In the middle of the emergency room on "The Pitt," Baby Jane Doe won’t stop crying.
As doctors and nurses move through the usual fast-paced churn of the hit hospital drama, Dr. Santos, played by Isa Briones, reluctantly attends to the abandoned infant and begins to sing. The song is “Ili Ili Tulog Anay,” a centuries-old Hiligaynon (Ilonggo) lullaby about a child being comforted while their mother is away. The melody is soft and heartfelt. For a moment, the noise of the ER recedes. The baby quiets. And a character known for her sharp edges reveals something unexpectedly tender.
The scene has since traveled far beyond the episode itself. Online, fans have shared clips and reactions. Filipino audiences around the world have recognized the lullaby from childhood. What they are hearing is a lineage of voices. To prepare for the scene, Briones learned the lullaby from a recording by Lea Salonga, the legendary Filipino performer. The suggestion came from her father, actor Jon Jon Briones, after the show’s creator and showrunner, R. Scott Gemmill, approached Isa with the idea of incorporating a Filipino lullaby into the episode.
What followed was a collaboration that began with a FaceTime call between father and daughter and ended with one of the show’s most memorable moments. It was filmed under the unpredictable conditions of working with real infants, shaped by cultural memory, and anchored by a song that has been passed down through generations.
In my conversation with Isa Briones and Jon Jon Briones, two days before Isa would later win her first Screen Actors Guild Award for the acclaimed HBO Max series, the story behind the scene reveals how a brief lullaby became something larger: a personal connection between family and character, a showcase of Filipino language and tradition, and an unexpected viral moment for a show better known for its high-pressure hospital drama.
This is a closer look at how that moment came together.
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Isa Briones as Santos in 'The Pitt.' HBO Max
Isa Briones remembers receiving a message in early 2025, when the creative team was still exploring how different characters might interact with a newborn patient abandoned at the hospital.
“I got an email from the writer of our show, Scott Gemmill, and we were probably on episode four or five at that time,” Briones says. “He emailed me and he was like, ‘We have this idea. Because we have the baby in the hospital, and everyone’s going to kind of have their chance to interact with the baby, and we thought it would be a really nice moment of quiet, private vulnerability from Santos to sing a lullaby. And we were thinking maybe it could be a Filipino lullaby. Are you okay with that? Do you feel comfortable with that? Do you have any ideas of what the song could be?’”
Briones’ answer was immediate.
“I was really excited,” she says. “And I immediately called my dad, as I often do, and I was like, ‘Yay! What do you think? Are there any lullabies that scream out at you?’”
Her father, actor Jon Jon Briones, initially suggested another Filipino classic.
“I said, oh, there’s a perfect one,” he recalls. “My idea was ‘Sa Ugoy ng Duyan.’”
But the choice changed once he understood the emotional context of the scene she was describing.
“When she told me the story of it, of the scene, I went, no. It needs to be ‘Ili Ili Tulog Anay,’ because it is the story. It’s the caretaker or a sister, not the mother, who’s saying, you just sleep now, little child, your mother is not here. And I went: Oh, that’s perfect.”
For Isa Briones, the connection clicked immediately. “It’s so beautiful and so simple. It just felt really right.”
Once the song was chosen, there was another question: how would she learn it? Jon Jon Briones had a practical solution.
“Yes, because I was not prepared to record myself singing it,” he jokes. “Who can best teach this song to Isa? Lea Salonga.”
He sent his daughter a recording by the legendary Filipino singer. Isa laughs remembering the thought process behind that choice. “Also in my head, I was like, Santos grew up in a half-Filipino household. She probably listened to Lea Salonga growing up. There was her dad or her Lola, someone was putting on this music. Queen Lea was obviously on her mind.”
Learning the lullaby presented a small linguistic challenge. “Ili Ili Tulog Anay” is sung in Hiligaynon, a language Briones does not speak fluently.
“Well, I think music helps,” she says. “Especially something that has a fairly simple melody and just a few lines. Whenever anything is set to a melody, it’s usually fairly easy to burn it into your brain. But yeah, it was definitely different. I’m not a fluent Tagalog speaker. I know some things here and there. I actually just started Rosetta Stone recently to learn more Tagalog.”
