[Scott] Gemmill knew he wanted [Isa] Briones for The Pitt early on, but the studio hemmed and hawed about Briones’s potential unlikability after seeing her as Santos. “That’s the character,” Gemmill insisted. Briones remembers auditioning remotely (she was still doing Hadestown eight shows a week) and being told she had the role, but then that one executive wasn’t convinced and she needed to tape another scene going “balls to the wall.” “I was very upset at that point,” Briones said. “Don’t offer me a job and take it away.” Gemmill wrote her a new scene, which appears in the show, where Santos threatens a child abuser in his hospital bed. She went all out. Then they called and told her she really had the role. “I had already celebrated and mourned,” Briones says, with a shrug of her shabu-shabu tongs.
Since then, The Pitt has blown up in an unlikely way for any cultural object in the 2020s, much less a gruesome medical drama. The show became a runaway hit on HBO Max, won a bevy of Emmy Awards including Best Drama, and looks like a surefire contender again for its second season. Your parents watch it, and maybe so do your Gen-Z cousins. Initially, Briones took a detached approach to the reaction her character provoked. As the first season was airing, people would come up to her on the street and tell her they hated her, a reaction so strong that she found it funny. “In real time, you got to see people grapple with their biases,” she says, “so I was having fun with it.” But as some of that hate continues, Briones has found it difficult to process.
In The Pitt’s second season, we see scars on Santos’s thighs, and there is a scene where she grabs a scalpel off a cart, indicating that she is struggling with self-harm. Briones worked closely with the show’s writers as they developed the story line, giving notes on drafts. She’s pleased that some audience members were moved by the depiction and that Santos’s scars weren’t sexualized. But as someone who has had her own mental-health challenges, she says, she finds it trickier to engage with people who still loathe Santos after being exposed to that side of her. “I know it’s about the character, but when it’s your face and it’s things you’ve experienced in your own life, it becomes harder to separate,” she says. “Some people have really stayed hating her. I used to give a lot of grace. If you’re still this critical of her and not critical of Langdon, I think you’re just a misogynist.”
- Karaoke With Isa Briones Is Not for the Weak | Vulture, April 2026 (alt link)
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