As Dr. Mitch Ripley on Chicago Med, actor Luke Mitchell has to portray all of the character’s many layers. And on top of all of that, keep his accent American. If you didn’t know, Mitchell is from Australia, and getting the dialect just right is something he takes seriously.
Mitchell explained in a recent interview, “I started auditioning for some American things when I was still in Australia, and I…hired a dialect coach to teach me what we call a Standard American Accent,” he said.
But even though he’s been acting stateside for years, and this is his second season on Chicago Med, he still takes pains to get the sound just right. “I have to do a lot of vocal warmups to kind of build the train tracks so that my mouth can glide along and hopefully not make any mistakes,” he explained.
And his on-screen counterpart will have to do some work to get his voice right, too, in a sense. “Ripley’s going to go on a big journey this season and he’s going to need to learn to communicate better,” Mitchell revealed.
Luke Mitchell on Chicago Med
We were introduced to Mitchell playing Ripley during Season 9’s premiere. “It turns out that he has an old and difficult relationship with Dr. Charles [Oliver Platt],” Chicago Med executive producer Andy Schneider told NBC Insider. “And he carries some resentment to Charles for that past. Charles himself has to do some soul searching, and kind of reflect on how he treated people in the past.”
“He had a troubled childhood, but looking at him you wouldn’t know that,” Schneider added. “He’s moved on and he’s a really good doctor. He’s got wonderful bedside manner — good with kids, good with patients, and to everyone else in the ED, he’s a charming new addition.”
Ripley has also caught the eye of Dr. Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram). “Hannah is dating,” Schneider told us. “She’s out in the world of dating apps and not doing well with it. But there is this really handsome, new guy [Ripley] coming into the ED — and charming.”
Luke Mitchell says he and Jessy Schram “giggle a lot” on the Chicago Med set
“We giggle a lot,” Mitchell said about working with Schram, who plays Dr. Hannah Asher. “We have a lot of fun.” Mitchell views his co-star as a “bright light” both as a human being and as an actress, he told NBC Insider. “We want every scene [to be] as good as we can possibly make it… But we’re kind of like kids. We really enjoy ourselves as well and if there’s a laugh to be had, we’ll take it.”
