When the first season of “The Pitt” came out last January, Isa Briones and the rest of the cast had no idea what to expect.
“We knew it was good. We were aware of ‘OK, we’re making something very good,’ but sometimes that doesn’t mean anything,” Briones says. “And there are plenty of good shows out there that don’t get watched and it’s because of so many different factors. But this really connected with people, which is amazing.”
The show was picked up for a second season, which they were in the midst of filming when the 2025 Emmys took place — and the show cleaned up, taking home the prize for Outstanding Drama series, as well as acting awards for Noah Wyle and Katherine LaNasa.
Isa Briones
Sela Shiloni/WWD
“You kind of never get a chance to sit in it without being in it, which I think is kind of good because then you can’t really focus too much on the exterior,” Briones says. “As amazing as awards are, you can’t base all of your worth on it because you’re just like, ‘I’m still working. I need to do the thing.’ And I think it makes for a better environment for us to just keep doing the work and not think necessarily about the things that could make you be a little more superficially anxious, a little more like, ‘Oh, I hope they like me.’ Just do the thing.”
The series has just begun airing its second season, and on Sunday it was awarded Golden Globes for Best Television Series Drama and Best Actor in a Television Series Drama, again to Wyle. The cast is still filming the rest of the second season, even as the first couple of episodes arrive.
Briones has become a fan favorite as Dr. Trinity Santos, who viewers meet in Season One as a rather abrasive and confident intern and find now in Season Two in her second year of residency.
“This season we get to go a little bit deeper into what her whole deal is. Obviously, the main thing that everyone sees is her tough exterior and how she can be very on the offense, but you also get those little moments of vulnerability where you’re like, ‘obviously she is punching first, so she doesn’t get punched because she has been the victim before,’” the 26-year-old actor says of her character. “She has been the punching bag before and is never going to let herself be that again. And I think in Season Two, you see a different side of her.”
Briones was starring on Broadway in “Hadestown” when the audition for “The Pitt” came her way. She was nearing the end of her run with “Hadestown,” so had started to think about what was next, but being onstage for eight shows a week left her little room to properly think about such things.
“I truly had a meltdown while I was doing my selftape because the lines weren’t sticking, because it was very medical and I was like, ‘oh my god, no one’s going to believe me as a doctor. I shouldn’t even audition,’” she says. She would later learn from costar and producer Wyle that they instantly knew she was the right person for the role.
“He was like, ‘You felt so in your body and in who you are,’” Briones recalls, “and I think that was in big part due to being in theater at that time because you’re so physically dropped in — even though I felt mentally cuckoo.”
Briones began auditioning when she was around 9 years old, having grown up in the world of theater. Her parents are both theater actors, and she grew up on the tour of “Miss Saigon” due to her father, Jon Jon Briones’ role as The Engineer. Her parents settled in Los Angeles eventually, looking to give their kids a sense of normalcy, and her mom tells her that soon after little Isa started asking when she could start auditioning herself.
“They were like, ‘Oh no. It’s happening,’” Briones jokes.
Her first love was theater but given their location in L.A. she focused on TV and film auditions, struggling to book anything as a mixed-race child.
Isa Briones
Sela Shiloni/WWD
“It was a time when interracial couples were on screen a little bit, but it wasn’t super common. And in that world, it was usually either they wanted someone in the blonde, blue-eyed family or the fully Chinese family and it was like, I don’t fit into either of those,” says Briones, who is Filipino-American. “So I got the experience of auditioning and auditioning, but then I didn’t really start working until I was in high school, when I left actual school and did independent study and all of a sudden I had time to audition for local musical theater and that’s when it really was like, ‘OK, yeah, I do really want to do this.’”
Santos felt like a breath of fresh air for Briones, who had grown accustomed to playing “the girl who’s going to figure everything out.”
“And as amazing as that role could be, it’s kind of that trope of a lot of genres where it’s like, ‘OK, here’s the girl who we can paint all of our feelings onto, which is an important role in any piece of art.’ But this is the first time that I’ve gotten to be so definitively like, ‘this is her own character,’” Briones says. “She’s not going to let you paint anything onto her. Santos is not going to be your canvas for your emotions. She’s going to say exactly how she feels. And I think that’s freeing for me as an actor, and also as a person, to be a complicated female character, which I think there are plenty of in this show, and that’s amazing. And to not be liked is kind of awesome.”
