The Good Doctor introduces its first-ever medical students in Season 7 Episode 2, airing on Tuesday, February 27 at 10/9c on ABC.
Kayla Cromer and Wavyy Jonez make their debuts as Charlie and Dom in “Skin in the Game,” in which Shaun (Freddie Highmore) struggles to accommodate the newest member of his surgical team, Charlie (Cromer), who interferes in a patient’s relationship with his daughter. Elsewhere, Park (Will Yun Lee) tackles a tricky brain tumor, and Lea (Paige Spara) and Morgan (Fiona Gubelmann) adjust to motherhood.
Co-showrunner and executive producer Liz Friedman told TV Insider all there is to know about Charlene “Charlie” Lukaitis and Dominick “Dom” Hubank. Charlie and Dom are medical students on their first surgical rotations — eager to learn but raw and untested in the fast-paced world of St. Bonaventure’s Hospital. Charlie, who is also a doctor with autism, idolizes Shaun. But as Friedman previously told TV Insider, “The two of them will have a complicated relationship.”
Adding medical students to the final season was “fun” for the series because, as Friedman previously described, they “don’t know how to bandage a wound. They don’t know how to draw blood; they’ve never done it before. That’s when we have David Renaud, who’s one of our writers on staff and also a doctor, telling us stories of things that he was baffled by when he was a med student first put on the floor. We thought, well, these are great stories.”
Here’s all that Friedman revealed about the new recurring characters Charlie and Dom, whose debut episode is directed by Highmore himself.
Kayla Cromer plays Dr. Charlie Lukaitis
Charlie (Kayla Cromer) and Shaun (Freddie Highmore) disagree during surgery in The Good Doctor Season 7 Episode 2 (Disney/Jeff Weddell)
As previously announced, Cromer is an actor with Autism Spectrum Disorder, making her the first actor with autism cast in the series. Charlie is a third-year medical student who’s excited both for this rotation and the chance to work with her hero, Dr. Shaun Murphy. Like Shaun, she has Autism Spectrum Disorder, and she has admired him since she first saw the viral video of him saving a boy’s life at the San Jose airport. Empowered and energetic, her passion for surgery may only be matched by her love for Taylor Swift.
Charlie will be surprised to learn that she and Shaun won’t have the easiest time getting accustomed to each other’s differences. Charlie presented the series with the unique opportunity to flip the script on Shaun. For six seasons, Shaun has been the one to challenge everyone else’s outlooks and approach to healthcare. Now, Charlie will do that for him.
“What was really exciting to us was the idea that Shaun being at St. Bonaventure has really had an impact on our characters in that they’ve learned the very real value, both on a medical and personal level, of accepting Shaun and going outside their comfort zone of who you would typically think could be a doctor or a surgeon,” Friedman says. “They’ve learned the positives of that, and they’re fairly then equipped and motivated to accommodate Charlie. That’s a tougher task for Shaun because of his ASD.”
The series was excited to challenge viewers’ possible assumption that Shaun and Charlie are “natural allies” because they’re neurodivergent. Instead, Friedman says they wanted to “look at the ways in which who they are makes it very difficult for them to connect particularly with each other.”
Wavyy Jonez plays Dr. Dom Hubank
Dom (Wavyy Jonez) bonds with Charlie as a fellow medical student in The Good Doctor Season 7 Episode 2 (Disney/Jeff Weddell)
Jonez is known for playing The Notorious BIG (Biggie Smalls) in USA‘s limited series Unsolved. His Dominick is also a third-year medical student and is a gentle giant who was hoping this surgical rotation was just a box to check on his way to becoming the family doctor in his underserved community. But this former football player learns he isn’t as tough as he appears when he faints at the sight of blood. Too big to fail, Dom must overcome his newly discovered hemophobia and will need his peer and friend Charlie to do so.
“The other thing that’s fun about medical students and how the education works is, you do rotations in all different areas of medicine. It’s not a matter of you deciding what you want to do, and then you only train in that. You get a sampling of everything,” Friedman explains. Dom opened this topic up for the series.
The former college football is “a big, strong guy,” Friedman says, who already has his sights set on his area of expertise: family medicine.
“For him, the surgery rotation is just something he’s got to get through,” Friedman says. “And then he will discover that he’s going to have a challenge with surgery that he didn’t see coming in a million years and is going to make it very questionable whether he can actually pass the rotation.”
Friedman is excited for fans to see these medical students band together as a team, revealing that they know each other already from med school.
“[Dom] is a friend of Charlie’s,” Friedman says, “and I think they have a really fun friendship together as people who’ve been helping each other make it through med school.”
The Good Doctor, Tuesdays, 10/9c, ABC