Katherine LaNasa has finally, 30 years into a multifaceted career, won her first Emmy playing Charge Nurse Dana Evans in HBO Max’s surprise smash, “The Pitt.”

The series – Season 2 begins Thursday – unreels weekly in real time. Each episode is one hour in a 15-hour shift in the Emergency Room.

LaNasa’s Evans is in charge of the nurses and seriously supports Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending physician.

Louisiana-born LaNasa, whose father was a flight surgeon in Vietnam and whose career spans three decades, has discovered she’s becoming a recognizable star.

“It’s literally like becoming a public figure overnight,” she said in a joint press conference in LA. “What’s weird is, I’ll be in sweatpants, go with my daughter to the mall to get a gift card for somebody.

“And thank God I usually behave myself! Because it won’t be ‘til 25-30 minutes and they’ll say, ‘By the way, I love you on “The Pitt.” Like, they’re nervous.

“I had one guy working in this shoe department and as I was leaving, going down the escalator, he ran over and said, ‘I’m sorry. I was just so nervous to wait on you!’

“I was like, ‘Oh!’ Cause everyone’s cool in LA. If I went home to Louisiana, I would know that I was famous. But in LA? You don’t feel famous. You feel invisible in LA. It’s kind of nice.

“But then later you realize they were watching you. So it feels a little disconcerting sometimes.”

“The Pitt” wasn’t an instant, overnight hit. It took weeks as the episodes gained recognition and its audience arrived.

“Sometimes you don’t realize the show is so really deeply emotional,” LaNasa, 59, reflected. “It’s kind of like its secret sauce is hidden in there.

“You think you’re doing one thing – and then you have a whole bunch of feelings. I remember doing the flashback scenes with Noah last year when Robby was having a really hard time with traumatic memories resurfacing of his mentor’s death.

“I have a son that was a young adult when his own father” – Hollywood icon Dennis Hopper – “died and really I just burst into tears when we were done with the scene. Then Noah just gave me a big hug.

“Sometimes in this job I just download. I have so much feeling come up when I’m just talking, not trying to get that emotion in the scene, right?

“But I have so much emotion invested in the character and invested in (the series). So we really lean on each other, just feel really held up by each other and are really there for each other.”

Noah Wyle, Katherine LaNasa and Sepideh Moafi in “The Pitt.” (Warrick Page/MAX)