Jennifer Stone said she auditioned for one of the series regulars for The Pitt after becoming a nurse, but the script was so close to her real work that it nearly pushed her into a panic attack. On CHEERS! with Avery, she described reading lines during a shift and then talking herself down when the pages started to feel uncomfortably familiar.
CHEERS! with Avery
Stone said, "I auditioned for one of the series regulars for The Pitt when that first came out." She added, "And as I often do, I was reading the script and working on lines while we were waiting for a patient to get admitted, kind of in those brief little pockets of time that you have, so I was working on the lines and reading the script at work."
2022 and 2023
Stone began working as an emergency room nurse in 2022 and added a separate role as a disaster relief registered nurse in 2023. Those dates matter because they place the audition in the middle of a real-world nursing career, not as a nostalgic side project from her Disney Channel years.
The Pitt and
Stone said the problem was not the material’s difficulty but its proximity to her day job. "And it got to those last few pages, and I started having a panic attack, just even hearing about that. I started having, like, the heavy breathing and I started having to do the, OK, this is the floor, that’s a table. Like, I started having to like talk myself down." She also said, "I have a hard time watching it ’cause it’s too close to home a little bit."
The result is straightforward: she tried out for The Pitt and did not get the part, but the more interesting detail is how little distance there was between the audition and her actual job. Stone starred on Wizards of Waverly Place from 2007-2012, recently returned as Harper Finkle for the final season of Wizards Beyond Waverly Place, and now sits in a narrow lane where acting and emergency medicine overlap more than most casting calls ever will.
