The Pitt's Isa Briones Talks Playing 'Someone The Audience Loves To Hate' And Episode 7's Big Santos Reveal
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center intern Trinity Santos is among the most divisive TV characters in recent memory — but portrayer Isa Briones doesn't mind. In fact, she relishes it.
"It is an actor's dream to play someone that the audience loves to hate," she tells me. "There's so much fun to be had there. People are going to feel some type of way, so I'm just going to go for it.
"It's also fun to take a break from trying to be likable," she explains. "When I see people have strong reactions, and some people are, like, 'I hate you,' I'm, like, 'Great, I did what I was supposed to do. I made you feel something.'"
On the recently renewed Max medical drama The Pitt, the Star Trek: Picard alum embodies a newly minted resident with a fierce competitive streak and no discernible filter. The character breakdown Briones received ahead of her audition was heavy on buzz words — Santos was described as "strong willed," someone who "doesn't care what other people think" — "but with how the show was written, there was inherently a kind of humor to it," she says. "I'm auditioning for a medical show, but there's something very funny about everything that she is doing. She's making very strange choices for someone [in her position]."
At the time, Briones was starring in Broadway's Hadestown, doing eight shows a week, and filming self tapes in her downtime: "I remember [series star/executive producer] Noah [Wyle] telling me, 'Your self tape stood out because you were free with it. You weren't trying to act like you were in a hospital. You were just being yourself, and that's what we wanted.'"
In Episode 7, Santos discovers that the wife of her patient has been putting progesterone in his coffee in an effort to subdue his libido and stop him from molesting their teenage daughter. Santos then proceeds to confront her patient and says that she's known men like him — "men you trust, men you look up to. First, it's a kiss on the head, then it's the lips," and then "a friendly massage becomes a hand under your shirt, and then fingers inside you, and it's all our little secret because you love us so f—king much."
Just like that, all of Santos' choices since she first scrubbed in at 7 am — challenging male authority figures, presenting herself to her peers as though she's made of tougher stuff than any one of them — start to make sense. It's a moment Briones had been anticipating ever since series creator R. Scott Gemmill and fellow EP John Wells took her aside during pre-production and shared what they had in mind for her character.
"We started off the whole process with two weeks of medical boot camp," run by professional doctors, to ensure that all the actors looked like they knew what they were doing. During that process, "we would get pulled for individual meetings with John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, and they wrote out a whole page of what they think your backstory is," Briones explains. "They said, 'Obviously, there's room to play here. Share with us any ideas you have, but this is what we have in mind.' It's not all going to come out in Season 1 because [it all takes place in] one day," but "there are going to be hints of this [and that].
"Sometimes you go into a show, into a project, and all I know is what is going to happen," the actress points out. But here, all she knew about was "what has happened to me before. It made my job so much easier [because] any scene I walk into, I know who I am, and I know my opinion on the room and everything that's going on."
Yet when it came to her monologue in Episode 7, Briones felt challenged in a way she'd never been before. "It's interesting to attack [the emotional stuff] when the character you're playing is not an emotional person," she says. "It's threading that needle of, clearly, emotions are poking through, but only a little bit. I'm a crier, so I would start talking, saying the lines, and I'd start really crying, and I can't do that because Santos wouldn't do that. That was a fun change for me because I think so [often] in acting, your currency is your tears, but that's not what this calls for. It's a very different beast."
Briones doesn't know whether the audience's perception of Santos will soften now that they know her character is a victim of sexual trauma, but she hopes those cracks in her character's armor provide context for her behavior. Santos is still going to be a "very guarded person" moving forward, "but this is a moment where her emotions are getter the better of her because of how strongly she feels about this, and how hard it hits home, and I was very honored to be a part of telling that story."
New episodes of The Pitt drop Thursdays at 9/8c on Max.