Movies of War

Mar 5, 2026 8:45am PT Call the Doctor: As Hollywood Gigs Dry Up, Actors Are Playing Fake Patients in Real Hospitals By Ethan Shanfeld Plus Icon Ethan Shanfeld @ethanshanfeld Latest Netflix Sets ‘Squid Game: The VIP Challenge’ With Dylan Efron, Tristan Thompson, Mel B and More 2 days ago ‘Jury Duty’ Season 2 Trailer: A New Subject and Dozens of Actors Go on a Fake Company Retreat 7 days ago ‘This Whole Thing Is Not Normal’: Inside the ‘Baywatch’ Reboot Casting Call With 2,000 Wannabe Lifeguards 1 week ago See All Cheyne Gateley Peter sits in a hospital gown and raises his voice at the doctor. “I’m not crazy!” the middle-aged man insists as the young woman in the lab coat asks if he has received therapy. He has lymphoma, and his last doctor recommended an invasive treatment. “They want to stick a needle into my stomach,” Peter says. “That’s medieval! We’re in 2026 — we don’t just go around putting leeches on people anymore.” Related Stories Bad Bunny Gets His First Solo No. 1 on the Hot 100 With 'DtMF,' One of Four Songs He Has in Top 10 Post-Super Bowl Taylor Swift's 'Opalite' Reaches No. 1, Putting Her in a Tie for Third Place for the Most Hot 100 Leaders Ever After about 15 minutes of questioning, the doctor recommends treatment for the cancer, but another, undetected illness lurks beneath the surface. Peter has undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Popular on Variety The doctor types notes into a computer. Peter takes off his robe and heads to the break room for coffee and muffins. He resets. A new doctor enters the room. They take it from the top. This is all a simulation. The doctors are actually second-year medical students at NYU Long Island. And “Peter” is an actor playing a role, a “standardized patient” who is trained to evaluate future doctors on their communication skills. I’m watching it all unfold from a control room as Franny Bavaro, the coordinator of the SP program, toggles between 16 camera angles on a monitor. “Pretty good, huh?” she says. Bavaro manages a roster of 40 standardized patients, 30 of whom are professional actors. The SP program helps expose future doctors to complicated and sensitive medical scenarios while improving their bedside manner. And as the entertainment business constricts, squeezing opportunities in Hollywood and on Broadway, working as an SP has become a creative and reliable side hustle for performers in between jobs. “As actors, it’s very up and down. You can be on Broadway for four years and then unemployed for seven months,” Tom Souhrada, a 35-year stage veteran, tells me in the break room after playing Peter for a handful of NYU students. Out of work during the pandemic, Souhrada began researching ways to put his skills to use offstage. Most SP jobs in New York pay between $25 and $30 per hour. Sitting next to him is Deborah Berenson, a writer-performer who today is playing Clara, a woman seeking answers regarding her elderly aunt’s delirium. (The student’s job is to discern that the patient is experiencing alcohol withdrawal.) Berenson, who is English, practices an American accent in her simulations. You may recognize this concept from a “Seinfeld” episode in which Kramer takes a job as a standardized patient with gonorrhea. Real SPs warn that the sitcom didn’t capture the process with 100% accuracy. But it is a rare representation of the gig in popular media. Kramer and Mickey take on roles as standardized patients in an episode of “Seinfeld” Joey Delvalle/NBCU Photo Bank Back in the control room for another round, Bavaro asks me which scene I’d like to watch. “Hmm,” I say. “Let’s do BPD.” On the screen, Peter is bickering with another doctor. “I’m not going to get locked up in an old folks’ home where all we do is watch ‘Wheel of Fortune’ and play Parcheesi all day,” he growls. Bavaro laughs: “That line is not scripted.” She leans into a conference microphone on the desk. “Five minutes remaining,” she intones, sounding like a Zen NHL announcer. Before each simulation, the SPs receive a packet that describes their character’s personal history and health information. There’s no script, per se, but there are certain canned responses that the actors must give. They can improvise and make acting choices, but they also have to keep their performance, well, standardized. Some cases require weeks of research and training. Before playing a patient with schizophrenia, Andy Hartman, a 25-year-old SP who works at NYU and Weill Cornell, watched dozens of videos and walked around his apartment wearing headphones, mimicking how many real patients manage overstimulation. Hartman says he felt a responsibility to “do schizophrenia patients justice” with his portrayal. His efforts, after all, may have a direct impact on how people struggling with mental illness will be treated by future doctors. Some SP simulations require hair and makeup, often done by moonlighting Hollywood artisans. Portraying a victim of a hotel explosion, Hartman was once rushed to the hospital on a stretcher and hosed down in decontamination showers. Some simulations are known as “secret shopper” cases, like the time Hartman checked himself into a hospital while emulating bird flu symptoms to evaluate how the unwitting doctors and nurses treated him. Other gigs are less involved. “Ultrasound cases are the most competitive. It’s the easiest shit ever: You literally lie flat on a table for like eight hours a day, and they put gel on you,” Hartman says. Plus, he walks out with a free reading. Actor Andy Hartman is wheeled into the hospital during a standardized patient simulation Fred Verkhovsky for NYU Langone Health The cases can be emotionally taxing for the med students, as the SP program trains them to deliver bad news — the surgery didn’t go well, we’re going to have to amputate, the tumor metastasized. “So many times I’ve looked at the SP afterward and been like, ‘I totally believed you were dying! You are an incredible actor,’” says second-year NYU student Alaa Hamdan. The simulations in turn help actors hone their skills. “The main objective is to be as natural as possible, so the students don’t feel like they’re talking to an actor,” says Souhrada. As an SP, he says, “I’ve discovered certain things that have crept into my auditions, especially for TV and film.” More than that, actors see the program as a “meaningful” way to give back, whereas “a lot of the part-time work you can do is quite soulless,” Berenson says. It hits especially close to home for Hartman, who grew up with a deadly nut allergy that was cured by a year’s worth of intense clinical trials. “There were a lot of doctors who looked after me,” he says. “How can I use my acting to help train the next generation of them?” Jump to Comments Brad Arnold, Lead Singer of 3 Doors Down, Dies at 47 JavaScript is required to load the comments. Loading comments...