Darren Barnet Takes It Day by Day

For Darren Barnet, star of NBC’s medical juggernaut Chicago Med, acting was equal parts pursuit of passion and logical inevitability. “I became an actor because I am indecisive. I’m interested in so many different aspects of life, and with acting I didn’t really have to choose,” he reflects. “I can taste a little bit of every life.” As he calls from what looks like a hospital break room, clad in personalized maroon scrubs, the point proves itself.

Barnet is filming his third season as Dr. John Frost, a resident in pediatric emergency medicine at the fictional Gaffney Chicago Medical Center. Before that, he was a racecar driver in Gran Turismo, a bare-knuckled criminal opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in Road House, Sydney Sweeney’s idealized ex in Anyone but You, and a high school heartthrob in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, co-created by Mindy Kaling. A little bit of every life.

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says of joining the One Chicago universe, the blockbuster franchise that also includes Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D., both of which have since featured him in crossover storylines. “But my mom had been a big fan since forever and she said, ‘Take the job. Go do it right now.’”

If there was any trace of hesitation, it came from two fears. The first was moving to Chicago and putting distance between himself and his loved ones. “I moved around so much that I get nervous to even put my clothes into a drawer,” he says of his nomadic lifestyle. “I don’t know that I’ve had the feeling of home for a long time.” But to know Chicago is to love it, and he has since settled in enough to approximate the feeling: “If I have a bed to rest in and access to people I feel safe around and loved by, I can make that a home.”

The second was a lifelong phobia of hospitals. “It’s one of my greatest fears on the planet,” he admits. “I’ve had really bad times in hospitals, and they always remind me of that.” This fear is harder to shake, and he still wrestles with the irony of his current job: “I don’t know if this qualifies as exposure therapy—if it does, then I’m doing the work every single day.”

In conversation, Barnet is open, unguarded, and matter-of-fact: ask the question, get the answer. As candidly as he credits indecision for part of his career path, he shares the crux of his phobia. “My dad passed away in front of me,” he explains—a traumatic life event he had to reenact, almost beat for beat, in Chicago Med. Instead of panicking, however, he dug in: “That’s something we used to make [the storyline] as true to life as possible. It makes me happy as an artist that people here cared to make it true,” he says, commending showrunner Allen MacDonald’s commitment to realism. “It’s clear they’re not just trying to meet a deadline.”

Barnet and MacDonald (CSI, 13 Reasons Why) both joined Chicago Med for its tenth season in 2024, helping to usher in a visceral new era. “It’s easy to get locked in the trope of what a network TV drama is. Every show, I think, has had their time getting caught in that hamster wheel,” Barnet says of the pressures hit series contend with. The franchise, now in its fifteenth year, isn’t immune: both Chicago Med and Chicago Fire are currently among the ten most-watched non-sports programs on television and, along with Chicago P.D., are NBC’s only properties in the top twenty. But with MacDonald at the helm, Chicago Med has placed renewed focus on the integrity of its storytelling. “This season is breaking out of that—so hard. They’re going a lot deeper and demanding more out of their writers and actors in the best way possible,” Barnet continues. “I don’t know what they went through during the hiatus [between the eleventh and twelfth seasons], but the storylines are grittier and more raw than I’ve ever seen them,” he adds with a laugh.

Despite, or perhaps thanks to, his uneasy relationship with hospitals, Barnet recognizes the power of the medical drama genre and is proud to be part of its tradition. “Everyone has had a sick loved one, or has lost a loved one, or been sick themselves, or known someone that has been sick and needed medical attention,” he explains. “Love, loss, and the understanding of our mortality are things no one escapes. This show shines a light on that. It’s a giant mirror to our mortality, and they do it so well.”

Dr. Frost marks a departure from Barnet’s breakthrough role as popular jock Paxton in the coming-of-age teen drama Never Have I Ever. The actor had already been cast when he was overheard speaking Japanese during a fitting, prompting co-creators Kaling and Lang Fisher to incorporate the actor’s heritage into the character. Thus, Paxton Hall became Paxton Hall-Yoshida.

