Patrick Ball’s Path to Broadway and “Becky Shaw”
Two years ago, the actor Patrick Ball was thirty-four years old and working three jobs in the city, none of them glamorous. He was a server at the Fort Greene restaurant Evelina, a barista at the Chelsea café the Sleeping Cat, and a wardrobe production assistant for the HBO series “And Just Like That . . .” (“driving the costume shoppers around to pick up Carrie Bradshaw’s outfits,” as he described it). His acting career wasn’t going as he had hoped. He’d earned his M.F.A. from Yale’s drama school, in 2022, and had done regional theatre, but he’d had no luck with Broadway. His IMDb page listed just two credits: an episode of “Law & Order” and a straight-to-streaming sci-fi flick called “ReEntry” (as “Bartender”). When he told co-workers that he was still hoping to hit the big time, he recalled, “they’d say, ‘Uh, sure. O.K., dude.’ Then they’d ask me to make an almond-milk latte.”
In 2024, Ball submitted a self-tape for an upcoming HBO Max series called “The Pitt,” which would follow the lives of several E.R. doctors at a crowded teaching hospital in Pittsburgh. It was a good fit, if a long shot; Ball grew up near Greensboro, North Carolina, with an emergency-room-nurse mother and a paramedic father. While waiting to hear back, he started filling out applications for sensible day jobs in nonprofit fund-raising.
It turned out that “The Pitt” was looking for untested talent, and Ball was cast as Dr. Frank Langdon, a resident who struggles with addiction and gets busted for stealing drugs. When Ball told his boss on “And Just Like That . . .” that he was quitting his menial job on one HBO show to take a leading role in a different HBO show, “they were, like, ‘Excuse me, what?’ ” he said. “ ‘Aren’t you the guy who drives us around?’ ”
With “The Pitt” a smash success, recently renewed for a third season, its cast members—many of them, like Ball, previous unknowns—are suddenly in demand. Ball is finally on Broadway, starring in “Becky Shaw,” a dark comedy about a blind date gone wrong. He plays a character he describes as “a toxically nice guy.”
These days, Ball can’t walk down the street without people noticing his cut-glass jawline and chin dimple, and he has taken to wearing a medical mask to hide. On a recent morning, he strapped on the mask and strolled into an office tower near Penn Station; he took the elevator up to Pearl Studios, a warren of rehearsal spaces and audition rooms where he logged a lot of hours during the lean years. “I was such a frequent flier in this building,” he said. “I know exactly how it feels to sit in the hallway with four other dudes who look exactly like you, all wearing the same blue denim shirt, going up for the same part.”
Ball was there to visit the casting director Pat McCorkle, who gave him his first Equity gig, in the play “Shining City” at Barrington Stage Company, in the Berkshires. He ambled through the halls, which smelled of burnt coffee and sweaty socks, until he found a small room where McCorkle sat behind a folding table in a long-sleeved black shirt, ashy blond hair skimming her shoulders. She gave Ball a hug, then exclaimed, “He returns!”
That day, McCorkle and her associates were running an open call for Barrington Stage’s summer season. “I’ve done the high-profile Hollywood thing,” she said. “I helped cast young Matt Damon and Brendan Fraser in ‘School Ties.’ But I far prefer this. I don’t like the work of just hiring Tom Cruise.”
“You were my lifeline,” Ball told her. “You brought me in for everything, even things that I wasn’t even remotely right for.”
“Well, if I like you, I’m going to keep seeing you,” McCorkle said.
“I got to do ‘All My Sons’ in St. Louis and ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ back in Greensboro,” Ball said. “Here, my agents just kept putting me up for these CW shows about vampires. They just wanted me to be a generic ‘hot guy.’ ”
“Oh, honey,” McCorkle said, with a laugh. “I’ve cast four Hallmark movies_—_I know. I just said, ‘Your time will come.’ ”
Ball rolled up a sleeve to show off some beaded friendship bracelets adorned with phrases like “Da Pitt” and “Ball Is Life.” They were gifts from fans, bestowed at the stage door of the Hayes Theatre, where “Becky Shaw” is playing, as an homage to similar bracelets that Dr. Langdon wears on “The Pitt.” The sudden rush of attention has been overwhelming. Last fall, Ball asked his “Pitt” co-star Noah Wyle, who broke out at twenty-three, on “ER,” for advice on how to handle it. “And Noah said, ‘You’re so lucky this is happening in your thirties,’ ” he recounted. “ ‘You’ve had the opportunity to figure out how to be a regular person in the world.’ ”
Ball mentioned that this chat had happened “on the P.J., flying out from the Emmys.” “P.J.” means “private jet”; Ball is, at least, adapting quickly to the lingo. ♦