Photo: Lucas Michael for New York Magazine
With a little encouragement, and after a bit of sake, Isa Briones will pull out her party trick at karaoke. We’re in a private room at Sing Sing on the Lower East Side around 6 p.m. — a place where, we both admit, it’s strange for anyone to go before 11 p.m. Once I’ve proven I’m game enough for this assignment by singing a song of my own (I go with Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” a classic safe choice), Briones takes the helm. She has an expansive and agile voice, a sharp sense of humor, and a karaoke champion’s love of ABBA. “The best I’ve ever felt was doing karaoke with my girls singing ‘Chiquitita,’” she says. “There’s a video of us going around in a circle, just chanting ‘Chiquitita!’ It’s like, this is why being a girl is so important.”
The party trick is that she’s taught herself to sing “The Winner Takes It All” with all the same mannerisms as Meryl Streep in the film version of Mamma Mia! “I can do the whole performance, beat by beat,” she says. We cue up the song. The synthesizer riff starts to clink. “Imagine Pierce Brosnan is following me,” Briones says, before shifting into Streep’s liquid vowels and aquiline posture. It’s a studied impersonation, down to the way she keeps fiddling with an imaginary scarf — in an instrumental section, she pretends to run along a Greek coastline with it. “That’s the performance of a generation,” Briones says afterward. “Every time she goes, ‘I don’t wanna to talk,’ that shit is amazing.”
Tonight is a moment of downtime for Briones, who’s in the middle of wrapping up the second season of playing headstrong resident Trinity Santos on the HBO Max series The Pitt while joining the hit Broadway bio-musical Just in Time, about the mid-century crooner Bobby Darin, in which she plays singer Connie Francis. The jobs are miles apart for Briones in terms of tone and genre. Just in Time’s a sparkling, upbeat throwback, and Francis is a first-act love interest. It’s the kind of role that requires a lot of gusto in a short amount of stage time — “princess track” is the theater term she uses for it. Meanwhile, on The Pitt, Briones is accustomed to shooting long hours in a simulated but high-intensity hospital ER as a character whose own intensity is supercharged to the point of abrasiveness. In the first season, Santos gets into a conflict with a rival doctor, Patrick Ball’s golden boy Langdon, that was intentionally written to challenge audience expectations — he turned out to be stealing drugs, while she was in the right.
On the show’s second season, which Briones describes as Santos’s “no good, very bad day,” Santos chafes against the menial tasks of doing her paperwork and continues to butt heads with Langdon, now back from rehab. Her character tends to view her co-workers as competition and rub people the wrong way. “I’ve always said that Santos is probably the most closely aligned with my own personality,” The Pitt’s creator and showrunner R. Scott Gemmill told me. “When everyone was hating on her, I was like, What’s wrong? She’s just a little sarcastic.” Still, he said, as he worked with Briones and returned to the character for a new season, he saw opportunities to shape her around the performer. Briones, 27, is, like Santos, remarkably self-possessed, but she’s also self-aware and emotionally astute. This season, we see her character be vulnerable in her situationship with a fellow doctor, treat her colleagues like actual friends, and sing a Filipino lullaby to a baby. The scene was Gemmill’s idea, devised after he had learned about Briones’s musical talent, though the song choice was left up to Briones (her father suggested it). “I thought it worked,” Gemmill said, “because you didn’t expect to see a soft side to Santos.”
Photo: Lucas Michael for New York Magazine
Before karaoke, Briones proposed we meet up for hot pot at Shabu-Tatsu in the East Village and showed up with a bag of thrifted clothes in hand before happily getting to work offering advice on the menu. Briones lived in the neighborhood the last time she was in New York, during a run in Hadestown in 2024, and is enjoying checking in on her old haunts. Later this evening, she has to slip on her heels, slap on makeup, and get to the premiere of a play at the Public Theater nearby. “You know where I just realized we should have done this interview?” she tells me. “Marie’s Crisis.” Once, after losing out on a job, she went to the piano bar and sang her heart out — “Just being in a sea of older gay men screaming Cabaret, it was the best, most healing feeling in the world.”
Alex Timbers, the director of Just in Time, knew Briones’s essential brio made her right for the role of Connie Francis. In the show, Bobby Darin, originally played by Jonathan Groff, is now performed by Matthew Morrison (the fact that Morrison’s former co-stars have shown up in the audience has delighted Briones, who had a Glee-themed 11th-birthday party; she dressed as Brittany Pierce) before it’s handed off to Jeremy Jordan. When I saw Briones perform in April, the crowd’s energy lit up every time she came onstage and, with a mischievous wink and a smile, laid into a standard; a clip of her applying brassy force to Francis’s big hit “Who’s Sorry Now” has been praised on Broadway-adjacent social media. “Connie Francis needs easy charisma,” Timbers says. “Isa’s nervy and sardonic in the way the role is.”
Briones’s funny, frank, and firm manner is shaped by her experience growing up in a theater family. Her parents, Jon Jon Briones and Megan Johnson, met onstage while performing in the ensemble of a German production of Miss Saigon. Isa was born in London in 1999, where her dad had joined the show for the last portion of its West End run, eventually taking over the role of the hustler-pimp the Engineer, a half-Asian character originally played by white men like Jonathan Pryce. Miss Saigon, regardless of its complications, was a recurring “saving grace” for Briones’s family. Jon Jon, who had found it difficult to land work as a Filipino actor in New York in the late ’90s, returned to the show in various iterations for decades and was “off and on touring the whole beginning of my life,” Briones says. The family eventually settled in Los Angeles when she was 9, where her parents did TV and theater work while Jon Jon also worked as a massage therapist to pay the bills. Much of what Briones learned about acting came from hanging out backstage after shows, hearing a cast dish about what did or did not work each night. Soon, she wanted to join the family business too.
