How The Pitt makeup team achieved hyper-realistic medical gore, details revealed

Created by R. Scott Gemmill, The Pitt, is a medical drama that features Noah Wyle, Patrick Ball, Fiona Dourif, and others. The show premiered on Max on January 9, 2025 and was an instant hit with the viewers and the critics. The series revolves around the emergency department staff of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center and each episode focuses on one hour of the 15-hour work shift.

Apart from all this, the show also looks into the personal lives of the doctors and the nurses and focuses on themes like underfunding, staff shortages, and more. While The Pitt is noted for its writing and direction, the show has garnered particular acclaim for its realistic portrayal of medical injuries and the challenges faced by the medical community. As such, the show has a lot of gore, but it is all done with thorough research. Here’s a look at what the experts of the show have to say.

The tiresome research of the makeup team of The Pitt

From a nail in the heart to an influencer suffering from toxic poisoning from a cream, The Pitt is relentless in the way it pours in people into the show and showcases their varied medical emergencies. While it is gory, it is authentically done. In an interview to Variety, head makeup artist Myriam Arougheti states that she used reference photos for The Pitt but her biggest resource was “videos of real procedures” on a medical training website for student doctors. “I’d spend many hours watching,” she says.

Further, Arougheti formed a team with special makeup effects artists like Thom, Chris Burgoyne, and more and “figure out how to replicate this…without hurting the actor…Thom’s a magician,” Arougheti remarks. In an episode of The Pitt that featured a man with third-degree burns, Arougheti remarks about the thought process that went into making it realistic. “There’s been a lot of burns on TV…we wanted to play with different colors…we played with pinks, whites, and yellows, which are not typically the colors you see in a burn,” she states.

In the interview, she also goes into details about how a full chest piece with a fake bladder was created and pieces of silicone were glued together and slime was used to add texture. The whole structure took six hours to apply. Further, in another episode, a man comes in with a nail in his heart and the makeup team had to make sure that a beating heart was created. Therefore, an artist pumping the heart and another artist pumping the lungs was needed.

How the makeup team of The Pitt worked with shooting schedules?

Interestingly, The Pitt, was shot in episodic order and therefore, Arougheti states that it was “incredibly helpful…because we start the procedure and the next time we see them, we’re on the other side.” However, the downside was that, “we pick up wherever they left off at the end of the day, their makeup needs to pick up exactly there the next day.”

The team also maintained continuity by taking photos and detailed notes. “We knew that after five hours, we’re going to start bringing down blush…by the end, a lot of the actors had zero makeup.” In one of the most important episodes of the season, the team has to handle an influx of patients that have come from a mass shooting. Therefore, Arougheti details that a lot of charts were made and she worked with the background supervisor Lisa Simone. “I had pictures of the actors and where they were shot, where the bullet wound was…Everything was detailed in advance.”

The Pitt was so realistic that Arougheti notes that one of our doctors was approached as a party and was told that “you showed a real procedure on TV” and they were in violation. This instance is a testimony that the tireless efforts of the makeup team behind the show, had done their job well.

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The Pitt is available on HBO Max.

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