The Oscar-winning classic Noah Wyle turned down twice: “I’m almost glad”
When you’ve been nominated for Golden Globe awards 30 years apart for almost exactly the same kind of role, then it’s probably a reasonable pointer that it’s exactly the kind of role you should be playing as an actor.
Noah Wyle just waltzed off with a win this year for medical drama The Pitt, three decades after his first nomination for ER, but that’s not to say he couldn’t have taken a different route in between.
The first of Wyle’s TV medicine men came in 1995 as Dr John Carter in the show that made George Clooney famous and had housewives swooning around the globe and wishing they could have some kind of injury, among whom the babyfaced Wyle had an army of fans too.
He picked up three consecutive Golden Globe nominations and five Emmy nods for his work on ER, and after six seasons, he’d become one of the highest-paid TV actors in history, raking in some $9million per series. By the time he finished as Carter in season 11, it was 2005, and after returning to a guest spot in a couple of later seasons, Wyle had been in ER more than any other cast member.
Unsurprisingly, given the show’s success, at one point it was the most-watched TV programme in America for three years running. Wyle was in demand from casting directors for major movies, but routinely turned them down in order to focus on ER, and he recently revealed some of the films he wasn’t able to do: “Good Night, and Good Luck, George [Clooney] offered me a part in that, but I couldn’t get out of ER. Saving Private Ryan, again, couldn’t get out of ER to do it. There was a bunch that in retrospect I’m almost glad that I didn’t do them, because those guys made those parts.”
Saving Private Ryan was the Steven Spielberg-directed war movie that elevated the genre to new heights on its release in 1998, with the opening half-hour sequence retelling the Normandy landings in WW2 and proving particularly game-changing. Starring Tom Hanks, it would eventually bring in half a billion dollars at the box office and earn 11 Oscar nominations, winning five, including ‘Best Director’ for Spielberg.
In the following years, the film has been hugely influential, making an impact not just on how other war movies are made but also on video games, with the Medal of Honour series, which later morphed into Call of Duty, directly inspired by Saving Private Ryan.
Wyle recalled, “I got offered the part of ‘[Corporal] Upham’, which was Jeremy Davies’ part. And he was so phenomenal in that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything close to what he did.”
He also revealed he was offered Matt Damon’s part in the film as Private Ryan, but again gave it a miss. While he did take supporting roles in films like 2001’s Donnie Darko, it took the global success of HBO’s The Pitt to put Wyle right back on the map, which is in the midst of a second season; he plays Dr Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch, a senior physician in the Pittsburgh-based trauma hospital.
Aside from the actor’s Golden Globe success, he has also already won an Emmy for the show, which tells the story of a single 15-hour shift in the hospital, with each episode serving as one hour of events as they deal with understaffing and a lack of funding.
