People’s New Sexiest Man Alive Is Proving Weirdly Controversial

Wide Angle Noah Wyle Is People’s New Sexiest Man Alive. Not Everyone Is Happy About It. Explaining the ire that some Pitt-heads feel about the star. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Nadira Goffe? Oct 28, 20265:31 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Chris Polk/WBTVG via Getty Images. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Though it might seem that People magazine’s long-standing annual tradition of crowning a Sexiest Man Alive has lost much of its power due to the public simply not caring, this week we’ve been reminded of what happens when People gets it “wrong.” On Tuesday, the magazine announced that Noah Wyle, lead actor and an executive producer of The Pitt, is this year’s recipient of the steamy honor, and everyone promptly lost their minds. Wyle’s career has gone through a transformation over the past year or so. The 55-year-old actor was most known for his work on ER, the long-running hit medical procedural that began in the ’90s, until the arrival of HBO Max’s The Pitt, a new-age medical procedural that tackles modern health issues like COVID and anti-vaxxers. When The Pitt, which premiered last year, became a beloved phenomenon, Wyle became inescapable—but alas, sometimes exposure isn’t a good thing. Just as Wyle’s star began to rise once again, so too did backlash against the actor from a growing sect of vocal Pitt-heads that object to a list of grievances against the show’s lead. Such so-called evidence, compiled and cataloged by internet sleuths, has helped build a case against Wyle’s supposed political beliefs, alleged sexist ideology, and rumored impact behind the scenes of his show. Those bullet points may sound ominous, but is there any truth to them? I’ve broken down what Wyle’s detractors are accusing him of, and why they’re so mad that he’s been crowned the successor to the likes of Jonathan Bailey, John Krasinski, and Patrick Dempsey. I’m too squeamish to watch The Pitt or ER. Can you explain to me who, or what, is a Noah Wyle? I’m sorry to hear that, as you’re missing out on some really great TV! But seeing as The Pitt is famously gory in pursuit of medical realism, let me help you out. Wyle first became famous for starring as medical student John Carter on NBC’s landmark medical procedural ER. Though he continued acting after he left the show, Wyle’s career didn’t reach such heights again until recently, when he assumed the character of Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch on The Pitt, an HBO Max medical procedural for which Wyle serves as an executive producer alongside former ER producers. This is not without its own drama: The Pitt was initially supposed to be an ER reboot before things fell through with the estate of ER’s creator, Michael Crichton, who died in 2008. Now that the show has successfully debuted two seasons under different branding—and with some main structural changes to the show’s format, setting, and characters—Crichton’s estate is suing Warner Bros. and the creators of The Pitt, including Wyle, in an ongoing legal battle. The Pitt became a streaming executive’s wet dream when it skyrocketed into Max’s top five most-watched series debuts back in 2025, while also nabbing the highest postseason viewership growth for a debut of any HBO series, in addition to a bucketload of major awards nominations and wins. This is partially due to Wyle’s work as Dr. Robby, which earned him multiple Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Critics Choice Award, a Golden Globe, and multiple Emmys. And now he’s this year’s Sexiest Man Alive … sure! Yep. It’s not the first time Wyle has been deemed “sexy” while on the cover of People; back in the ’90s he was featured, alongside some of his ER castmates, on the magazine’s cover, which was dedicated to “The Sexy Men of ER.” Now, some 30 years later, here he is on the cover of People again! The interview accompanying the magazine shoot dives into Wyle’s “wife guy”–ness, how he knew that his wife—actress Sara Wells—was the one because of an accidental hawk homicide, and how fatherhood prompted him to leave ER. Giving him the title seems fine? What’s the issue? On the surface, and in a nutshell: Many people simply don’t think Wyle is conventionally attractive enough to be considered one of the sexiest men alive. It’s become a common refrain on X that Wyle isn’t even the most thirst-worthy actor on his own show. (That title belongs to Shawn Hatosy, who is free to hit my line at any time.) In light of the news, online commentators have been having a field day at Wyle’s expense, while others seem to be legitimately puzzled. One X user wondered, “Did the sexy men factory blow up or … ?,” while another asked, “Are all the other men dead in this scenario?” Meanwhile, others are remarking on People’s habit of ignoring celebrities of color for the honor. Yikes! That seems harsh. Beauty is certainly in the eye of the beholder, but at the end of the day, who cares? I’m with you! I don’t think this matters at all. (It’s also true that Wyle is considered by many other Pitt lovers to be attractive and … well endowed, let’s say.) Though the world’s response to the Sexiest Man Alive issue seems selective at best (I barely hear about it outside of a few social media posts supporting the year’s honoree), I think we would all do well to care even less. However, audiences are dissenting here not just because of attraction. This resentment encapsulates what appears to be a more generalized growing distaste for Wyle among Pitt fans and beyond. Why have people turned on him? For starters, there’s the ongoing question mark surrounding Wyle’s political views. Wyle, who is paternally of Ukrainian and Russian Jewish descent, has faced criticism for signing a pro-Israel message, shortly after Oct. 7, that is known as the “Israel Under Attack” letter. This was the inciting incident that led to people labeling Wyle a Zionist, and it was only further cemented by subsequent comments and actions from the actor. When discussing The Pitt’s famed episode detailing the medical process of treating mass-casualty events, Wyle mentioned the merits of Israeli doctors who built mass-casualty protocols for when they are “on the receiving end of a terrorist attack.” Wyle and his wife have also been affiliated with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which you might recognize as the known Zionist organization that called Mark Ruffalo antisemitic for speaking out against the Warner Bros.