The Pitt’s Shawn Hatosy Is an Emmy Winner, a TikTok Star, and a Secret Literature Nerd

Shawn Hatosy is having a career moment equivalent to pulling the lever on a slot machine only to watch as the characters start to line up, lights flare, and bells ring. At 50, he’s worked consistently in Hollywood for three decades. But it was landing the part of Jack Abbot—a grizzled night-shift emergency doctor and war veteran—on The Pitt that earned him his first Emmy last year and sent fans trawling through his filmography. Jackpot. 

Last year, when his crime drama Animal Kingdom fortuitously dropped on Netflix in the midst of Pitt-mania, Hatosy watched along with fans on TikTok as it climbed into the top 10. “Checking in on my new oomfs,” he quipped to his 700,000 viewers, while filming himself on the way to the Gotham Awards. “I’m really happy that shows like Animal Kingdom and Southland, which were such a big part of my life, are finding new audiences. I’m proud of those shows,” he tells me. On Twitter, he’s declared himself the “unc peepaw people’s princess” and regularly enjoys the virality of new and old posts alike, saying things like Miss Piggy “seems DTF.” 

Hatosy’s outsize popularity on The Pitt—a show where he is technically a guest star despite gleefully partaking in every press appearance—seems in part due to the stable of sympathetic, slightly unstable, salt-and-pepper characters he’s embodied over the years and partly due to his entirely unpredictable online presence. These days, he’s looking ahead to his character’s return to The Pitt, his directorial debut on the show (episode nine), his first boldface theatrical release (Ready or Not 2), and a new limited series, Cry Wolf, in which he stars alongside Olivia Colman and Brie Larson. 

Ahead of all that, we sat down with the actor for a trip through the ’70s tomes, classic films, and avant-garde directors that helped shape his one-of-a-kind output. 

I’m excited to talk to you about your offline reading habits, because I feel like you’re a very online person. Does that feel fair? 

I’ve been around long enough to have been through the early days of MySpace, to then Facebook, to what we’re dealing with now. I would say, probably I am. I’m tuned into what’s happening on social media, but it’s so messy these days. I see it with my kids too, like, is this the best thing? I’m starting to have these bigger, existential questions about social media.

I’ve seen some of your TikToks. I feel like you’ve got slang happening that I wouldn’t even know how to use.

Is that right? I think that’s just from Twitter, people making fun of me and just then me taking it and running with it.

So what kind of reader are you? Would you say you’re reading a lot?

Not like I used to. Isn’t that sad? It took me a minute to understand how much I liked novels, and not just novels. Marlon Brando had an autobiography that I loved—just finding people’s experiences and being able to reflect on how I want to experience this business or life as an artist. I was a terrible student. The only areas that I did okay in were literature and English, but as you can see, I can barely form a sentence. Then as I finished high school and moved to New York, I started going back and reading the books I should have read in school.

Were these the classics?

I do like the classics. One of my first books that I delved into—I’m not saying this is a classic—was The Stand. I might have been going from middle school to high school, and it was my first experience taking a book and becoming completely addicted to it. There are so many settings in The Stand, and there’s these physical details that still I think about. There’s this plague happening and the hacking cough and they have to travel through the Lincoln Tunnel, and the smells. The way [Stephen King] writes it was so beautifully specific. I thought I could never read a book that size, nothing would ever hold my attention, but it’s perfectly written.

In terms of the classics, The Great Gatsby I’ve read a couple times because it’s one of those comfort books. Even though I know how tragic the ending is, there’s something about that book—when you tune back in, you find yourself empathizing with a different character. First, it’s Nick. And then all of a sudden, it’s Gatsby, hoping that all this work and effort will really change my world, but it has these tragic consequences.

Oh, In Cold Blood. [Truman Capote] spent so much time with every character that arrives in this terrible tragedy. He gets so close with Perry, who’s one of the murderers. We’re not engaged in this story because we’re learning who did it. As an actor, it’s such a beautiful thing because you get the role of a villain a lot and it’s really easy to play that up, but it’s really hard to make them human. In Cold Blood was one of those books that showed me how to do that.

