Mild spoilers for those who have yet to watch the latest episodes of The Pitt Season 2.Lucas Iverson is currently the most misunderstood man on television. As James Ogilvie on HBO’s Emmy-winning medical drama The Pitt, he’s a wildly ambitious, highly competitive, technically skilled, and abrasive fourth-year student doctor who’s gunning for a residency in the emergency department of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center (PTMC) But meeting Iverson is a study in contrast. In reality, the Yale School of Drama graduate carries a warmth that his onscreen counterpart is yet to fully show to audiences. Rather than viewing his breakout role as a pursuit of stardom, he sees it as a deeply personal love letter to the medical world that once saved him.Before he even stepped into the ED of PTMC, Iverson was already acutely aware of a hospital’s high-stakes environment. Born with a rare birth defect, he views his role as Ogilvie as his own way of showing gratitude to healthcare workers. “It’s like the ripple effect through my life where a lot of people who have worked with me in the past, and with whom I still work with as a patient — to hear from them and to be able to give something small back in some way means the world,” he tells Hypebeast from New York City, just days after the show’s pivotal 11th episode.To prepare for his role in The Pitt, Iverson needed to balance the physical language of the ED with staying in character. His theater background prepared him for that. “I think it's vital,” he says. “So much of what we do requires an extreme appetite in a way that training gives an actor. There’s a process of learning in rehearsal for a play that translates really well to when sh*t hits the fan in The Pitt,” he adds before pausing to apologize for the curse word, which I assure him is fine to use, “It’s like learning the physical aspects of the choreography of a trauma scene while still being able to fold in character.”“It’s not easy,” he clarifies, “but it's the same muscle as when the director says, ‘Do something that feels a little unnatural.’ You have to, like, raise your volume in a way that feels a little uncomfortable on stage in order to share with the audience. That muscle of making that true is really useful on our set.”The next step was medical bootcamp. Unlike the two-week tutelage the Season 1 cast underwent, Iverson and his cohorts only had two days. “I think that was a crazy decision because it was a lot of information for two days,” he states, still with a hint of disbelief in his tone. Their training involved everything from learning the typical cardiac arrest treatment plan to working on dummies, ultrasounding their stand-in team and each other, practicing intubations, placing a central line, and suturing for two hours (“You can’t really fake that”).By the end of the 48-hour crash course, he was still questioning whether he was ready to convincingly portray the technical precision of a life-and-death profession on-screen — an evident dissimilarity between him and the assertive Ogilvie.Ogilvie’s bold and brazen entry in the ED didn’t go unnoticed by fans. Right from the start of the season, viewers already had their own unfavorable assumptions of the student doctor. Many called the character brash, singling him out for his “gunner” attitude and perceived arrogance towards his peers, and his overall lack of empathy towards some patients. Whenever he would receive some sort of comeuppance, audiences were quick to celebrate those moments. It was evident that, to these viewers, Ogilvie was deserving of whatever hell he was about to experience on his first day.Iverson doesn’t reject the criticism. In fact, he’s very much aware that Ogilvie is a type of med student, and maybe even a doctor, that can be unpleasant to interact or work with. But the audience's response has begged him to ask: who deserves our empathy?“It's interesting that our punishment is to take away our empathy for [Ogilvie]...It’s a slippery slope. How do we determine who's worthy of our empathy?"“It's interesting that our punishment is to take away our empathy for him, as though he hasn’t earned it,” he muses. “I think that that's sort of how he views some of these patients erroneously. But I think it’s really interesting. And, if not, perhaps the entire reason why he's in the show.”"It’s a slippery slope," he continues, "How do we determine who's worthy of our empathy? I think Ogilvie needs to interrogate that, and maybe we, as the viewers, could learn from that too. Maybe people are totally justified in taking it away from him as well.”But Iverson doesn’t ever fault the viewers for their perspective of Ogilvie, especially considering that he found it hard to like his own character at first. “Initially, we didn’t get along. I had a hard time liking him,” he reveals. Fans who felt the same way regularly dissected Ogilvie’s dynamic with fellow med students Joy Kwon (a new third-year student portrayed by Irene Choi) and Victoria Javadi (a fourth-year student portrayed by Shabana Azeez), breaking down scenes of when they go toe-to-toe. “Anytime Ogilvie one-ups Joy, I think it’s just a chance for him to shine a little harder. But Javadi,” he confirms, “he feels directly threatened by.”The tension between Ogilvie and Javadi lies in a shared common goal: a residency spot at PTMC. While not much is currently known about his backstory, Javadi — who’s been in the main cast since the show’s inaugural season — has her history set: she’s both a prodigy and a nepobaby, attending her final year of med school at only 21 years old with both her parents working as doctors in the same hospital. Her advantages, on top of her natural gift as a doctor, haunts Ogilvie. “The rivalry there is about self-preservation. He feels like the deck is stacked against him, and he really has to compete,” Iverson explains. “The thing that unites Ogilvie and Javadi is that they both desperately want to be here. They want to be doctors here in this emergency room. Their attachment is greater, and that's also a seed of their rivalry.”As season two progressed, Iverson’s own understanding of and context for Ogilvie grew. For audiences, it didn’t really come to fruition until Episode 11, specifically in the scene where Ogilvie and Dr. McKay (portrayed by Fiona Dourif) treat a recovering addict and unhoused patient, Kiki, at the park just across PTMC. Initially dismissive of this patient as an addict, he’s then shocked by the reality of how some unhoused, recovering addicts like her live. Ogilvie is, for the first time, speechless.It’s already rare for the series to film outside of the hospital premises, but placing these characters in a quiet and peaceful setting — away from the never-ending chaos and pressures of the ED — was a subtle yet powerful move on the writers’ behalf.