Whoa! Chicago Med is about to enter its tenth season.
Chicago Med Season 9 ended with several cliffhangers that left viewers wondering whether one character was coming back.
This proved that there’s plenty of life in the series a year after Nick Gehlfuss’s (Will Halstead) exit.
Most of the cast is returning, so let’s look at who’s who ahead of Season 10.
Over Ten Years, How Much Has The Cast Changed?
Chicago Med’s cast is remarkably stable, so once you learn who the characters are, you should be able to follow not only the new season, but many of the previous seasons.
A few characters have left over the years, but there is always a core of five or six characters you can count on to carry the show, and Season 10 won’t be much different in that regard.
Related: Chicago Med Season 10: Everything We Know So Far About NBC’s Flagship Medical Drama
Even the recurring characters tend to stay year after year, most notably Sam Abrams, a neurosurgeon who pops up at least once a season with a smug attitude.
Please scroll down to check out all the major characters.
ED Chief Dean Archer (Steven Weber)
Archer has come a long way since he first appeared on Chicago Med Season 6.
He was initially a character fans either loved to hate or purely hated.
He was antagonistic to everyone, didn’t care about patient desires, and couldn’t stand anyone disagreeing with him.
He still has some of those tendencies.
He blamed Dr. Marcel for new resident Zola Ahmad ignoring protocol despite Marcel telling her firmly what the rules were, and when he had to use OR 2.0 the year before, he deliberately broke the machine.
His treatment of Zola was downright hypocritical, considering that he broke plenty of rules when he thought he had a good reason and once deliberately put a patient in a coma so he’d have an excuse to override the patient’s lack of consent for a procedure.
Still, Archer has displayed a softer side lately. His friendship with Hannah Asher straddles the line between platonic and romantic, and he’s tried to re-establish a relationship with his estranged son, Sean, who is a recovering addict.
Archer battled end-stage renal failure for a while, culminating in Sean giving him a kidney despite Archer’s ex-wife’s disapproval.
Related: Chicago Med Review: Did Archer Display a Hypocritical Streak?
He is played by Steven Weber, who is best known for his role as Brian Hackett on Wings, though Weber has had a long career that began with doing commercials when he was in the third grade.
Weber has guest-starred on many shows, some of which allowed him to reunite with WIngs costars, and he has been involved in adaptations of four Stephen King stories.
He also was a close friend of the late John Ritter, whose son Tyler appeared on the Season 9 finale.
Ritter died of an undiagnosed aortic dissection.
In honor of his memory, Weber pushed for a Season 8 storyline involving a patient with a similar condition to feature a shoutout to the John Ritter Foundation For Aortic Health, which Ritter’s widow founded.
Dr. Hannah Asher (Jessy Schram)
Hannah Asher is the hospital’s OBGYN and is an expert in addiction recovery because she’s overcome opioid dependence.
Asher was initially introduced as a troubled doctor who was abusing heroin. Will Halstead met her at a safe needle program, and it was awkward when she then came into the hospital.
After leaving temporarily to go to rehab, Asher was rehired at Med and has been sober ever since. She’s portrayed as a caring doctor who takes ethics seriously but is unlucky in love.
She’s toed the line with Archer for a while, but during Season 9, she began dating new doctor Mitch Ripley, who was hesitant to start a relationship with her because of his past.
Jessy Schram has guest starred on many series, including several police procedurals such as CSI: Miami and Without a Trace.
You might also recognize her from four Once Upon a Time episodes, in which she played Cinderella/Ashley Boyd.
She is also frequently seen on Hallmark movies and was excited to appear in an episode of the new Fantasy Island in 2023.
Schram is also a singer, though this talent is not utilized on Chicago Med.
Dr. Daniel Charles (Oliver Platt)
Dr. Charles’ role as an Emergency Department psychiatrist makes him fairly unique.
Most medical dramas don’t focus on psychiatry (the only other series that did was New Amsterdam, but that ended up being silly and unrealistic by the end.)
