On ‘The Pitt,’ Ned Brower’s Nurse Jesse Has Captured the Hearts of Fans — Now He Wants Their Ears

Brower became an EMT after exiting the band Rooney. His career comes full circle with a featured role in the ER — and a brand new musical project

When Ned Brower sat down with The Pitt producer and co-star Noah Wyle to discuss a big moment in Season Two, the world had not yet heard the name Alex Pretti. All Brower knew at that point was that his character, nurse Jesse Van Horn, was to be arrested by ICE during an episode in which officers attempt to detain a patient in the fictional ED.

“I think a great part of the show is when we can touch on these kinds of hot button topics in a framework that’s not always hitting the audience over the head, but that reflects society back from a hospital perspective,” Brower says of the pivotal moment in Episode 11 of the HBO Max hit.

“A couple of times a year we’ll bring in doctors and nurses to talk about what’s going on, what scares them,” show creator R. Scott Gemmill says. “ICE became one of the stories [the other night]. We’ve gotten a reputation for being sort of pre-cognizant about what’s going to happen, but it’s just because we spend a lot of time with the experts, and we look at what’s happening, and then we just extrapolate based on current situations.”

In fact, the scene was filmed in November 2025, months before ICU nurse Pretti was gunned down by ICE agents in Minnesota while trying to help a fellow protestor, an eerie coincidence that wasn’t lost on Brower, who used to play shows with his old band Rooney in Minneapolis. “It’s just been heartbreaking to see a great American city like Minneapolis under siege,” he says. “I also know what kind of people work as ICU nurses, and it’s just the best of the best.”

Brower would know — he’s lived that life as well. The actor/musician’s route to appearing on one of the most popular shows on TV — in one of what is likely one of the most explosive episodes — has been anything but straightforward. From indie rock to ER nurse to actor and looping right back around to pop musician, Brower’s life has been a colorful ouroboros, a delicate dance between creativity and practicality.

Medicine was always a part of Brower’s life — his father was an ophthalmologist — but he was much more into skating and playing music in his hometown of Seattle, Washington. “If my whole family got together to choose the last person that would probably go into medicine, I think I would have been the guy to win the award,” he says. After college, then, he went on to model and act in teen shows like Dawson’s Creek, finding fame as a drummer/vocalist in Robert Schwartzman’s band Rooney. 

When he left that band, though, Brower found himself with bills to pay and limited options. Inspired by pals following a similar path, he became an EMT for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, then got his Master’s in 2020 at the UCLA School of Nursing. Despite his previous apathy about medicine, Brower was a natural, once sussing out that a 100-year-old grandmother accidentally ate her nephew’s weed brownies at her birthday bash (he prescribed she listen to jazz). Other experiences were less humorous. He still gets choked up recalling a teen who died during swim practice.

“You can put up walls on so many of these cases,” he says. “But every once in a while one of these cases just breaks through your armor.” Those experiences — plus the lessons gleaned working at the ED in a children’s hospital in L.A. — have been integral to his performance on The Pitt. When Season One ended with the aftermath of a mass shooter at a music festival, Brower remembers thinking, “Can I apply those emotions that are somewhere in a box locked in my head to the show?”

The real-life nurse often steps in to advise on the realities of the ER during filming — Brower still works in a private practice that does emergency medicine and urgent care medicine. And while it may seem as though he hadn’t added to his IMDB for a while pre-Pitt, he’s been honing his acting skills since 2013, when he launched the Fleetwood Mac musical comedy Rumours Tribute Show, playing the titular Fleetwood to the delight of audiences around the country. “It’s like when you’re changing majors,” he jokes. “Those credits transfer!”

Meanwhile, being on a collaborative TV show has reawakened Brower’s musical side — which wasn’t exactly dormant, considering he’s been collaborating with Marc Maron on his show and specials these past few years. “On Season One of The Pitt I found that I was having a lot of downtime on the show, and something happened where my creative gears just went into high gear,” he says. 

The result is his new electro-pop band, Bloodwerk, a name suggested by an ER doc colleague. The band — Brower and collaborator John Low — are dropping their first two singles Thursday inspired by skate videos and Eighties favorites like the Pet Shop Boys: “Truth Will Tell” and “Sound of Mind.” The band even plans to sport hyper-realistic skull masks, made, in part, with help from The Pitt’s effects team. They’re featured in the video for “Truth Will Tell,” which guest stars The Pitt’s Irene Choi (student doctor Joy).

“My takeaway — being at the midpoint of life — is: you just never know where things are going to lead. So I tend to try and say yes to everything, and try new things,” Brower says. “There’s been huge failures along the way, but sometimes the big failures then lead to something incredible that you never would have anticipated.”