TV Talk: Noah Wyle rides a motorcycle as ‘The Pitt’ filming begins in Pittsburgh

A production assistant shouts, “Background!”

An extra playing a jogger immediately goes from standstill to running as an ambulance rushes up Cedar Avenue toward Allegheny General Hospital, otherwise known as Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center on “The Pitt.”

Behind the ambulance, Emmy-winner Noah Wyle, playing Dr. Robby, rides a motorcycle as cameras roll for the first of three days of filming for the show’s second season in Pittsburgh. (Most of HBO Max’s “The Pitt” films in Burbank, Calif.) While an identically dressed stunt double was spotted on set, a production assistant said Wyle operated the motorcycle as well.

Between takes, a LifeFlight helicopter descends to land at AGH in the city’s North Side neighborhood. A production assistant walks by holding a stack of fake Pennsylvania license plates, used on cars seen in the scenes.

Executive producers John Wells and Michael Hissrich, both Carnegie Mellon University grads, wear neon yellow vests for safety alongside much of the crew.

Signage in front of AGH has been changed to PTMC with American flags and banners flying to match the second season’s setting on July 4th weekend.

Rebecca Starr, a Pittsburgh-based background actor since the early ‘90s, sits on a bench in Allegheny Commons East Park. She was hired to play a hospital visitor for a scene to be shot inside the hospital, but she’s also been put into service as a pedestrian for exterior scenes.

Starr’s husband, Donald Fry, will play a hospital patient in later scenes.

“I roped him into it,” she said. “I got my neighbor, too. I get people.”

Starr’s image was used in picture frames on her first movie, 1993’s “The Cemetery Club.”

“I was Danny Aiello’s dead wife, Myrna,” she says, happily showing images from the sets she’s worked on, preserved on her smart phone, a photo album of more than two decades of Pittsburgh filmed production history.

Starr worked as a stand-in for actresses Kate Burton (in “Where Have You Gone Bernadette”) and Becky Ann Baker (in “One Dollar”).

“Anytime there’s someone with red hair…,” Starr said she gets considered for a stand-in role.

Starr played a lunch lady in Netflix’s “I Am Not Okay With This,” a ticket taker at PNC Park in Jason Momoa’s Netflix flick, “Sweet Girl,” and wore period attire for Amazon Prime Video’s “A League of Their Own.”

“I love seeing all the behind-the-scenes stuff, how they make it,” Starr said before she was called away for pedestrian duty after “The Pitt” cameras changed locations. “And [on a set] they serve the best food you’ll ever have in your life.”

Season 2 of “The Pitt” will stream on HBO Max in January.