Charles’ position has allowed Chicago Med to explore storylines that few medical dramas do. He has seen patients with conversion disorders, eating disorders, suicidal ideation, and other mental health issues that are not as rare or shocking as those usually depicted on television.
Related: 19 Most Moving Mental Health Stories on TV
Despite his expertise, Dr. Charles has challenges in his personal life, such as a teenage daughter from whom he has often been estranged.
He is also dating Liliana, a Polish immigrant who works as a janitor in the hospital and who often sides with her troublemaking brother, Pawel, over him.
Throughout Season 9, Charles grappled with guilt over the inhumane way he treated Ripley when Ripley was a teenager sentenced to a juvenile psychiatric facility after acting out.
That will likely continue during Season 10, especially now that Pawel has accused Ripley of beating him up.
Although Oliver Platt is a well-known actor, he comes from a political family.
His father was a career diplomat who served as US Ambassador to Pakistan, Zambia, and the Philippines, so Platt often moved around and changed schools.
Platt credits drama departments at various schools he attended for giving him some stability in his life.
Platt has had many roles over the years, but his experiences with politics helped him in two: his role on the West Wing and later on The Good Wife as a right-wing billionaire client who enjoyed sparring with Christine Baranski’s far more liberal character.
He enjoys playing characters vastly different from one another and is selective about the roles he takes, only pursuing ones that are interesting and different from what he’s done before.
Crockett Marcel (Dominic Rains)
Marcel is another character who has become more endearing over time. He joined the cast during Chicago Med Season 5, replacing Colin Donnell’s Dr. Rhodes, who had left at the end of the previous season.
Like Dr. Archer, he wasn’t the greatest guy at the beginning. He gave off sleazy vibes, flirted too much, and acted like he knew better than everyone.
Related: Chicago Med Review: [Marcel] Taking On Too Much
It didn’t help that Marcel got thrown into an annoying love triangle, competing with Will Halstead for Natalie Manning’s affection.
However, dating Natalie helped bring out Marcel’s softer side, and he let his guard down enough to explain why he feared intimacy: his infant daughter had died of leukemia shortly after her first birthday.
That pain resurfaced during the Season 9 finale when Marcel learned a patient’s father had killed himself after his son’s death from liver failure.
Marcel was depressed, called out of surgery, and eventually told Maggie he had considered suicide, too, when his daughter passed away.
Like his character, Dominic Rains is an Iranian-American.
Marcel is not the first doctor he played; he was cast in a spinoff of General Hospital in 2007 as Dr. Leo Julian.
Unfortunately, he had a scheduling conflict and could not continue in the role, which was taken over by his younger brother Ethan.
Related: 17 Times Soap Stars Guest Starred on Primetime Shows
The Rains brothers also collaborated on a short film based on their real-life experience with a cousin who died after being misdiagnosed with cancer.
Dr. Mitch Ripley (Lucas Mitchell)
Dr. Ripley is the newest addition to the Chicago Med staff.
When he first arrived, he was uncomfortable when Dr. Charles recognized him and it soon turned out that Charles had treated him as a teenager.
Ripley was a troubled kid who was institutionalized after becoming violent and is ashamed of his past.
Chicago Med turned the tired TV trope of the violent kid from the wrong side of the tracks on its head, using this backstory to explore the way psychiatry has often been weaponized against marginalized people.
Ripley has cautiously begun dating Hannah Asher despite his fear that she might reject him if she knew his past, something which became more difficult to hide after his old friend Scully from the streets came into the hospital with Scully’s pregnant girlfriend.
The situation will be even more complicated during Season 10, considering the cliffhanger at the end of Season 9.
Shortly after Scully offered to “take care” of Pawel for Ripley, Pawel came into the hospital after a severe beatdown and accused Ripley of it.
Whether Hannah believes that remains to be seen, but Ripley could be in serious trouble, and his past will likely all come out during this storyline.
Related: Cliffhangers That Made Our Jaws Drop to the Floor
When playing Ripley, Luke Mitchell has a perfect American accent, but he’s Australian.
