How Does Noah Wyle Prepare for a Big Scene?

Noah Wyle treats a scary role as a mirror instead of a reason to turn it down. The first time he read the Falling Skies pilot, the man was a history teacher who then had to kill aliens with a machine gun. His instinct was that nobody wanted to see him as an action hero. He asks what the resistance is really about. On that show the mirror was a post-divorce single father rebuilding a life, afraid of leadership, of fatherhood, and of loss. Those fears told him where the part needed him to go.

Once he is on the job, he protects a hard scene the way a caveman protects a new fire. He thinks about it a little every day, builds it, then tamps it down until the shoot. The day itself is the release. On The Pitt he had to keep a breakdown in episode 10 lit from episode one. At breakfast with his kids he checked that the feeling was still there. In the grocery store he checked that he could do the scene right then. The technique he always wanted takes fresh coffee and a folding chair, and he can do it anywhere.