Unlocking the Hidden Side of Dr. Al-Hashimi: Sepideh Moafi’s Surprising Revelation That Changes Everything
Ever wondered what it’s really like to be the new kid in one of the most beloved TV medical ensembles? Stepping into the shoes of a seasoned hero is no walk in the park — especially when you’re arriving at an ER where humanity and heart have always reigned supreme. Enter Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, the cool, slightly strait-laced new attending ready to shake things up with AI innovations and fresh bureaucracy in season two of The Pitt. But here’s the twist: rather than just clashing with the freewheeling, burnout-prone Dr. Robby, she quietly flips the script, showing us that empathy and leadership aren’t always what they seem on the surface. Sepideh Moafi, herself a refugee and humanitarian, breathes authentic warmth into this complex character — a woman worn tough from the outside but fierce with compassion beneath it all. Ready to dive deep into how Dr. Al-Hashimi is redefining care in a chaotic world and what makes her tick? Let’s unpack this nuanced new force in The Pitt — and no worries, we’ve got those defibrillator paddles on standby just in case. LEARN MORE
9 min readIt’s not easy being the new girl, especially when you’re joining an ensemble as beloved as The Pitt. Over the course of its first season, viewers fell in love with the doctors, students, and medical staff of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s ER, led by perennial hot doc Noah Wyle. In the show’s second season, Sepideh Moafi clocked in for her first shift as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, who’s preparing to take over for Wyle’s senior attending physician Michael “Dr. Robby” Robinavitch as he gets ready to ride his motorcycle off into a sabbatical. Where Dr. Robby operates as a freewheeling cowboy, Dr. Al initially comes off as a strait-laced administrator. Her demeanor is cool, and her first acts include introducing new bureaucracies and advocating for the use of AI-assisted medical tools. In other words, the audience is primed to see her in opposition to what made us fall in love with Emergency Department’s staff in the first place: they are, yes, very good at their jobs, but more importantly, they do them with compassion and humanity within a system that could use a lot more of both.
But as the season’s 15-hour day shift has gone on, Dr. Robby seems to be cracking under the strain of a mental health struggle he’s not willing to face. He’s burnt out and losing his grasp on the human touch that had made him such a hero in the eyes of his staff. Meanwhile, Dr. Al has subverted expectations in the opposite direction. She’s manipulated the bureaucracies she’s so well-versed in to help patients who need more care than the system is built to provide, like a prisoner who she recognizes as malnourished. It’s revealed that she has a background of humanitarian work in conflict zones, which makes her adept at navigating the ER when a cyber threat forces it to go analog. She’s even gotten to have her own Wild West medical moments.
For Moafi, an Iranian-American refugee whose parents sought asylum in the United States, and who works as a humanitarian activist with the International Rescue Committee, the season’s through line of accessing empathy hit home. It also gave her the core to Dr. Al’s character, one that she could reveal as the season peeled back more layers to her story. “I tried to bring as much humanity and warmth and dignity,” Moafi says, “to a woman who, like women in so many fields, had to present a tougher exterior in order to be taken seriously.”
We talked to Moafi about bringing Dr. Al-Hashimi to The Pitt, whether we’ll get answers to some of the still more mysterious questions around her character, and if the vibes with Dr. Abbot will keep vibing or flatline. (We’ll be ready with the defibrillator paddles if they do.)
What did you know about Dr. Al-Hashimi and her character arc when you joined the cast?
There were three scenes in the initial audition, and I could tell that they wanted to know the emotional range of the actors that were reading. There was one scene that was a lot of exposition. But as my mentor always says, exposition is an opportunity to reveal your POV. That’s sometimes where people get trapped. They just state the facts when it’s actually an opportunity for your character to give a strong point of view on how you feel about those facts. This was a scene all about AI, why she wants to implement this technology in the ER, and what her background with the AI was. It was a three-page scene of dense exposition. And then there was a scene that was didn’t end up in the show, so I can share it now: she had lost a patient and the scene was about her dealing with her inner critic, her self-punishment, the grief of losing a patient, and what that patient represented to her. And then the third scene was a more flirty, sassy dynamic with Robby.
