Isa Briones knows you love to hate her character, Dr. Trinity Santos, on The Pitt. And she wouldn’t have it any other way

“Honestly, I love it,” she tells Gold Derby. “At first, people were like, ‘Oh, is that hard?’ But I don’t know. When you’re an actor, just making people have a reaction, that’s your job. I don’t need anyone to like me. I just want people to feel something viscerally, and clearly they do because people have a lot of opinions. And I think it’s fun. I think it’s fun to see the discourse of all the differing opinions about her and about her and Langdon (Patrick Ball) and everything. It’s been it’s been very cool to see … when that whole arc happened, seeing people kind of go through that.”

That whole arc started near the midpoint of the season when Santos suspected that Dr. Frank Langdon, a senior resident, might be stealing drugs. The pair had been clashing from the second Santos stepped inside Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center as a new intern. Cocky and brazen with no filter, Santos is quick to try to flaunt her skills, defies superiors — ordering tests without approval — and repeatedly calls her fellow newbies nicknames they do not like. If there was a “villain,” she was it. In the 10th episode, she reports Langdon to Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle), who fires him when it turns out Santos’ suspicions were correct, forcing viewers to reexamine their judgment of her and confront their own internalized sexism.

“At the end of it, [people] realize, ‘Oh, maybe I had some internalized biases that were a little misguided.’ It’s, I think, a very well-written arc and I’ve been really just grateful to be able to play someone who’s so complex and and is polarizing in that way,” Briones says. “Obviously, she hasn’t been great. She’s done some not great things. But if you really look at it, the two of them are quite similar. They do kind of go about things in very similar ways sometimes, but it’s just received differently when it’s coming from the charming, handsome man than the go-getter, fresh-faced woman.”

While it hasn’t been stated on the the show yet, Santos is a former gymnast, which explains a lot of things: her fierce competitiveness, her spiky exterior, and her use of sarcasm as a shield. Creator and showrunner R. Scott Gemmill and executive producer and director John Wells told Briones that she could select another sport as Santos’ former career, but the actress felt gymnastics “makes so much sense.”

“A lot can happen in that type of environment of especially pitting people against each other. Obviously, this is not a sweeping generalization. … But I think a lot of the time, it can be very, like, ‘Me against you and I need to be the best,’” she says. “Especially when often in gymnastics, you’re going into it so young, so it’s drilled into you. We talked about a lot of her trauma kind of stemming from that part of her life and a big part of why she pivoted so hard to, ‘Now I’m gonna focus on medicine. I’m gonna focus on something else, something else that I can try to be the best at.’ You definitely you definitely see it in how she interacts with her her colleagues because she’s like, ‘I’m not here to make friends.’ Because, clearly, she’s been in environments before where that is not the goal. It’s to be the best.”

Coinciding with the Langdon arc, The Pitt turns the table on viewers’ perception of Santos starting with the sixth episode. She accidentally drops a scalpel into the foot of Dr. Garcia (Alexandra Metz), who, up until then, had been her only ally and was kind of flirting with Santos, asking what her sign is (Scorpio, which also explains a lot). Garcia upbraids her afterwards, telling her there’s a fine line between cocky and confident.

“It’s kind of the first moment you get to see her be taken down a peg and start to really go inward instead of constantly fighting out,” Briones says. “There’s there’s no escape for her then because she did it, you know? She dropped it. She can’t blame it on anyone else. There’s there’s nothing to to escape from there. You just have to be like, ‘Yup, I messed up.’ That starts kind of her humbling.”

The seventh episode provides the first big reveal about Santos. After learning that a patient has been sexually abusing his daughter, Santos confronts him, saying she knows men like him before threatening him to leave his daughter alone. Like the other tidbits the audience learns about Santos, this, once again, explains a lot. Briones found the monologue “daunting” — and not only because Wyle told her beforehand that she had the first big monologue of the show.

“It was a really complicated scene to play because me, personally, I might be wanting that release of wanting to cry or scream. But, actually, right now, I need to hold all that power right inside in this moment and then leave it,” she says. “As we would talk to a lot of the doctors and nurses that helped us on the show, they have addressed that where it’s like, ‘Yeah, of course, this job affects you. Of course, you’re going to feel a lot of emotions, but you also are the person that someone is looking to for stability in that moment.’ So you have to kind of keep it under a lid for a certain time, and, of course, that lid eventually explodes. But I thought I thought that was a really cool moment to play with how how working in that environment is going to affect you because every health care professional is still a human being at the end of the day.”

Santos gets a bookend scene in the finale with another patient whom she realizes had attempted suicide. She opens up about her friend who took her own life, convincing the patient to talk to a professional. “I thought it was a kind of great way to bring it back around and also see the growth from Episode 7 to that point even though it’s one day,” Briones says. “And you also get to see that she’s not just a hardened, mean person. There’s clearly a heart there, and this is something she has grappled with herself. And in a moment when someone really needs her and she also sees herself in this kid, she’s like, ‘I need to help this kid.’ She says, ‘I’m going to stay,’ even though she probably really wants to go home. She’s like, ‘I’m going to stay and try to make sure this kid doesn’t fall through the cracks,’ because that’s what people did for her.”

The one aspect of Santos that Briones loved the most playing is the one that hits closest home. Nurses Princess (Kristin Villanueva) and Perlah (Amielynn Abellera) had been gossiping in Tagalog the whole shift. Santos later reveals she’s half Filipino, like Briones herself, and had understood them the whole time. Briones, whose father is Jon Jon Briones, said writer Simran Baidwan pitched the idea to her at a table read. The actress is not fluent in Tagalog but knows certain phrases. “I was like, ‘What if she can just interject? And they’re surprised.’ And they were like, ‘That’s what we had in mind.’” The episode was directed by Quyen Tran, who asked the actresses if they wanted to try anything else during the scene.

“The little end bit where Princess is like, ‘She looks so white though,’ that wasn’t in the script. But they’re like, ‘Say that.’ And it’s funny for me because she was like, ‘Is that OK if I say that?’ I was like, ‘Yes.’ Because that’s true,” Briones says. “That’s the exact experience I’ve had. And even though sometimes that has been said to me in real life, and it’s hurt or it’s been kind of erasing part of me, it felt really empowering to show it in the show because it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s that’s an experience I’ve had.’ And some other mixed kid is gonna watch that and be like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so funny. I’ve had that exact experience.’ And even if it isn’t the most joyful memory, it’s there that that feeling of representation is still there, and there’s something cathartic about that. And so that was one of my favorite days on set.”

With Season 2 taking place 10 months later on Langdon’s first day back at work on the Fourth of July, Briones thinks it’s a “really great opportunity for some more drama or also maybe kind of turning over of a new leaf” between Santos and Langdon. And fingers crossed that Santos and Dr. Whitaker (Gerran Howell), whom she invited to live with her after learning he’s homeless, are still roomies. But how does Santos have a spare bedroom with its own bathroom? “Yeah, I have questions!”

Season 1 of The Pitt is streaming on Max.