The Pitt‘s Isa Briones is breaking down how a potential sexual assault case offered a glimpse into her character Dr. Santos’ own personal turmoil and potential trauma.
During the Thursday, February 13, episode of the hit Max series, Santos is treating a man who suffered a fall from a ladder. His blood results show elevated hormone levels, which cause the patient’s wife to reveal that she was drugging him with estrogen in an effort to get him to stop molesting their daughter.
Santos tries to talk to the daughter — who denies any inappropriate behavior. The resident’s superior Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) is of no help either after he says they are legally obligated to report the mother and not the father.
The episode builds up to a speech that Santos delivers to the patient where she threatens him — while hinting that she had a similar experience as a child with a trusted male figure in her life.
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“All of our characters get moments like that where we’re not really ever saying anything outright. It is just the human experience of feeling your feelings but trying to be professional and get through a job,” Briones, 26, exclusively told Us Weekly about how Santos heavily hinted at her own troubled childhood. “What comes out, comes out.”
The actress was also relieved at how subtle the implication was, adding, “It was really beautiful to read that scene and not have it be a forced moment of me breaking down to someone on my first day. That wouldn’t happen. But she’s being confronted from a place of, ‘I need to be not attached. I need to keep my personal stuff at the door. I need to just do my job.’”
Briones recalled having a large conversation about Santos‘ backstory.
“In our time doing the medical rehearsals, we also got time to sit with [executive producer] John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill. Both of them laid it out like, ‘This is what we have in mind for your character. This is the backstory that we have imagined,” she noted. “We talk through it all. And they’re like, ‘Of course this is not all going to come out in a 15-hour shift. The audience is not necessarily going to know this right now.’”
The Pitt, which premiered in January, highlights the highs and lows of working in emergency medicine with an unconventional approach — 15 episodes that showcase 15 hours of one shift. In addition to Wyle and Briones, Tracy Ifeachor, Patrick Ball, Katherine LaNasa, Supriya Ganesh, Fiona Dourif, Taylor Dearden, Gerran Howell and Shabana Azeez make up the rest of the cast.
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Briones told Us she found it “so helpful” to get a breakdown of Santos’ past.
“I can go into every room knowing what my life is. That just immediately gives me, the actor and the character, a point of view in every scene,” she continued. “One of the things was this backstory of possible sexual assault and where that lies in her.”
Briones continued: “I think we have all experienced that in some sort of way at our place of work of needing to push through and pretend that nothing is hurting us. But obviously it is. It was a really beautiful example of that and we all get to do that at some point.”
New episodes of The Pitt premiere on Max every Thursday.