–Paramount merger. Wyle’s wife has also come under fire for liking an Instagram post of a CNN segment that was criticizing pro-Palestine celebrities for remaining quiet amid a ceasefire deal (which has not resulted in an end to Israel’s decimation of Gaza). At the same time, many have pointed out that Wyle has interacted with pro-Palestine content over the years. In addition, he is a long-standing board member of the Los Angeles committee of Human Rights Watch, an organization that has been notably against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Wow, I sure hope he hasn’t stepped into any other politically charged issues. I haven’t even gotten to the Confederacy apologist moment. The … what? In light of The Pitt’s success, and amid the growing disapproval of Wyle as the tides have turned against him, his appearance on a 2017 episode of Who Do You Think You Are? resurfaced. The documentary–reality series follows a different celebrity guest each episode, as researchers dive into the celebrity’s background and teach them about their family history. In Wyle’s near-decade-old appearance, he was worried to learn of the family rumor that someone else had taken the place of a family member to fight in the Civil War. He found out that his great-great-great-grandfather had fought—for the Confederacy. Wyle’s response: “I would rather have found out that we had relatives that fought for the Confederacy than to find out we hadn’t fought at all, or that we had had somebody fight for us … I do feel better to know that, right or wrong, he stood up and served.” I think you can see the problem there. I’m not sure what was running through his head, but those are not the words I would have chosen in response to that revelation. No kidding. I was wondering, do people have any issues with Wyle that are directly tied to The Pitt? Yes, and though the timeline of all of this is a little weedy, I would reckon that this is where the so-called case against Wyle really began to form. During a 2025 red-carpet interview, Pitt actress Shabana Azeez—an Australian actress of Indo-Fijian descent who plays Dr. Victoria Javadi on the show—half-jokingly, half-seriously called Wyle out for continually forgetting or mispronouncing her name in multiple interviews. This sparked a larger conversation about Wyle’s treatment of women, particularly women of color, on set. In an April GQ interview, Wyle admitted to making a joke on set that could be considered off-color: Because Dr. Robby yells at people “he feels inferior to” and because the women on the show are “such rock stars,” after finishing a scene where he would yell at someone, he would jokingly yell, “Someone bring me another woman to yell at!” It doesn’t help that Wyle apparently has a bit of a history of mistreating newer castmates on set; most notably, he has publicly admitted that he was “not nice all the time” to his ER co-star Kellie Martin. Given all of this, Wyle has been accused of sexism by some on the internet. None of this is helped by other suspicions regarding The Pitt’s on-set culture. Every season, The Pitt has lost a prominent character played by a woman of color. Tracy Ifeachor, who played Dr. Heather Collins, left after Season 1 in a decision that is so shrouded in mystery that fans assume she was purposefully ousted for personal reasons. After Season 2 aired, it was announced that Supriya Ganesh, who played fan favorite Dr. Samira Mohan, would leave and Ayesha Harris, who plays Dr. Parker Ellis, would become a series regular. The people who make the show have argued that these cast changes are a result of realism, since medical professionals do come and go in a hospital. Nevertheless, as fans it hurts to see many of these actresses disappear from the show after we’ve become invested in their characters. What do you make of all of this? Is it enough to declare Wyle “canceled”? Some of these pieces of “evidence” against Wyle seem to be trivial, while others feel more understandably controversial. I don’t see why we have to bring surface-level, immaterial things, like Instagram likes, into the fray when there’s enough documentation here to suggest that Wyle may indeed be a complicated man. After all, multiple truths can co-exist simultaneously, and individuals aren’t always going to be politically coherent. The reality is, we don’t know for certain what Wyle’s 2026 stance on the genocide is, or the culture he cultivates on set, and we will continue to not know these things unless he or others say anything definitively. This whole mess certainly isn’t helped by the level of parasocial investment from some of The Pitt’s most intense fans, who seem ready to turn on each other and cast members at any moment. In conclusion, the prognosis on Wyle is still pending. For now, can we at least come to an agreement that we as a society have moved past the need for a Sexiest Man Alive? Celebrities TV