Are you one of those people, with something like The Great Gatsby, who reads the book and then goes to watch the film and judges it incredibly harshly?

Very much so. I watched the Leo [DiCaprio] and Tobey [Maguire] version, which I actually didn’t judge horribly. Another is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s probably my favorite book, but I saw the movie first, and I love that it’s also one of my favorite movies, and they’re so freaking different. The book is from the point of view of Chief Bromden [while the film follows Jack Nicholson’s character, Randle McMurphy]. That’s a movie that I can rewatch anytime it’s on. I would almost like to see a version of the movie that followed him as the narrator.

It feels like it’s been long enough to do another version, as opposed to some things where there’s a new adaptation every year. Where do you find your next book? Are you going for the biggest novel of the year?

I haven’t read a new book in so long, so don’t make fun of me. 

You know what, sometimes I go out to people for this column and they say, “Sorry, he’s never read.” So you’ve at least read books.

Yeah, I don’t read new books. There’s a book written in the ’70s called Going After Cacciato. The author’s name is Tim O’Brien. It’s about a unit in Vietnam, and one of their privates goes AWOL and his name is Cacciato. The war has been terrible, they’re holed up in this place, and it’s rained for months. The main character, Paul Berlin, says, “[Cacciato] said he’s gonna walk to Paris,” and the Lieutenant’s like, “He’s not allowed to. We’re gonna go get him.” So it becomes like a road movie. I highly recommend it. All right, now you tell me one that I should read that’s new.

Unfortunately, the last book that I read and am going around recommending is called Unabridged, and it’s 300 pages about the history of the dictionary. I feel kind of crazy recommending that to people, but it’s amazing. 

I’m gonna check it out.

Is there a book that you’re hoping will get made into a film, whether it’s this ’70s novel or something else?

I would love for that movie to get made. Actually, that’s how I discovered it. Somebody sent it to me as a script. Then I went and found the book and fell in love with it. That one’s had a couple of development phases. Are you gonna be able to make an article out of this, or are you scared?

No, I feel like it’s going really well. Do you not feel like it’s going well?

No, I do, but it’s about reading new books, isn’t it? And I don’t. But I definitely have read books.

I’m learning everyone’s dirty laundry by finding out who in Hollywood has never read a book. What is the best or worst book recommendation you’ve ever gotten? Hopefully it’s not this dictionary thing that I just said.

Unabridged, worst book I ever read. If it’s not a good book, I won’t read it. I just don’t have enough time. So, I’m not gonna shit on anybody right now. I mean, nobody recommends books to me. So sad.

They don’t know about your secret history with reading all of the classics.

It’s so important that they make lists of the ones that you’re supposed to read, because then you feel like, I have to read, you know, Grapes of Wrath. 

Is there a contemporary director you’d like to see write an autobiography? 

I used to love Quentin Tarantino so much until he said stupid things about actors. I do love Paul Thomas Anderson. He can do no wrong in my book. Am I just, like, so easy to read?

That you love Paul Thomas Anderson? I don’t know if I would have guessed that.

There’s another book called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. It’s about how the auteur in the ’70s became this really great movement. They made a movie called Easy Rider that was directed by Dennis Hopper and it was made for no money, like under $1 million, and it went on to make a shitload of money. So there was this flurry of movies greenlit and they were all influenced by the French New Wave and these little cameras. They could go on location and do cool things. It led to a lot of great work from Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese. It details every movie in that period that I love up until movies like Jaws came out and all of a sudden you had the blockbuster. The business moves in cycles.

Shawn Hatosy’s Required Reading

Stephen King, The Stand, 1978  (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Gosh, I don’t wanna say my favorite book because it’s so stupid and cliched. Well, I really do think The Stand is one of my favorite books. Is that okay?”

Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato, 1978 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Going After Cacciato. That’s the one that got away.”

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Did I get a classic yet? Let’s go To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye, 1992 (Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
“Last but not least, let’s make it a book about procedure. Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye, is about a wonderful editor and how he works. It really shows how he has created his own language in editing.”