It’s two days post-production of Isa Briones’ latest acting gig, and the 27-year-old is ready for a vacation—a proper vacation. She normally loves a “girl-about-town” destination—Briones spent her last vacation doing a summer art program in Paris, which consisted of venturing around the city and drawing. But she just finished spending eight months in LA catching up on her role as Dr. Santos in season two of The Pitt. This is HBO Max’s most physically demanding TV show about an ensemble of healthcare workers in a Pittsburgh emergency department. Briones has a three-month break before she’s back in LA to film season three, which premieres in 2027. Meanwhile, she’s thinking of going on a coastal vacation. “I’m trying to go somewhere that I can lay on a beach and do nothing,” Briones says over Zoom—wearing a striped sweater and hiding out in her eclectic Los Angeles apartment.

On September 14th, 2025, The Pitt went home with five Primetime Emmy Awards for its first season, including Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Casting for a Drama Series. In Briones’ Star Trek and Goosebumps days before booking The Pitt, the actress would get the occasional superfan who approached her on the street because she spoke to their niche interest. But in March of 2025, once The Pitt released the majority of its episodes to the public, Briones got a sense of how big the show was to audiences—she completely lost count of how many people recognized her in public.

When the first episode of the second season dropped at the beginning of January 2026, there was a 200% increase in viewership compared to the show’s pilot, which had premiered exactly one year prior. Briones views being a contributing member to a successful television project as “already beyond my wildest dreams,” as she comes from a family of actors who worked hard to make a name for themselves in the industry. Her mother and father met while performing in Miss Saigon, a musical that her father had been a part of from 1989 to 2014. As a true theater kid, Briones grew up watching and learning about acting from her father, who is an immigrant from the Philippines. She says she owes a lot of her success to him and her Filipino heritage, noting, “It truly is that I’m my (living) ancestors’ wildest dreams, and I never even fathomed that could be possible.”

That possibility came to fruition in 2024, which marked an incredibly rewarding year for the actress. In March of that year, she made her Broadway debut as Eurydice in Hadestown, accompanied by her father, who played Hermes. Although their interaction time onstage is minimal, their connection is truly palpable. Briones admits that even though her father was so involved with Miss Saigon for 30 years, she’s never seen him so emotional until he performed with her in Hadestown. “After the curtain, he’d be sitting there, and people would be like, ‘Are you okay?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, no.’ He just kind of kept leaking after the show… still teary-eyed,” the actress says. At the end of each show, both she and her father acknowledged each other through a sign of respect for elders in the Philippines—Briones’ father reached his right hand out, the daughter grabbed it, and she lovingly pressed her forehead against his hand. “I will be forever grateful to get the best seat in the house for a master class like that.”

Photography by Jonny Marlow

In between her theater performances, the actress did self-tape auditions for projects she could join after Hadestown. On one particular off day, Briones filmed a few back-to-back while she was worn down with a cold. One of her auditions consisted of speaking into a camera while jumbling on medical jargon—Briones sent the tape out, thinking nothing would come of it. A few months later, she wrapped up Hadestown after taking a secret trip to LA, where she became a doctor in the span of two weeks. She says she loves the adrenaline of it all. “It was crazy and a whirlwind, but that is what theater people love. We love to be in chaos and have overlapping productions.”

 From the jumpstart, Brione’s experience on The Pitt was nothing short of memorable. At medical boot camp, she bonded with the cast by learning how to intubate, stitch up a patient, do a chest compression, and various other procedures. But perhaps the most invaluable and eye-opening portion of medical boot camp was learning about the real-life experience from the doctors and nurses. “It could be an open forum. We could ask them whatever… The most important part for me was hearing the emotional toll of being a healthcare professional. I feel almost every doctor or nurse who came in and talked teared up at some point talking about working in a post-COVID world. And it was just very affecting,” Briones says. 

It’s important to note that these doctors and nurses are a key production element attributed to the show’s success. They are members of the writers room to ensure all the medical terminology is accurate and are also in charge of choreography, which plays out during the procedure scenes. Briones shares there are days on set where she gets “called in for a rehearsal” by the doctors and learns her blocking through sides on her script—small drawings that depict movement, typically when operating on a patient. “It’ll be like a rectangle, and that’s the gurney. So then it’ll show you’re on this side of the gurney, and then at this line you’re going to travel up here to the gurney, someone will pass you this, and then you take that, you make that cut and then you pass this to that person.” 