But Hiligaynon sounded unfamiliar even to her ears. “With this, it was like, oh, these are some words that do not sound familiar to me, and this is a little bit different than what I’m used to hearing,” she says. “But I think it came very naturally, just because when you can hear Lea singing to you, it sticks.”
Isa and Jon Jon Briones at the SAG Awards. Yong Chavez
The actual filming of the scene was shaped by a practical reality: babies run the set. Working with infants means working inside strict time limits, and production had multiple babies scheduled that day.
“There were three babies we were working with,” Briones recalls. “And that was kind of the thing that ran this whole season, working with the babies, because you only have a four-hour window, maybe even two. It’s a very short amount of time.”
Each baby had a different personality. “One would not cry,” she says. “He was an angel. And then there was one that would not stop crying. And then there was one perfect baby.”
The crew needed a very specific combination: a crying baby who could be comforted. “That perfect baby came in crying a lot,” Briones says. “I started singing, and for the first couple takes she would not stop crying.”
Then something shifted. “There was one take where I was really locked in,” she says. “I was really with her. I started singing, and all of a sudden she started calming down right as I started singing. She grabbed my finger, and it was just like a magical little moment.”
Moments like that are impossible to manufacture. “You get goosebumps when it happens,” Briones says. “Because you’re like: Oh. This is exactly how it was supposed to go.”
The filming itself didn’t follow the usual rhythm of television coverage. Normally, scenes are shot piece by piece: one actor’s close-up, then another’s. But with a baby, the camera has to follow the moment.
“It was not your usual filming process,” Briones explains. “Sometimes it would be on me, and they’d say, wait, the baby’s doing something perfect. Turn around. We have to turn around. So it was a little jumbled. I just have to do my thing. As soon as they’re ready to film me, I need to be ready and get it in as few takes as possible, because the baby’s the star right now.”
“Baby Jane Doe,” she says, mimicking Nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa), “is the star of this scene.”
For Jon Jon Briones, the response from Filipino audiences has been especially meaningful. “Personally, I’m so proud of that moment for Isa,” he says. “Because in a way, she kind of put Hiligaynon on the map. Especially that beautiful lullaby. Everyone’s talking about it.”
The reaction has come from across the Filipino diaspora. “The response from Filipinos all over the world has been amazing,” he says. “Some of them felt seen. Some remember hearing that lullaby from their grandmothers or their mothers. It was special.”
Isa Briones as Santos in 'The Pitt.' HBO Max
Filipino lullabies also echo something deeply personal for the Briones family. Jon Jon Briones remembers singing to his daughter constantly when she was a baby.
“When you were a newborn, I would have a playlist when I’m holding you, putting you to sleep,” he says to Isa. “One lullaby after another. Like, okay, that one didn’t work, move on to the next one.”
Some songs were constants. “Ugoy ng Duyan was always there,” he says. But in their home, the definition of a lullaby was flexible.
“We’re a musical household,” Isa Briones says. The father and daughter previously appeared together in the Broadway production of “Hadestown,” playing Hermes and Eurydice. “If you ask most people what lullabies their parents sang, it’s specific songs. But they sang me everything. It was lullabies, it was show tunes, it was jazz, it was all the standards.”
In a way, the scene in "The Pitt" carries that same spirit: music used simply to comfort. For Isa Briones, it also reveals a deeper layer of her character. Dr. Santos often keeps emotional distance from the people around her. The lullaby scene breaks that pattern.
“It’s really special playing someone like Santos,” Briones says. “It feels like the first time getting to be someone who is not trying to be liked, who is not trying to make themselves smaller to be more palatable.”
Instead, the character is allowed to be contradictory and human. “Progress is not making everyone a perfect human,” she says. “It’s showing that everyone is human. They have bad days, good days, parts of themselves they don’t like.”
Santos, she believes, carries wounds that shape how she moves through the world. “She pushes people away,” Briones says. “She’s learned to distrust people. She’s learned that people aren’t safe or people are going to leave her.”
But with a child, those defenses disappear. “Looking at this child who has done nothing wrong, feeling like this is the one person in this ER that I can be comfortable with,” she says. “It’s really sad and very relatable. When she’s singing to the baby, you see such a vulnerable side.”
For the actor, the cultural element deepens it even further. “The fact that this scene was such a pivotal moment in seeing her vulnerability,” she says, “and the fact that it included her culture and included a Filipino lullaby, it makes me want to cry.”
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