for Danny’s choice to move on?
I don’t think I can have an objective feeling about the situation. Obviously, at the beginning of shooting the show, I knew what the arc was. I knew what the outline for the episodes were, I knew what happened in each episode, I knew the structure and the bones of what was going to happen, and what had happened in the past. But I will say, by the time I got to reading and then shooting episodes 8, 9, 10, I didn’t know at the beginning how intense of a love that was for both of them.
That was a real wonderful surprise to find, because I think it explains the stakes of everything that’s happened before that. You see two people who are just missing each other. They’re not able, for whatever reason, for all of the reasons, to actually communicate in a way that the other person can hear. It’s heartbreaking.
This show has a lot of familiar themes that we’ve seen on TV in the years since Me Too. What do you think Pulse did well, or differently, than other shows that have explored the same dynamics of workplace relationships?
What really makes this show different is that it’s not telling a story of HR saving the day. It’s not telling a story of, this person did something wrong, and this person did something right.
There’s room for those stories that are more black and white. That’s entirely valid, and I think we have seen a lot of those stories. Me Too was an amazing moment for so many women in every generation. What this story is doing is much more personal, in a way. It’s really telling a story of two people who are not good for each other in a situation that is impossible, and that neither of them know how to get out of.
The only means available to getting out of that situation is a third party. And because of who that third party is—HR—things then become coded in whatever way they become coded. It was really important for Zoe and Carlton in developing the season to allow all of these characters to live in that gray space between right and wrong. It’s going to be really interesting to see all of the ways in which audiences are split on their opinions, and how those opinions maybe change as they watch the season.
There’s a lot of complexity there for the characters, and there’s a lot of complexity in their actions. We’re not getting to the end of the season and saying, “This person’s right because of what they did.”
Right, it’s not SVU.
Yeah, totally.
Danny’s kind of… she’s frustrating at times.
Totally.
How do you feel about her decisions? Do you relate to her at all?
Honestly, I feel like she was very hard to play and hard to live in for that long because we are quite similar in a lot of ways. She’s incredibly good at compartmentalizing, and I am too. It’s hardest sometimes to play characters whose problems are more closely aligned to your problems. When we see her by the end of the season, when she’s laying in the ocean and surrendering to the literal tides, it’s a release. She’s a character who is gripping intensely to control the entire season.
As we all know, that’s not a great functional place to stay. It’s certainly cathartic for me to get to see her have that moment at the end of the season. I hope that if we get to go back and do more seasons, that we’ll get to see all of the ways in which also growth is not a straight line. There’s so many ways in which you learn your lesson once about some part of your personality, and then you think you figured it out, and then you make another choice and you’re like, oh, wait—and you’re back in the opposite direction.
Speaking of that last scene, the finale ends with the doctors prepping for victims of a boating accident. Danny’s in the ocean…Am I jumping to conclusions? Are we supposed to kind of feel like, oh my God, maybe it was her?
Wait, I’m upset. I never in a million years thought that. But I love that that’s what you’re thinking about.
I mean, I do love to speculate.
Honestly, that’d be wild. Anything’s possible. You just blew my mind. That’s the first time I have ever thought about that possibility.
I’ve watched a lot of Grey’s Anatomy, and the doctors are on the table almost as often as the patients.
It’s true. [The cast and I] were all talking about that. We were like, “Who would be the first one to go?”
Maybe it was just the way they edited that final scene together.
That went right over my head. Reading the scripts, I never thought about that. I’m going to literally text the showrunners right now and tell them that you said that.
What’s next for you? What are you most excited for?
Basically, right after the show premieres, I’m bouncing to go do Regretting You with Allison Williams, Dave Franco, McKenna Grace, and Josh Boone. I’m so excited about that. We already got to have a week together doing prep, and it was just so fun. It’s such a great group of people, and I think it’s going to be a really juicy time.
And then, right after that I’m going to go shoot Billion Dollar Spy. Amma Asante is directing, Russell Crowe and Harry Lawtey are in it. It’s based on a book of the same name, and it’s about the spy in the Cold War who works with a Russian informant who basically gives what would be today billions of dollars of information to use against Russia. I think there are a lot of parallels to the times that we’re living in today in particular, and it feels like a particularly timely story to be telling. I’m excited to do it.
How are you feeling about working on Regretting You amid all of the drama still circulating around Colleen Hoover’s other project, It Ends With Us? Has that impacted you at all?
Honestly, it feels entirely separate. That just feels like a completely separate situation on a completely separate movie that’s totally unconnected.
I feel like I, as a cast, we could not have a different dynamic. Everyone is truly already so tight. I actually went to college with Allison [Williams]. We’re four years apart, so I just was only there with her for that first year of my freshman year, and it’s been so delightful to get to reunite with her. She was always someone who was older than me I looked up to when I was a freshman, and I think it’s so cool to have that full-circle moment.
It sounds like you’re very busy in the next year. How do you reset when you have back-to-back projects? What do you do to unwind?
I work out. I run, and I lift heavy weights. Those things are what keeps me emotionally sane—and therapy.
The trifecta.
I literally have a color-coded thing on my calendar that’s just for self-care activities, and all of those things fall into that category.
What are you listening to when you run or you’re lifting?
I mean, sometimes I am a silence girly.
You’re brave.
I just like to kind of use it as a meditative time, especially on long runs. It’s the only time in my life where I feel like I can just do that and not do anything else. But I’m always trying to read more, so sometimes I will listen to audiobooks.
Are you reading anything for fun at the moment?
I’ve started The Overstory [by Richard Powers] for the fifth time. I’ve loved it every single time I’ve started it, and for whatever reason, I get to page 50 and then a curse happens and I forget about it and stop reading it. But we’re already on page 100, so I have such high hopes. I highly recommend it.
With all the traveling you do for work, have you come up with any travel hacks?
I always bring melatonin for time zone changes. One milligram of melatonin is my lifesaver for when I’m switching time zones, and I always have my eye mask and my earplugs so that I can sleep anywhere and everywhere. And a lot of socks.
Ooh, like compression socks?
No, just for cold feet. Just big socks for planes. And a humidifier. I did just get a little tiny humidifier that I take with me. Canopy makes them, it runs on batteries, but you also plug it in. I bring it to hotel rooms, and it saves me.
What’s your go-to skincare product?
I have such sensitive skin, but I will say the one thing that I’ve been using lately that has saved my dry, dry skin is Regimen Labs has a wave serum, and it is revolutionary. It changed my life.
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