‘New Amsterdam’: Tyler Labine Teases ‘a Lot of Trouble’ Ahead for Iggy After Hiring Trevor

When we last saw the doctors of New Amsterdam, everyone was in for some bad news: Dr. Veronica Fuentes (Michelle Forbes), Dr. Max Goodwin’s (Ryan Eggold) replacement as medical director, found out about the resistance and made some major power moves.

Among the demotions, termination, and warnings: Dr. Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine) is no longer head of the psychiatry department. But maybe Max, sticking around to try to help while Dr. Helen Sharpe (Freema Agyeman) returned to London, can do something about that? How does everyone feel about their former boss being back?

Labine teases what’s ahead and Eggold directing him in February 22’s “Two Doors” (and yes, Iggy’s decision to hire Trevor was not the best).

Things are messy right now at New Amsterdam. The resistance is over. Veronica’s made all these moves. What’s life like at the hospital when it picks up?

Tyler Labine: Things were left off obviously very tense. Lot of people being demoted, a.k.a. me. Bloom [Janet Montgomery] got fired. Reynolds [Jocko Sims] is a snitch. There’s a lot going on. Dr. Mia Castries [Genevieve Angelson] is staying miraculously, and Wilder [Sandra Mae Frank]. It was a real big shake-up, and the mood is tense.

But the one really obviously great thing is that mom and dad came back, Helen and Max came back. But I don’t think any of us on staff think that they’re gonna be effective in any way. They’ve already made their peace with leaving. So I think it’s gonna be a really big fight for Max especially, because he’s got an uphill battle with Fuentes, but also with us, we’re all feeling a little raw. He just left, and we’ve all made peace with that. So the welcome wagon might not be as welcoming as he’s hoping.

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I was going to ask if everyone’s kind of feeling hesitant because yes, Max is back, but he’s planning on this being temporary, then going back to London.

Yeah, you got the nail on the head there. It’s hard to put your eggs in his basket again because we know where his heart is and also are all very happy for him. He made his choice. He’s following his joy. The season is called “More Joy.” He wanted to find his joy and go with Helen. So I think it’s a little hard to just flip flop and come back and then also to like place faith in him when everything else feels like it’s kind of falling apart since he left.

How is Iggy feeling about his job right now? Veronica took the department from him.

Iggy had been very sort of tentative in kind of reprising his role anyway. He’d been very tentatively kind of taking patients again. So my hot take on that is that he’s very angry because his ego is in the way, but I don’t know how much it’s going to affect his day to day at this point. I think he’s still gonna take on patients, but probably just a lot less than he did before. And he might be kind of comfortable with that. Not being the chair of the department, we’re gonna see what that does, how that affects his involvement with the psych ward. But as of right now, I think he’s super peeved, but it’s business as usual.

Ralph Bavaro/NBC

You brought up Reynolds snitching. How is Iggy feeling about him? It seemed like Mia was going to be their downfall.

That was the red herring, right? Everyone’s mad. That was not something that any of us saw coming. I don’t think anybody, audience, any of the cast, nobody saw that coming. When we read that, we were all like [Gasps], “Oh no!” This season has been a doozy for Reynolds, polyamory and snitching.

But from an Iggy standpoint, I think Iggy tends to see the humanity in everybody, and even in the scene that we shot when he was leaving and everyone was glaring at him, I made sure to play a moment of looking at him, like really trying to see what he’s going through and what his motivation was. I think we all know that his motivation was not to be a snitch or a rat. He was trying to save people’s lives, which is always what we’re all trying to do. So I think everyone’s mad and a little bit hurt that it went down like that, but I think ultimately it’ll be OK. But there will be some consequences, socially and emotionally, for him.

In this week’s episode, Iggy helps a father and son deal with vastly different views on a shared trauma. What can you preview and what’s the biggest challenge for Iggy?

Yeah, that one was really cool, very topical, as our show does so well. The son was involved in a mass shooting at a grocery store and survived, everybody else in the situation did not. And his father doesn’t believe that he was actually involved in a real shooting. He thinks it was a false flag staging, orchestrated by “them.” So it’s a really, really tricky situation. His son is like, “I was there, you saw me there. I was there,” and his dad is just in complete denial about it.

Virginia Sherwood/NBC

The challenge there, I think, is to not sort of shatter either of their worlds. The idea that socially speaking, some people have gone down the rabbit hole through this pandemic and through access to the internet where we feel like sometimes we may have lost somebody, we can’t get them back, and we want them so badly to see the truth, but at the end of the day, it’s our truth. And you can’t make somebody see it. And so Iggy has to choose a very sort of, I would say, controversial path to help these two actually salvage any kind of relationship without trying to make one or the other right or wrong. It’s another one of those moments where Iggy has to straddle the fence and sort of walk the line and figure out how to make everybody happy, but it might not be the most direct line.

Talk about Ryan directing you for those scenes.

It’s Ryan’s second episode directing. I love working with Ryan as a director. He’s got a really good shorthand as an actor to talk to other actors, which is really important. Not every director has that; some directors get really hung up on how to keep communicate with an actor. Ryan obviously is a very adept performer and had a really easy time telling us what he wanted to see. And we were working with a young actor who’d never really acted before as well in these scenes. It was just really cool to watch him kind of coax this performance out of this really talented kid, but he was nervous. It’s fun to watch Ryan work his magic, and he’s a very visual human being. You can tell he really has a vision for the show and he sees things in a very unique kind of way. So I’m just always excited to work with him and any way we get to sort of shake up our current working partnership or scenario is always interesting. It’s fun.

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Iggy may not have had made the best choice in hiring Trevor.

Oh, you think?

Is Trevor still around?

Trevor is not gone. There’s a lot coming up with Trevor. I can’t spill very much about that. But I will say this: You’re absolutely correct: It was a terrible idea for him to hire Trevor professionally, personally, emotionally. It’s gonna get him in a lot of trouble. He really walked into a buzz saw with this one.

Virginia Sherwood/NBC

What can you say about Iggy and Martin (Mike Doyle) and what we’ll see because of that? Iggy didn’t even tell Trevor that the sweater was from his husband.

I know, that was so shady. I can tell you that Martin, who has been nothing but a rock and supportive for Iggy, may have hit his wall.

Oh, no.

I’m not gonna say anything else. He might have. We’ll see. There are some big, big scenes coming up with him and I.

New Amsterdam, Tuesdays, 10/9c, NBC