While “treating” patients during filming of episode nine, Briones coincidentally became a patient herself offscreen.​​ The actress was diagnosed with appendicitis after enduring stomach pain to the point of standing at a 90-degree angle at the end of a filming day. She received treatment at the same hospital The Pitt uses for ambulance footage—naturally, there were some familiar faces. “In triage, the other doctor—he was doing his little ‘beep, beep, beep, beep’ and then looked at me, and he’s like, ‘The Pitt.’ I remembered him because we visited this hospital and took pictures with everyone. I remember talking to him, and he was like, ‘Sorry to see you like this.’ Then the nurse, she was like, ‘You’re on The Pitt. Oh my God! Okay, we’re going to scrub your name. No one will know you’re here.’ I was like, ‘It’s fine. I’m not that famous.’” The actress underwent surgery (despite never having it before), and she remained incredibly calm due to her newfound medical knowledge built from playing a medical intern. “It’s kind of the best set to have a medical emergency on.”

Photography by Jonny Marlow

On The Pitt, Briones’ Trinity Santos is widely known for not being liked by everyone—characters and audiences alike. When the audience first meets Santos in season one, she’s incredibly ambitious and doesn’t apologize for her actions—it is her first day on the job, after all. To the actress, portraying Dr. Santos is a fun experiment where she can boldly present herself to others. But Briones can’t help but feel protective over her character: “Santos gets to be this figure of breaking this norm of ‘how you feel you have to act to be taken seriously or respected…’ I think Santos feels like a rebellion, and that’s really cool,” she says. To channel Santos’ confident energy onscreen, the actress consulted the on-set attendees (fully trained doctors) to understand her character’s level of tenacity in a work environment where every second counts because patients depend on it. “Trinity seems to really want to do stuff, so she’s excited to do this, but is this really risky? You get to kind of ask those things that really inform the scene emotionally.”

However, in season two, with Santos 10 months into her residency, Briones knows her character is now well-versed in certain procedures thanks to advice from the on-set attendings. The actress also portrays Santos as someone who understands not everyone is going to like them. “I think that has gotten to her and has made her go-getter attitude dissipate into, ‘No one here will like me, and that’s fine. I’m just going to do my job and go home.’” But proof Santos has a heart is mainly shown through her relationship with Dr. Whitaker (played by Gerran Howell)—a fellow resident whom she took under her wing after the first season. To Briones, Santos’ relationship to Whitaker is as follows: “Yeah, you’re so annoying. But also, if you were gone, I wouldn’t live.”

During the last couple of episodes of season one, the emergency department becomes overwhelmingly chaotic due to the admission of many patients who are victims of a local mass shooting. Briones remembers the chaos and intensity of that moment—it felt like the actress herself was watching this scenario play out in real life. “Many actors talk about this: your body doesn’t know you’re acting. Your brain knows, but your body doesn’t. So, your body is still experiencing everything like it’s actually happening, and that’s a lot. That mass casualty time for all of us… we did not do anything but go to work and go to sleep because that was all we had the capacity for, physically and emotionally. But it really worked so well. It was this dance because of how frantic and crazy it was. You reach a flow state with it.”

Doctors are commonly said to be “superheroes” as they save lives every day. Briones understands that superheroes are invincible, whereas doctors are vulnerable human beings, because the truth is they have heroic efforts but still can’t save every patient. The actress believes The Pitt strives to humanize health care workers and remind audiences that they need to be protected—they deserve to have proper conditions for a decent work environment so they can do their job, which is caring for people. The conversation of decent conditions for healthcare workers is starting to take place nationwide, but Briones hopes that people take something else away from her show: “Everyone watch The Pitt to increase your empathy.”

Photography by Jonny Marlow

Credits

Photography by Jonny Marlow

Styling by Kat Typaldos

Hair by Jerrod Roberts

Makeup by Hinako