‘The Pitt’s Isa Briones On The Fallout From Santos & Langdon Blow Up & What To Expect Next

SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from the season finale of The Pitt on Max.

The 15-hour shift is officially over for the staff at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital.

For those who wanted to know if there would be any fallout between Patrick Ball’s Langdon and Isa Brione’s Santos over his secret drug use, you’ll have to wait until season 2 to see if payback — any payback — is in the cards.

Here, Briones talks about her character’s confrontation with Langdon and what it was like shooting the first season of the Max hit.

DEADLINE I was kind of expecting a big confrontation between Santos and Patrick Ball’s Langdon in the finale.

BRIONES That’s what is kind of beautiful about it. There is not some big retribution moment or anything. It’s what it is like to have conflicts with people at work. We had to band together and get this job done. It was insane. It’s also not her job to oversee that. She uncovered something and now she’s on her own journey. They’re off the clock now. They have to go home and recover from everything they just did and saw. I think that’s the big takeaway, is letting that sink in for everyone. What you just watched as an audience was a day. How would you feel at the end of it? Would you want to have some big blowout with someone? No, you’d want to go home and cry, and that’s the point.

DEADLINE Do you think Santos is the type who would want to confront him in the future or would she want to avoid him at all costs?

BRIONES She’s not some delicate flower. She’s going to do what she has to do. She’s going to deal with things clearly. She has dealt with a lot in the span of her first day at work. She’s not one to shy away from conflict. But from what I can infer, and I don’t know what happens after this, but it is going to be weird. Who knows who wants to come back after the day they’ve had? And who knows, especially for these med students and interns, what their takeaway was from a day like that when they’re still deciding where they want to be and what they want to do in the medical field?

DEADLINE Why do you think that Langdon and Santos clash?

BRIONES I think we tend to butt heads with the people who remind us of ourselves the most. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a similar way when he started out, being that go-getter who pushes ahead, but who also tends to be received differently with men than with women. But yeah, I think there’s an acknowledgement of how we’re cut from the same cloth, and that is threatening. That is a recipe for two very strong-willed people to really have issues. But I think they are both very talented and not averse to conflict.

DEADLINE Can you imagine yourself ever calling out a co-worker like that, especially on the first day?

BRIONES I don’t know if I’m as bold as her to do something like that on the first day. I appreciate the eagle eye she has and being like, something is going on here. She’s a polarizing character and she can be quite mean to people. I don’t stand by a lot of the things that she does. But she is right and she is onto something. I would love to be the person who’s like, I’m seeing something wrong and I’m going to say something about it. I don’t know if I would have done that on the first day, though.

DEADLINE Let me back up. How did your audition come about?

BRIONES I was on Broadway doing Hadestown and I got a self-tape request for it. When you’re doing eight shows a week, you don’t have a whole lot of bandwidth to be putting so much homework into it. So you’re just kind of like, okay, here’s the script. Here’s what I know. I just have to give them all that I can give them right now so they’ll see what I can do. I just had to get the job done right at that point. That translated to like, ‘oh, that works well in the ER.’ I never was able to go in person. It was all over Zoom and then finally it worked out and I had to leave my last couple weeks of shows. I had to leave for six days to go do medical boot camp, then come back to New York, do my last two shows with my suitcases at the theater, and then go right after I finished my last show to L.A. to start filming The Pitt. So it was kind of a whirlwind situation, but it worked out so well and I think it helped character wise to just be like, I’m going to get this done.

I didn’t know exactly what Santos’ arc would be. I also didn’t know at the time that it would be one day for the season. But I did know she’s very headstrong. She’s not everyone’s cup of tea and she doesn’t really care. She’s going to just do what she can to get ahead.

DEADLINE How was the medical boot camp?

BRIONES It was two weeks, but it was mainly a week of learning medical things. And then the second week was costume fittings, screen test type things, and getting a sense of the space. We have a full, very practical ER setup and we got to be in the space and start rehearsing our big trauma scenes. It was going to be the first time we were in that, and it was very intense. We had to kind of cement ourselves in that pacing, and then we could kind of take off from there. And we’d never stopped since.

DEADLINE Do you all wear much makeup?

BRIONES We do very minimal, which I love. I love not having to spend a long time in the chair. But also, it’s realistic. We’re not trying to be a soap opera where everyone looks like they just walked off the runway and they’re now checking your pulse. It’s very real. At certain points during the season, the makeup team would be like, ‘alright, we’re getting to hour eight, we’re going to start taking it more down.’ I was barely wearing anything at the end, because they were just like, you’re supposed to look tired. We’re supposed to look run down. We’re supposed to look like we’re on our last legs, which I love. We were not trying to serve some pretty version of what healthcare workers go through.

DEADLINE Can you talk about shooting the big trauma scene after the mass shooting?

BRIONES We knew at the end of episode 11 that we were getting into that. It was already so fast-paced. We had been working with almost all the same background actors who are on these gurneys every day. It was such a family. And even though it would be chaotic, it was still a controlled chaos that we had a handle on. And then came the mass shooting. Everything that we had gotten used to had a thousand times increased. It is interesting as actors going into a space like that. It’s been said many times that as an actor, you’re playing pretend, but your body doesn’t necessarily know that. Walking onto a set where there’s blood everywhere and actors are screaming and writhing in pain … your body is like, oh, I’m in fight or flight. It got very emotional and was an intense reminder of how important it felt to be showing the reality of what healthcare workers go through, especially now in a post-Covid world.