The opportunity to explore multiracial identity through a character was meaningful for Barnet, who feels strongly connected to his Japanese lineage while being acutely aware of the privilege afforded by his proximity to whiteness. “I’m under no delusion that someone would look at me and immediately think, ‘Oh, that’s an immigrant Asian man.’ I think there’s a huge pocket of people like me: part something, part something else, and there’s not really a box they can check,” he explains of the neither-here-nor-there alienation that can complicate one’s sense of identity. “I never knew if I was Japanese enough to really identify as Japanese, but I never felt white enough to just be a white guy. I try to never over-claim anything.”

He applies the same care and thoughtfulness to his characters. Though grateful for the representation Paxton offered, he neither expects nor wants every role to mirror his personal identity. “I don’t feel that I need that to perform,” he states. “I think it would be selfish of me to be like, ’Oh, this character now has to be part-Asian because I’m playing him.’ That would be Darren talking, and that’s not what my job is,” he continues. “In order to serve a character, I need to invest in what makes them true.”

For Barnet, representation also needs to go deeper than simply assigning a character a heritage. “If I’m going to portray it, I want to do it realistically. I don’t want it to just be a fact about this person,” he explains, offering a glimpse into the intention behind his craft. “Where we come from and how we were raised dictates a lot of our behaviors, our relationships, the way that we operate. I want to be true to that in my work.”

Outside of Chicago Med, Barnet is most excited about The Muse, a dark psychological thriller he stars in and co-produced. He lights up when talking about it, still reveling in the creative experience. “I don’t know if it’s crazy to say this, but that spiral into insanity was the most fun I’ve had,” he says of filming. “We slept in the farmhouse we were shooting in. Sleeping in the same bed I had a traumatic murder scene in was a little jarring, but also kind of funny, in a way,” he says, amused. Ultimately, the freedom to follow his creative inclinations, and those of others he trusts, was what he found most fulfilling. “There were no rules because we were working with our best friends. There was no wall we couldn’t get past.”

Off-screen, Barnet prefers to live outside the public eye. Despite his three million followers and a keenly invested audience, courtesy of Never Have I Ever, he keeps a clear line between the professional and the personal, broadcasting the latter only when it serves a larger purpose.

He is, for example, an advocate for mental health awareness and has no reservations about contributing to the conversation through his own lived experience. “I used to be very sensitive,” he shares. “Now, when someone tries to degrade me or put me down, I look at it like, This is something you’re going through. I don’t need to digest and ruminate on this, because that would only hurt me.” He adds: “That’s something I wish I learned younger.”

At thirty-five, he has come to recognize that the most obvious advice has also proven the most impactful, now that he has put it into practice. “I found what works for me,” he says of his mental health journey, “and that’s a routine, time away from the phone, working out, eating right. It sounds so basic, but it really is the best medicine.” Beneath this structure, basic as it sounds, lie the darker, more toxic patterns it keeps at bay. “Every time anything went wrong, I would blame myself. Oh, this is my fault. I couldn’t get out of my head about it, and it affected my relationships,” he offers earnestly. “I had to realize how selfish it is to make things going wrong all about you. Then, all anyone can care about is, ‘Oh, are you okay?’” he continues, rejecting the loop. “I learned that it’s not all my fault, it’s okay to ask for help, and it’s okay to be down.”

Another life lesson: most of the time, life is not so clear-cut as “down” or “up.” Reflecting on his early days in Los Angeles, working at SoulCycle and getting his real estate license while audition-hopping, he cherishes the purity of the dream he held then. “Sometimes I miss those days. It’s weird to talk about because I was a mess in so many ways. There was a huge fear of, Will I always be chasing something everyone told me is a pipe dream? Is everyone going to be right?” he remembers, laying bare another fear he faced head-on. “But there was also so much mystery: Imagine where I’ll be. Imagine what I’ll do,” he goes on. “Now, I have a lot of what I really wanted, but what you learn about goal-chasing is that once you attain a goal, all you think about is the next one. How can happiness ever be attained if it’s always at the next goalpost? I wish I knew that sooner, too.”

This realization has made gratitude a cornerstone of his everyday life. Asked if he ever looks at his current reality through the eyes of the person who feared he would never make it, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Every morning. I make sure it’s the first thing that I do. That’s the other scary thing about goal-chasing: you don’t take in the moment until it’s too late,” he says, shaking his head. “Like, slow down, Darren.”

Chicago Med continues on Wednesdays on NBC.