Jennifer Stone’s ‘The Pitt’ audition came while she was working a shift as a registered nurse, and the ‘Wizards of Waverly Place’ star revealed on Monday, 10 August 2026 that reading the script triggered a panic attack.
Stone played Harper Finkle opposite Selena Gomez on Disney Channel from 2007 to 2012, later reprising the role in the final season of Wizards Beyond Waverly Place, and she now works as a registered nurse in an emergency room.
She told the CHEERS! with Avery podcast about the audition, as reported by TheWrap.
Inside the Jennifer Stone audition for ‘The Pitt’
The role was a series regular on the Noah Wyle medical drama, which streams on HBO Max and unfolds across one brutal shift in a Pittsburgh emergency department.
Stone reads scripts between patients, which is how the pilot found her.
Stone told the podcast that the pilot’s closing pages deal with the Wyle character having COVID flashbacks, and she got to those pages while standing in a hospital waiting for a patient to be admitted.
She explained how the reading went:
“I auditioned for one of like the series regulars for ‘The Pitt’ when that first came out. At the end of the pilot episode, the Noah Wyle character, he’s having like COVID flashbacks. As I often do, I was reading the script and like, working on lines while we were waiting for a patient to get admitted or something like that. Kind of in those brief little, you know, pockets of time that you have. So I was working on the lines and reading the script at work and it got to those last few pages and … I started having a panic attack.”
Grounding is the technique she reached for, naming objects out loud to pull herself back into the room she was actually standing in. She said the same thing happened again while she was simply describing the scene to the podcast host:
“Even, like, just hearing about that, I started having like the heavy breathing and I started having to do like the, ‘Okay this is the floor. That’s a table.’ I started having to like talk myself down ’cause it’s still back there you know?”
Why Jennifer Stone finds ‘The Pitt’ hard to watch
Stone did not get the role, and she said she has a “hard time” watching the series regardless, because “it’s too close to home a little bit”.
Working a floor all day and then watching a fictional one all evening is a big ask of anybody.
Her comfort watch is Grey’s Anatomy, which she played on repeat through nursing school partly because it drilled medical terminology into her.
She said the older show has “more of a fantasy aspect… and more of an entertainment value”, which is a polite way of saying it lies better.
Where the Jennifer Stone story goes next
She is still on the emergency room floor, so the next medical script that lands in her hands will meet the same reader. Another audition is her call; the show already on air stays too close to her actual job.
