Patrick Ball is getting really good at playing Mr. Not-So-Nice-Guy. The North Carolina native’s specialty, after more than a decade in regional theater, is brash and belittling. But recently, he’s had his big break playing something more slippery: the smart, sympathetic man who champions his female counterparts at one turn and undermines them the next.
As Frank Langdon in The Pitt, Ball’s first TV role (not including the obligatory Law & Order spot), he plays a bright young doctor who charms the Pittsburgh ER—until it comes out that he has been stealing drugs from the hospital to support an addiction. When his character returned in season two this January, after a stint in a drug treatment program, the doctor who turned him in—Trinity Santos—was still reeling from having been undermined by him. “So many people in the fandom were like, fuck Santos. And then she’s right. Why did we immediately want to side with this guy?” he asked shortly after the premiere.
This week, Ball made his Broadway debut as Andrew in Becky Shaw, a hilarious Trip Cullman-directed production of Gina Gionnfrido’s 2009 Pulitzer finalist. Ball plays Andrew, who sets up his quasi-brother-in-law Max (Alden Ehrenreich) on a disastrous blind date with a woman from work (the titular Becky, played by Madeline Brewer). After Max pushes both women away, Ball’s Andrew chases after them with just a little too much white-knight zeal. “There’s a sort of insidious thing here that I actually think I do need to talk about right now,” says Ball, when we call in the midst of his preview run.
He’s buzzing about returning to theater, where he got his start, albeit now with a much higher profile. “Broadway debut is something that I’ve dreamed of since [I was] back in North Carolina,” he admits. Getting from his hometown to Times Square was an epic journey that involved role-playing being fired by Goldman Sachs executives and working as a wardrobe assistant for And Just Like That…
Here, he walks us through the steps, the bittersweetness of Becky Shaw, and why the future of American theater is fangirls.
How are you feeling going into the full run of the show, out of previews?
It’s bittersweet. I’m very excited to get my days back and be able to spend time in the park, but being in rehearsal is my favorite place in the universe. It’s something that you don’t really get in film and television. The tinkeringness of theater is something that I just absolutely love and I’m kind of sad that it’s gonna be over.
How did you first become involved in this show?
I was in LA. I was shooting The Pitt, and I got a call from my agent. The first time I read it, I was like, “This is amazing. It’s so dark and so smart,” and I was immediately confused because I was like, “I should be playing Max.” Most of my career, I would be playing the bull in the china shop—the overtly aggressive asshole that you realize may not be an asshole. I actually talked with Trip [Cullman, the director] and Gina [Gionnfrido, the writer] about it. Then I spent a week with the play and I came back, like, “Now that I look a little bit closer at this Andrew guy, there’s a sort of insidious, performative, nice guy thing here that is very layered and very interesting and something that I actually think I do need to talk about right now.”
I didn’t realize how funny the play was from the page, but this whole conversation around the overt aggression versus covert aggression, the assumption that this person is a sweetie pie, your best friend, rubs your back and tells you everything you want to hear, but is secretly taking over your life and emotionally blackmailing you—that is an interesting thing to talk about.
Do you feel like you’re drawn to that darker character you’ve been playing or is that just more your area of familiarity?
In life, I’m more of a Max. I just genuinely believe that clarity is kindness and I try to be straightforward with people. As a Scorpio, I’m very aware of people’s indirect aggressions, so I like to just be straight up. I’m a fairly boundaried person and I’ve learned that over my now long life of not writing checks you can’t cash.
Do you feel like you get something different out of working in theater versus TV, and do you want to keep doing both?
I definitely wanna keep doing both. I get so filled up by theater and obviously I love doing television. Me and Elysia [Roorbach, Ball’s girlfriend] went to watch Isa [Briones] last night in her show Just in Time, and just watching her do her thing, you can see how much she loves it, and you can see how much being back in the theater and being back with an audience is just feeding her soul. Any theater kid knows.
Have you always been the theater kid? You started studying broadcast journalism and then switched to drama. What made you want to pursue this?
I dabbled in theater in high school, but it was never necessarily my calling or my passion. I was an athlete throughout high school and got an injury and this just seemed like something else to do with my time. I originally went to school for broadcast journalism and then a friend roped me into doing a 10-minute scene because he was in the theater department. The head of the theater department came up to me and was like, “You should come do this.” I was like, You know what, I’m pretty much just smoking weed right now, so why not? I got accepted into the BFA program on probation, because I was kind of a mess. I was getting in fights and partying and drinking, getting arrested, and they were like, “We’re gonna give you a chance.”
The head of the program cast me in Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw as the lead. It’s this 19th-century philosophical treatise with high, elevated language. There was no way for me to bullshit it. There was no way for me to skate on charm or wiggle my way around. I was like, The possibility of being publicly humiliated is so real right now. I have to apply myself or I’m gonna look like an absolute fool. I spent two months before we started rehearsals learning all of the lines and reading Kant and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and learning about 19th-century England and George Bernard Shaw. I felt for the first time in my life what it felt like to apply myself. Feeling that payoff absolutely changed my life, and I was hooked.
