How long has Gerran Howell been acting? Well, that depends on whom you ask. Some would argue the 34-year-old Welsh actor from the coastal town of Barry had his breakout role far from home, playing a whip-smart Nebraskan farm boy and fourth-year medical student in HBO’s Emmy Award–winning series The Pitt, which features Noah Wyle and returned for a second season on Thursday. But Howell was a star in Barry long before that.
If you ask his mom’s best friend—who taught drama at his all-boys secondary school, Barry Comprehensive—she might argue that he started acting when he was 10 years old, when she cast him as a ventriloquist dummy in her production of Little Shop of Horrors, and as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “And that’s when I got the bug,” he says.
But if you ask his father, who, like Howell’s family friend, worked at his school, as a deputy head (“It was a real bubble”), he might just say that Howell’s acting career really stemmed from an innate, lifelong interest in film. “My dad used to record a lot of movies on VHS,” Howell says, “and I’d always just find myself watching them, maybe things I shouldn’t be watching, like Terminator 2. I instantly wanted to be in them.”
Howell’s first fans (then pre-pubescent zillennial British tweens) might recall him actually starting at 14—“though I looked about 10,” he says—when he landed the lead role of Vladimir Dracula in the children’s horror series Young Dracula. “I just got picked out of the bunch,” he says humbly about being selected among a “wide net” of other young actors. During his eight years on the show, he also earned an acting degree from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London, graduating in 2014, the same year Young Dracula wrapped.
A slowdown in bookings after Young Dracula brought an unexpected pause in Howell’s nascent career. Faced with the volatility of the industry, he spent his early 20s considering a future behind the camera instead. “I kind of stubbornly thought, Well, if I’m not going to do acting, I’d at least like to be involved in film or TV,” he says. “But then acting just picked back up again. That’s what happens, isn’t it?”
It sure is. In 2019, Howell appeared alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Andrew Scott in the Oscar-nominated war film 1917, followed by his role as Kid Sampson in the mini-series adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, starring George Clooney and Christopher Abbott. Another soldier role followed, that of William in Freedom’s Path, a movie set during the Civil War—his character is on the Union’s side, thankfully.
After appearing in the BBC whodunit Ludwig in 2024, he booked a part in last year’s debut season of The Pitt. Set in the emergency room of the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, the show spans a 15-hour emergency-room shift, with each episode unfolding in one hour of “real” time, beginning at 7 A.M.
To prepare for the job, Howell and the rest of the cast went to medical school—or more like an intense boot camp compressing four years of education into just two weeks. “There were a lot of whiteboards, diagrams, and videos of actual procedures, and we would practice bedside manner,” he explains. “It became less about, ‘Oh, this is going to be gross and this is going to be crazy,’ and more about how these [doctors] deal with the day-to-day, taking on all that trauma. That stuff really hit me quite quickly.”
It’s a good thing they had help from Wyle, the main character and a veteran of medical drama, who spent 11 years on ER, the 90s series with Clooney and Julianna Margulies. “This is his show,” Howell says of Wyle. “But it never feels like he’s blocking you out. You’re along for the ride with him, and you just learn so much just by being with him. We follow his lead.”
Howell’s character is sprayed in the face with blood and other liquids more than once in the first season, and tends to change his scrubs at least four times in a single shift. Willing and capable yet riddled with self-doubt, Dennis Whitaker is instantly endearing—a quality not lost on fans on TikTok, where coquettish tributes to his character abound, many qualifying, by Internet parlance, as “thirst traps.”
“Do you like those videos?,” I ask him.
“That’s a good question,” he says with a smile. “I think that shows [fans are] really connected to the characters. So I think that’s always going to be flattering, no matter what situations they’re putting us in.”
As fans speculate what Dennis will be like in the second season—now following him during the chaos of Fourth of July at the hospital—Howell looks ahead by circling back to Wyle. “He’s given me lots of things to look forward to. I hope to one day be somewhat in his league.”
The Pitt’s second season is available for streaming on HBO Max
Carolina de Armas is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
