When Season 2 of “The Pit” began, the only thing Supriya Ganesh had planned with show creator R. Scott Gemmill was that her character, Dr. Samira Mohan, would have a huge conflict with her mother. And she was excited to jump right in.
“I think her life plans centered around returning to New Jersey and living there with her mother, because that’s really the only family left. I think that’s part of the reason why she never felt the need to put down roots in Pittsburgh,” Ganesh says. “It was interesting to see how her mother made the decision not to be involved in this life project and how everything fell apart for her.”
Ganesh was excited to show a deeper and different side to Mohan, who has always been portrayed as a very empathetic doctor who puts his patients first.
“I liked that in this mother interaction, outside of the doctor-patient interaction, we were able to make her a little tingly and a little bland,” she added. “She’s a little socially retarded, awkward, and doesn’t do much outside of work. That’s what drives people away from her.”
Mohan’s strained relationship with his mother, evidenced by the constant ringing of his phone during work hours, culminates in episode 9 when Mohan suffers a panic attack. When Ganesh was told she would be acting the same day she received the script, she admits, no joke, she “panicked.”
“I have an anxiety disorder, and I had to sit down and say, ‘Okay, do you really know that a panic attack is coming? No.’ They come out of nowhere. I decided to approach this with that mindset, which was unexpected, but it plays into the reality of this problem,” she says. “I definitely wanted to portray it as accurately as possible and as sensitively as possible, because the few times I’ve been through it, it was very scary. It really feels like something is very deeply, horribly wrong.”
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She then did a lot of research about her anxiety disorder, saying, “I started having impostor syndrome.” Ganesh looked at different ways people experience their own panic attacks and tried to incorporate different symptoms.
Filming the panic attack “felt very real,” she said, admitting that the whole arc was “quite taxing on my body.”
The entire season takes a toll on Ganesh because his body doesn’t realize that the trauma his character is experiencing isn’t real trauma.
“Mentally, I think, in a weird way, it was hard to separate myself from her. It’s so weird because I was feeling a deep sense of just sadness. Feeling the weight of this character, I didn’t realize it was like that until the end of episode 13, when she leaves the hospital,” she says. “She seems to be allowing herself to cry when she leaves the hospital, because you don’t really want doctors crying at work. Before we shot episode 14, I was thinking, ‘Oh, she would have just cried.’ So I cried a little bit before, and I was so surprised at how much I was holding her.”
Ganesh will not return to ‘The Pit’. In the finale, her character tells Dr. Robinavich, played by Noah Wyle, that she will probably go into geriatrics. Ganesh said he hopes Mohan “finds a way to return to racial disparities research.” “I think it was really the right thing to do for her. It made sense that the funding was cut because in the real world that we all live in, that’s certainly something that everyone experiences and sees. I want that for her.”
As for whether she’ll return to The Pit in the future, she says, “It’s up to the writers.”
“It’s really whatever they wanted me to do in the end, so I’m really grateful. This whole team gave me a chance. This is my first role as a series regular on a TV show, and I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to the industry,” she says. “If the opportunity comes up and I’m available, I absolutely will. But ultimately it’s up to them.”