You’ve also spoken about how, after getting The Pitt, you paid off all your student debt. You took a risk going back to school and it’s paid off. Now, do you feel liberated to take more risks?
[Ball pauses, and begins to cry.] I paid off my student loans like three months into The Pitt, and that was a really profound moment ‘cause I thought I was gonna die with it. It’s a huge burden to carry, and a lot of people carry it. I was $80,000 in debt and I had been through a series of failed relationships where my financial insecurity was a real problem. I had just thought that was going to be my life forever, and that is a really heavy thing to live with. Paying off those student loans and getting back to zero, I remember being like, Man, if this show works, great. If it doesn’t work, they can’t take that away from me. I am out of debt. No take-backsies on that.
It is crazy how you have all these young creatives who wanna go into this industry and it does hold you back. It must stop a lot of people. Where were you when you got that call?
About six months before The Pitt came in, I was living in New Haven with my ex. We’d been together for three years and we were really struggling with coming up with a vision of the future. Working as an actor, you don’t know what’s coming, have no money—the financial outlook can be bleak. I was looking for an off-ramp. Her dad was ex-military and tried to convince me to join the FBI. I was thinking about joining the Merchant Marines. A year prior to that, I had spent four months in Alaska, thinking about working at a fishing camp, just dropping off the grid entirely. Whenever that relationship in New Haven eventually reached its breaking point, we had been living together, so I was without a home.
I went back to North Carolina. I got offered a fundraising job at High Point University. I was like, Well, this is a $100,000 a year job. I’m gonna have to wear a suit and go to fundraising dinners for a living, which I hate because there’s nothing more inauthentic to who I am, but it’s a job, it’s a life, and I cannot be too broke to marry again. The day after I got offered that job, I got a call from Moisés Kaufman to come do this play in Miami, and I said to the people at the fundraising job, “I need to make this change. But I feel like I need to go do this one last play,” and they were like, “Say less, the job will be here when you come back.” I went off and did this play in Miami and I met Elysia and fell in love. We left Miami and went on an eight-day trip around Iceland together and still didn’t want to say goodbye when it was over. So I went back to New York and was working four jobs.
I was working at a coffee shop, I was working at a restaurant, I was working as a wardrobe assistant for And Just Like That…, I was doing these corporate coaching seminars. I don’t think I’ve told anybody this story, but I was doing these seminars where they’d bring me into Blackrock and Blackstone and Goldman Sachs, and they would want to teach these young administrators how to have difficult conversations, à la how to fire somebody. They would bring me in as an actor so that these administrators could get practice firing someone. So I have been fired more than anyone you’ve ever met, I promise you. I’ve been fired thousands of times. And then the call for The Pitt came in and everything was different.
You have fans of The Pitt coming to see this play, this audience that you’ve grown. Does that change how you feel going out on stage?
I’ve worked enough to know that the number one priority for the American theater is to figure out how to build an audience of tomorrow. The American repertory theater model, the Guthries, the Oregon Shakespeare Festivals … is reliant on an older subscriber base. When I was doing Hamlet in LA, having a bunch of young women in their 20s on Twitter excited about a Shakespeare play is really fun for me. There’s an incredible amount of wacky girlypop energy in the audience and at the stage door every night. It’s just really good for the theater, because this is the audience that we need.
I really do genuinely believe that as time goes on, theater is going to become more and more essential as we get isolated behind our phones. We’ve begun to see just how unsatisfied people are living behind screens and only being able to connect with one another through comment sections. I get to watch people every night at the stage door gather around and be like, “Oh my gosh, you’re @langdonsredbull? You’re @weinthepitt?” They go out and have dinner after the show, and I’m like, that is fucking amazing, and that is the mission, and that’s what I think theater can and should be moving into tomorrow.
I’d be interested to hear what you are excited about in theater right now. Are there things that you see people doing that you feel are moving in that right direction?
Robert O’Hara, who directed me in Hamlet, his calling card is taking the great plays of the canon—A Raisin in the Sun or Long Day’s Journey Into Night—and fucking with them and making them camp and making them live in this meta-theatrical contemporary frame that makes them accessible and fun for young audiences. That is very much a mission I believe in. Jeremy O. Harris, who is now out running Williamstown Theater Festival, has done an incredible job. His ability with Slave Play to provoke in a way that broke out of the theater kids silo and into pop culture was amazing. It was a real watershed moment and I think he is trying to do the same thing out in Williamstown. There’s a lot of people figuring out how to take us into this next chapter, and I’m very excited.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Legendary Art World Deviant Paul McCarthy on Santa Claus, Trauma, and the Rise of Fascism
Gabby Windey Shares Her Book Recommendations for the Manosphere and Depressed Women Everywhere
15 Collectors Offer Their Best Advice For Getting Started
Bryan Stevenson on What Social Justice Movements Can Learn From March Madness
A Guide to the Real-Life New York Restaurants Where Characters Eat on TV
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?