Dr. Caitlin Lenox (Sarah Ramos) may have come with excellent references, which is why Sharon Goodwin (S. Epatha Merkerson) hired her to assist Dr. Dean Archer (Steven Weber) as co-Head of the Emergency Department at Gaffney Chicago Medical Center, but her lack of warmth isn’t making her any friends on Season 10 of Chicago Med.
And that’s exactly what Showrunner Allen MacDonald had in mind. In an earlier interview, he told Parade, “I wanted to bring in somebody who made Archer seem gentle by comparison, and so Lenox is someone who cares very deeply about her patients, like all the doctors in our ED, but she doesn’t want to get over-involved because she feels the way she can be human as a doctor is to treat as many people as possible, as efficiently as possible, and the reality of that is she can’t spend a lot of time babying everybody and talking and getting to know everybody.”
MacDonald tapped Ramos to play Lenox to co-run the ED with Archer after seeing her performance as Jessica on Season 2 of The Bear, and Ramos was happy to take on the role as Archer’s adversary.
“I thought it was kind of funny that Lenox was the antagonist because she’s just coming in and being good at her job and isn’t going overboard and taking care of her colleagues’ feelings,” Ramos told Parade. “I think that that was really exciting and inspiring and scary. As an actress and a woman, I’ve been really conditioned that I’m supposed to be taking care of people’s feelings and to be reading a room constantly and being like: ‘Did they take that the wrong way?’ or ‘Oh no, did I make them feel weird even though they didn’t say anything?’ Always being in my head, being like what’s the right thing to do. Lenox is like, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ It’s kind of scary, but also really cool.”
It’s unclear at this point if Lenox is on the spectrum and that is why she has problems with social cues, but, so far, she hasn’t really made any friends in the ED. Even when she tried to reassure Dr. Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram) that she wasn’t responsible for a patient’s death, the way she went about it was off putting.
MacDonald has shared the broad strokes of Lenox’s arc with Ramos, and getting a clue as to what makes Lenox tick is what made her want to test her skills on the role.
“It made me have compassion for her while she is being so misunderstood,” Ramos said. “I really relate to Lenox as a person. It’s not like she likes rubbing people the wrong way. She’s just doing the best she can with the tools that she has. She wants to do things differently, or she wants to have a different effect on people. But it’s that really relatable thing as a person where you’re like, ‘OK, I’m going to do things this way,’ and then, oops, the thing you didn’t want to happen happens.”