Briones searches through YouTube on her phone to find the video of her early-career glory, a commercial for a Furby-knockoff product where she excitedly announces that the toy has “hands!” (“These other girls have so many lines,” she says. “What the hell?”) By 17, she’d pivoted from an arts high school to homeschool, then landed a part in a local production of Next to Normal. “It has been nonstop since then,” despite some bumps along the way, says Briones. She moved to New York in 2017 and spent nine months auditioning for Hamilton while working at Balthazar — “They would say I’m too young, then call me in a month later and say, ‘You’re still too young.’” Finally, she booked its national tour. She also appeared on Star Trek: Picard and Goosebumps but recalls auditioning for one role she didn’t get: Nini in High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. Sitting in the waiting room, she watched Olivia Rodrigo and her eventual ex-boyfriend Joshua Bassett meet each other. Briones remembers looking over at Rodrigo, wondering which of them would end up on the Disney+ show, and thinking, “It’s gonna be one of us, baby girl.”
“Connie Francis needs easy charisma,” Just in Time director Alex Timbers says. “Isa’s nervy and sardonic in the way the role is.”
Photo: Matthew Murphy
Briones was skeptical of having Santos sing twice in a season — “I believe she was like, again?” The Pitt’s creator and showrunner R. Scott Gemmill remembers — but she enjoyed the catharsis of doing fake karaoke in a fake bar on the Warner Bros. lot.
Photo: Warrick Page/HBO Max
Gemmill knew he wanted Briones for The Pitt early on, but the studio hemmed and hawed about Briones’s potential unlikability after seeing her as Santos. “That’s the character,” Gemmill insisted. Briones remembers auditioning remotely (she was still doing Hadestown eight shows a week) and being told she had the role, but then that one executive wasn’t convinced and she needed to tape another scene going “balls to the wall.” “I was very upset at that point,” Briones said. “Don’t offer me a job and take it away.” Gemmill wrote her a new scene, which appears in the show, where Santos threatens a child abuser in his hospital bed. She went all out. Then they called and told her she really had the role. “I had already celebrated and mourned,” Briones says, with a shrug of her shabu-shabu tongs.
Since then, The Pitt has blown up in an unlikely way for any cultural object in the 2020s, much less a gruesome medical drama. The show became a runaway hit on HBO Max, won a bevy of Emmy Awards including Best Drama, and looks like a surefire contender again for its second season. Your parents watch it, and maybe so do your Gen-Z cousins. Initially, Briones took a detached approach to the reaction her character provoked. As the first season was airing, people would come up to her on the street and tell her they hated her, a reaction so strong that she found it funny. “In real time, you got to see people grapple with their biases,” she says, “so I was having fun with it.” But as some of that hate continues, Briones has found it difficult to process.
In The Pitt’s second season, we see scars on Santos’s thighs, and there is a scene where she grabs a scalpel off a cart, indicating that she is struggling with self-harm. Briones worked closely with the show’s writers as they developed the story line, giving notes on drafts. She’s pleased that some audience members were moved by the depiction and that Santos’s scars weren’t sexualized. But as someone who has had her own mental-health challenges, she says, she finds it trickier to engage with people who still loathe Santos after being exposed to that side of her. “I know it’s about the character, but when it’s your face and it’s things you’ve experienced in your own life, it becomes harder to separate,” she says. “Some people have really stayed hating her. I used to give a lot of grace. If you’re still this critical of her and not critical of Langdon, I think you’re just a misogynist.”
There’s a see-sawing feeling, Briones adds, between wanting to engage with the fun alongside fans of her work and trying to find a boundary when the attention on the character gets messy or dark. The Pitt now has a fandom that is often at odds with some of the show’s choices or simply argues with each other, causing a level of noise online that has become a dominant part of the discussion of the show’s second season. “I have to keep it in check how much I interact with it,” Briones says. “But I love a good meme.” Returning to Broadway for Just in Time, she’s adjusting to doing theater with a level of celebrity several degrees bigger than when she was in Hadestown. The show is performed in close proximity to an audience, and when I talk to Briones two weeks into her run, she’s already had to post an Instagram Story in reaction to an unruly audience member. “It would be one thing if it was a kid who can’t control themselves,” she says. “But it was an old man being like, ‘Great job, Dr. Santos.’ If you’re going to disrespect the theater, at least learn my actual name.”
She’s found support among the rest of The Pitt cast, three of whom, including Ball and Sepideh Moafi, have shows this spring in New York. It feels like a throwback to the days when network TV stars would do theater in their downtime. (“I’ve always wanted to be Laurie Metcalf,” Briones jokes when I bring up the comparison.) Even the Pitt stars who aren’t doing theater are in town. A crew of them went together to Ball’s premiere in Becky Shaw, including Supriya Ganesh, who plays Dr. Mohan and was recently announced to be leaving the series. Ganesh has become a good friend of Briones’s. “I can’t really speak to it,” Briones says of Ganesh’s departure. “But I’m really bummed, because I think Mohan was a wonderful character and there was way more to explore with her.”
In The Pitt finale, Briones’s musical and TV worlds merge somewhat. During a mid-credits sequence, we see Santos go out to karaoke with her fellow resident Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden), where the two screlt Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” (Gemmill suggested the song.) Briones was skeptical of having Santos sing twice in a season — “I believe she was like, again?” Gemmill remembers — but she enjoyed the catharsis of doing fake karaoke in a fake bar on the Warner Bros. lot. “Things can get heavy on this show, so for once,” she says, “it was fun to have fun shooting something.”