“This moment is built upon a series of other moments of forced empathy, so to speak, for Ogilvie. But it's his first time in this sort of quiet, serene park, looking at this young woman who’s close to his own age. I think it's his first ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ moment, you know? The first time that he's able to really say, ‘Okay, as soon as I see you, I have a hard time justifying my previous beliefs and holding them to you. You seem to me to be the thing that I need to see in everybody, which is a person who's tried their best in every circumstance.’”Outside of his PTMC scrubs, Iverson’s career is moving at breakneck speed. He’s preparing to lead as Cassio in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s (STC) Spring 2026 production of Othello, a character he believes mirrors Ogilvie’s own path. The actor is also returning to The Gilded Age for Season 4 with an expanded role. His growth from a "terrified" co-star with four lines to a series lead is a journey he describes with profound humility. He references a lesson from his grad school professor, Tamilla Woodard: some people enter new chapters to "take things on," while others enter them to "let things go.""That's exactly where I see Ogilvie being," Iverson says. “When the garden is full, you must till it and change over, turn over the soil in order to plant new seeds. I think Ogilvie is planting new seeds at the cost of taking out all the weedage that's been there for a long time.”With Season 2 of The Pitt coming to an end next week, he isn't asking viewers to love Ogilvie. He does, however, ask them to watch him rebuild, “I so wish that I could share my lived experience of him with everybody, so that they could see all of this beauty that I feel he has.”"Whatever your experience of him is, it's justified," Iverson concludes. "But I would hope that as he moves towards greater empathy, maybe we all could do the same with him."Hypebeast: Many viewers see Ogilvie as this season's anti-hero. How do you handle the "Evil Whitaker" memes and the online discourse?I think any comparison to Garen Howell is a compliment in and of itself. Garen has sent me a couple of memes of us like, side by side, which is so fun.I was looking at the discourse originally, and then I was like, "Oh, I don't think this is for me. For my own mental well being, I need to try and take a step back from it." It gets unhealthy. I've done that to varying degrees of success, but every time a big Ogilvie episode happens, I'm sort of sitting there like, “What are they saying?” and I'll peek.I did peek after Episode 11. I think the needle is moving.Touching on Episode 11, it felt like a massive turning point for Ogilvie. Why was it crucial for that park scene to take place outside of the ED?The pressures of the ED feel like an arena to Ogilvie. And when he's in the arena, he wants to perform well. Going outside with McKay is a beautiful metaphor of leaving the idea of what you think you want in order to go and do the thing you need. I think that that's the metaphorical aspect of physically leaving the hospital.How would you say this hour impacts him for the rest of his time in the ED?I think this is the furthest point so far today where Ogilvie has taken risk in a way that has inadvertently crushed the person that he was when he first came in. It's the furthest point thus far where he has stuck out his chin and has been willing to learn and attempt something new. I don't think it's a coincidence that as this stuff with Howard and Kiki in the park are happening, he also develops the only real relationship with a patient that he makes today. And then for that to go south so suddenly, when he was so sure he was doing so well, I think is a fall from grace, right? It's like sticking your chin out and getting the biggest punch. He’s learning that that’s not atypical. That's what this job is.You’ve wrapped Season 2 of The Pitt, and now you’re going into Season 4 of The Gilded Age and playing Cassio in Othello. How are you processing this momentum?I feel so humbled and shocked and grateful. I never would have been able to predict anything like this in my life, and I know that it's just a step along the way, but I feel that way with Othello and STC too. I was doing a play there right when I got The Pitt, and I had to leave that show mid-run. I thought it would forever soil my relationship with this theater, but they've asked for me to come back. The continued returning to these places feel like a beautiful theme that I'll never be able to fully deserve, because how could anyone earn more time in the presence of geniuses? That’s sort of what all of this feels like — just continual blessing.Let’s talk about Cassio. Do you see any parallels between Cassio’s downfall and Ogilvie’s trajectory?Oh, I love this question. It’s so juicy. Let me think.Yes, but what are they? I think that Cassio is a victim of circumstance, right? Ultimately, he’s unprepared for the events of the play. I think he's set up to be one way in the world, and the world treats him as another. There's an overlap there with Ogilvie that I can't nail down exactly yet, because we haven't started rehearsals for Othello, but I do think that Ogilvie projects his life going one way, and is surprised the more he learns about the realities of the world. There's a similar fall between these two characters in that way.Looking forward to The Pitt Season 3, do you hope that the writers are going to make Ogilvie more likeable, not just to the viewers, but to the rest of his colleagues as well? Or are you happy having him as the resident anti-hero?It's really tough. If I were to be so lucky for the writers to allow Ogilvie to return, and I do have to say, whatever they think is best for the story is imperative.It would actually be really upsetting if Ogilvie didn’t come back.Selfishly, I would love it, because I love those people. I felt like I was in the company of the most wonderful artists in the world, and I'm in awe of them.I think it's an interesting story either way, right? There’s something really unique about the idea of a doctor whose dream is sort of killed through the course of the day — their idea of what their life would be like as a doctor, and then they have to rebuild it in this new way as they've learned these lessons throughout the day. There's value in having somebody who shakes things up. I guess it would just be whatever serves the story we want to tell most. And I would feel so fortunate to be able to be a part of that.