Nick Gehlfuss plays the chief ER resident Dr. Will Halstead on the NBC drama Chicago Med, but the actor has seen more of the Windy City than just the inside of its hospitals.
“I just checked off something off of my bucket list: I saw Buddy Guy at Buddy Guy’s Legends,” says Gehlfuss. “He’s a pioneer of blues music. He has this club down in the South Side of Chicago. He’s phenomenal.”
Gehlfuss particularly enjoyed that he didn’t have to travel far to delve into his character research further. “The best thing about filming in Chicago is that the research is as soon as I walk out my door or I look out my window,” he says. “It’s not always the case that you shoot in the location where the story takes place. We had this great opportunity to put different parts of Chicago on the map.”
Even though Gehlfuss has watched his character evolve throughout the Chicago Fire and Chicago PD series, he claims playing Halstead always keeps him on his toes. “Will is spontaneous and he’s unpredictable, he operates in this world that is so chaotic and at a pace most people can’t operate in,” the actor says. “He’s a bit of a wild card when it comes to the fact that he’s the one who enforces the rules amongst his colleagues, but he’ll also be the first one to break them if need be.”
Besides observing actual doctors and immersing himself in his new hometown, Gehlfuss had additional help in preparing for this role from his mother and sister, who are nurses in real life. But even that didn’t quite prepare him to practice medicine beyond the confines of a TV series. “Let’s just say that if anyone needed help and I was the only doctor around,” he says with a laugh, “they would rather perform CPR on themselves than let me do it.”