He played Chris Knight on Neighbours, the iconic Aussie soap that now streams on Amazon Freevee, and was also on H2O: Just Add Water, a popular show about teenage mermaids.
Mitchell has also been on several American shows besides Chicago Med, most notably Blindspot, which almost didn’t happen because he thought he was wrong for the role.
Maggie Lockwood (Marlyne Barett)
Maggie is an empathetic but tough nurse who assigns new cases to doctors as patients arrive in the ED.
When a patient in bad shape comes in, she tells whichever doctors need to take care of that patient that they are “going to Baghdad.”
Maggie is empathetic with patients and new residents, but her personal life is somewhat messy.
She met her now ex-husband, Ben when they were both receiving chemotherapy at the same time.
Unfortunately, she and Ben split for the sake of drama before the beginning of Season 9, and now she’s dating Loren, an EMT turned trauma doctor who nearly died after a helicopter crash.
Maggie had a daughter, Vanessa, at the age of 16, who she gave up for adoption and who later became a resident at the hospital but wanted Maggie to stop being so overbearing.
More recently, Maggie has been showering anxious new medical student Naomi Howard with love and empathy.
It’s hard to imagine Chicago Med without Maggie, but we nearly had to when Marlyne Barrett was diagnosed with ovarian and uterine cancer.
However, Barrett had aggressive treatment for her cancer and appears to be still going strong.
Related: Chicago Med Review: The Story That Wasn’t Told
Barrett is best known for her role as Maggie in Chicago Med, but she is also a familiar face to those who love the Law & Order franchise, having appeared as a guest on SVU, the original Law & Order, and Law & Order: Trial by Jury.
Hospital Administrator Sharon Goodwin (S. Epatha Merkerson)
Sharon Goodwin is a former nurse who now works as a hospital administrator.
She spends more time than she’d like in board meetings but also has some say in HR decisions and whether doctors can perform complicated or ethically ambiguous procedures.
Much of her time is spent settling arguments between doctors about treatment protocols and smoothing things over with doctors who dislike her decisions.
Related: Chicago Med Review: A Three-Tissue Story
Throughout Season 9, Sharon has had to deal with her ex-husband’s cognitive decline while beginning a relationship with Dennis Washington, an oncologist at the hospital.
During the Season 9 finale, she made the heartbreaking decision to put Bert in a home.
She’s also best friends with Dr. Charles. Some fans think they would make a good couple, but their relationship has always been strictly platonic.
If you watched the original Law & Order in the 1990s, you’re already familiar with S. Epatha Merkerson, who played Lieutenant Anita Van Buren.
She had planned to leave the series after its 20th season, and her last episode was the final one to be broadcast for ten years.
She is so closely associated with that role that some fans assumed she would return to Law & Order Season 21, which would have meant saying goodbye to Goodwin.
Fortunately for Med fans, that didn’t happen, and Goodwin is now involved in a heartbreaking story about her ex-husband’s dementia.
Merkerson is a spokesperson for Merck America Diabetes Challenge and attempts to spread awareness about the disease among Black people, so it’s not surprising that her Chicago Med character is diabetic and has occasionally had issues.
What Other Characters Might Appear on Chicago Med Season 10?
There are several less significant characters you can expect on Med:
-
Dr. Sam Abrams (Brennan Brown), the chief neurosurgeon who is often smug and obnoxious -
Loren Johnson (Henderson Wade), formerly an EMT who flew patients in from rural areas but is now a trauma doctor in training. He is also Maggie’s boyfriend. -
Zach Hudgins (Conor Perkins), a medical resident who often works with Archer or Charles -
Naomi Howard (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut), a medical student who is too tentative and fearful of making mistakes -
Sean Archer (Luigi Sottile), Dr. Archer’s son who is in addiction recovery after serving time in prison and often butts heads with his father
Over to you, Chicago Med fanatics. Who is your favorite character, and what storylines do you hope to see them in during Season 10?
Hit the big, blue SHOW COMMENTS button and let us know.
Jack Ori is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. His debut young adult novel, Reinventing Hannah, is available on Amazon. Follow him on X.