For the second callback, I learned more about what her fuller backstory could be, and that stuff ended up being in the show: We’ll learn about what’s going on with the baby. We’ll learn about what happened in the bathroom. We’ll learn more about why she’s so set on the advancement of medicine through technology. A lot of these things become more clear as the season progresses, and a lot of this was actually established in the audition process.
It’s unusual to get so much information about a character’s arc during the audition process. Why do you think they took such a comprehensive approach to finding somebody for this role?
I think it’s challenging to strike a gentle, delicate balance for a character like this. She’s by-the-book in ways that can appear like they’re pro-establishment, and yet she’s not pro-establishment at all. She understands the system in which she works and knows that in order to change the system, you have to find ways to tweak and dismantle the system from within. So I think it’s a very nuanced role. You need the confidence to be a blank canvas and let people project onto you, but then towards the end of the season, lift the veil and reveal more of the character’s personal, emotional drive. I think the trap with this role is to play it two-dimensional and cold. In the end, John Wells and people at HBO told me that the way I was bringing the character to life surprised them, that it was different from what was on the page.
Dr. Al-Hashimi is introduced as a foil to Dr. Robby, and the audience is primed to be wary of her. She’s the new kid on the block, her emergency medicine credentials are questioned, and she wants to implement AI in the ER, which is divisive to say the least. How did you approach playing that tension at the start of the season while setting her up to win us over as the season went on?
It’s tough, man, it’s tough. But knowing that there’s going to be a bigger reveal at the end of the season that humanizes her, that fleshes out all the dark, murky pieces of her character—that gave me confidence as an actor. So no matter how hard I play the one side of her in the beginning, I know there will be room to play the other side later and for some redemption by the end.
And I’m curious to know, as we revisit the character at the end of the season, was it our own biases that we projected onto her? She’s presented as a kind of antagonist, as a kind of counterbalance to Dr. Robby’s charismatic cowboy leader. She gave Dr. Robby this thick packet, and he didn’t read it. She’s been nudging and emailing him to prep him for this day, and he completely ignored her. He treated her dismissively. But it’s interesting the way that we neglect the information that doesn’t serve our preconceived notions.
Yes, she’s more of a rules-based person, but the more you get to know her, the more you realize she’s actually fluent in the rules so that she can break them when she needs to go that extra mile. Yes, she comes in with a very different point of view on AI. And because of the way we’re all feeling the weight and cost of AI in society right now, if someone comes in and is pro-AI, it’s going to make you immediately judge her. It’s such a divisive topic right now, but her feeling is that it’s a moving train and if we don’t get on and steer it, with the direction that it’s already going, we’ll be in trouble. So with AI, she believes it’s about stewardship, and she’s trying to take a leadership position. What the show has done beautifully is set her up in this way, so that it can flip it and show her in a different light as it goes on.
Episode by episode, Dr. Al-Hashimi subverts our expectations. We assume that she’s a stickler; but she bends the rules to help a prisoner who needs more help than protocol allows. We assume she uses technology as a crutch; but she’s one of the doctors most capable of navigating an analog system after the hospital computers go down. We assume she lacks a human touch; but on multiple occasions, she’s the one espousing empathy. Did you know her character would have those narrative stepping stones?
We knew that there was going to be a potential cyber attack and a system shut down, but everything else I didn’t know. And yeah, it was interesting. When I found out about her humanitarian work, I was so moved, because that was something I had put in her backstory just for myself, but I didn’t talk to anyone about it. It was just one of those magical moments where you’re on the same page as the writers, where the writers see something that matters to you and they add it into your character. I was thrilled about that.
In the beginning of the season, there’s a question of whether Dr. Al-Hashimi is even qualified for this position. She’s worked at the VA. There are no emergencies in the VA. And Dr. Robby asks in episode 1, “Do you even deal with this kind of thing in the VA?” He’s making her defend her worth, questioning if she’s worthy to have this leadership position. But then you learn that she has worked in cities where the entire city has been turned into an emergency room. She’s worked in conflict zones devastated by war, climate crises, violence of all kinds. I think it’s admirable that in a world where everyone is screaming for attention, where everybody is trying to prove themselves, she doesn’t try to prove herself. She allows her strength, her warmth, her personality to reveal itself as circumstances call for it.
Like when she sees one of their most valuable doctors, Dr. Langdon, being severely punished by Dr. Robby for reasons that she can’t understand in the beginning. So she takes him under her wing. There was a line that was cut from the show, where she praises Dr. Langdon for getting the help that he needs and tells him that by getting help, he’s setting an example for his peers and his students. She reveals her humanity in these subtle moments. That is true leadership.
Throughout the season, she wears a gray jacket that almost looks like a space age carapace. It stands apart from everyone else’s scrubs. What was the process behind that choice?
It does signal something futuristic. There’s something about it that feels almost like a spacesuit. Lyn Paolo, our wonderful costume designer, has worked with John Wells for decades. I think it was the easiest costume fitting I’ve ever had in my life. The character breakdown called for something very clean. We captured the essence of that through the gray-ish jacket paired with a simple chain necklace and small gold hoop earrings. And we wanted something very structured, more form fitting than the rest of the casts looser scrubs. It tells a story: that this is someone who takes their appearance, how they present themselves in the workspace, very seriously. Lyn nailed the challenge of telling these different stories in subtle ways.
Will we see more vibes between Dr. Al-Hashimi and Dr. Abbot?
I don’t know if I can say. But I can say this: This season, what we’ve done is establish a rapport between these doctors. They have a shared respect and a shared vocabulary because of their experiences in conflict zones, him as a vet, her as a humanitarian. That connection is open for interpretation. I don’t know where they’re going to go with it in future seasons, but I hope they’ll go there.
There’s a word that I’ve heard a lot on this season: “empathy.” Many of the storylines seem to hinge on it. At one point Dr. Robby says that their job is “not for the faint of heart,” and Dr. Al-Hashimi responds, “It’s not for the unempathetic either.’ What do you think we can take away from that?
[The Austrian poet] Rainer Maria Rilke says to live the questions now until one day, gradually, without noticing it, you’re living the answer. I think what The Pitt does beautifully is showing that gradual discovery through these characters—the patients, the doctors, the nurses. In one episode, Dr. Al-Hashimi says, “I don’t know if being a mother has made me more understanding or more judgmental.” In that moment, I think she’s admitting that she can’t help but judge [a mother who brought her child in with severe heat stroke after he fell asleep in her car] in some ways. But we also see the way she is with the mother. She’s so kind and so compassionate towards this woman. So I think that The Pitt is constantly investigating our own biases, and empathy is key to that. When you witness people seeing with more depth, it inspires you to look a little deeper too.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
gonicc Professional Pet Nail Clippers and Trimmer - Best for Cats, Small Dogs and Any Small Pets. Sharp Angled Blade Pet Nail Trimmer Scissors.
$6.99 (as of March 30, 2026 02:16 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
MOUNT-IT! Motorized Fireplace TV Wall Mount | Remote Control Electric Pull Down Mantel Mounting Bracket, Up to 77 Lbs Weight Capacity, Height Adjustable, Swivel, VESA 600x400 Compatible
$313.49 (as of March 30, 2026 02:20 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
Apple AirPods 4 Wireless Earbuds, Bluetooth Headphones, Personalized Spatial Audio, Sweat and Water Resistant, USB-C Charging Case, H2 Chip, Up to 30 Hours of Battery Life, Effortless Setup for iPhone
$114.95 (as of March 30, 2026 02:16 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
IAMS Proactive Health Adult Wet Dog Food Variety Pack, 3.5 oz. Pouch, (18 Count)
$23.98 (as of March 30, 2026 02:16 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
Post Comment