Filipino Nurses and Health Care Workers Are Everywhere. Now, They’re Finally on Screen Too.

When I was scrolling on TikTok last fall, I came across a video about the “Filipino mafia.” This wasn’t a group of gangsters like the Yakuza or the mob, but rather a clique of nurses gossiping and strutting through a hospital like the “Plastics” in Mean Girls. The scene, clipped from an episode of the new NBC sitcom St. Denis Medical, went viral, making Filipinos in the comments laugh and feel seen. People of other backgrounds who work in health care nodded along, noting the accuracy. And I, a Filipina with a few family members working in medicine, even let out a chuckle. It was as if for the first time, a widely understood reality finally made its way into mainstream television: Filipinos dominate the health care industry.

Filipinos make up the biggest group of immigrant workers in the American health care system, according to a 2019 census, per the National Institute of Health. Further, a 2021 study stated that 1 in 20 registered nurses are Filipino. Those figures are thanks to a combo of American colonization and the rise of H-1B visa in 1970, which made it possible for more foreign workers to fill temporary jobs in the U.S. It’s likely you know a Filipino nurse personally, or know someone who does. Yet medical dramas, despite their widespread popularity and long-running success, have been painfully slow to reflect that truth onscreen. ER ran for 15 seasons without focusing on a Filipino nurse (this oversight became the butt of a joke at the 2018 Emmys); and Grey’s Anatomy reportedly featured a Filipino nurse for the first time significantly in 2021—its 17th season on air—when Aina Dumlao guest-starred as Girlie Bernardo, a frontline first responder during the COVID pandemic.

“Being Filipino American and just having so many nurses in my family, and being pressured to be a nurse myself growing up, it’s always been so odd to me that there hasn't been a ton of Filipino nurses on TV in the past on these medical shows,” says St. Denis Medical writer Emman Sadorra, who is Filipino and pitched the “mafia” concept along with a fellow Asian American writer. “[Working on] a new medical show that I’m so lucky and proud to be a part of, I knew that that was something I wanted to try and bring to the table or shed some light on.”

Yssamei Panganiban as Sharice and Nico Santos as Rene, members of the “Filipino mafia” in St. Denis Medical.

Although the Filipino mafia was only the subject of one episode (so far) on St. Denis, other Filipinos in scrubs have recently appeared onscreen this year as medical TV dramas underwent a renaissance. HBO Max’s The Pitt, arguably the buzziest new show of the year, features three Filipina characters working in an emergency room: two are nurses, who often chit-chat in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, and one is a doctor. And when Netflix debuted its own soapy medical romance Pulse this spring, the cast included a Filipino actor playing a surgery intern.

There have been other flashes of representation in recent years, like a brief scene of nurses speaking Tagalog in the locker room in New Amsterdam in 2023, or a minor character, Nurse Villanueva, appearing on The Good Doctor from 2017 to 2024. This new wave of shows marks a long-awaited breakthrough in representation—and more accurately depicts the reality of working in a hospital. It feels like the powers that be in the entertainment industry are at last starting to get it—finally noticing us, seeing us, and inviting us to tell our stories. With immigrant communities under attack right now in the U.S., this kind of visibility and celebration, for any minority group, is more important than ever.

“It is crazy that it’s taken this long for there to be such concrete representation, but it’s so special to be a part of it and show it in so many different forms,” says Isa Briones, who stars in The Pitt as a prickly and ambitious med student named Dr. Trinity Santos. “There’s nurses, there’s doctors, there’s also a spectrum of what [being] Filipino is. There’s so many different nuances within it.”

Isa Briones as Dr. Trinity Santos on The Pitt.

Many of these actors know the impact of Filipinos in health care firsthand. Briones says “so many family members, extended family members and friends of friends are Filipinos who are medical professionals.” Pulse’s Chelsea Muirhead says her Filipino mother, a phlebotomist, encouraged her to be a doctor or nurse when she was going to school. “Now I get to turn to my mom and be like, ‘I did it,’ the Filipino-Scottish actor jokes of her role in her Netflix series. “I’m kind of a doctor and I’m living that dream, finally.’” The Pitt’s Amielynn Abellera, who is also Filipino and whose mom was an ICU nurse, even studied pre-med in college (“That was a pattern that I was going to follow,” she recalls) before pursuing her passion for acting. “The medical world of The Pitt feels so familiar,” she says.

The Pitt makes sure audiences know that Filipinos are in the ER staff right away. Kristin Villanueva, the actress who plays a chatty nurse named Princess Dela Cruz, points out her character’s early introduction in the series, alongside Abellera’s Perlah Alawi, a fellow Filipina. “I’ve read some comments of people just having a huge sigh of relief and excitement when you see me and Amielynn in that second minute of episode 1 and already speaking Tagalog,” Villanueva says. “It was also jarring for me that all of a sudden, BAM! Dr. Robby—Noah Wyle—is going in and already being flanked by two Filipino nurses.”

Kristin Villanueva, Noah Wyle, and Amielynn Abellera in The Pitt.

Notably, The Pitt develops these characters fully, rather than making them one-dimensional stereotypes. Throughout the first season, Briones’s character is shown butting heads with a white male counterpart (her performance is so convincing that her character has become divisive) and trying to connect with her patients. Meanwhile, Princess and Perlah have become fan favorites for their relatable workplace gossip. (No office dalliances get past them!) The writers are “so collaborative,” Villanueva says, welcoming the actors’ input to create a more authentic portrayal.

Briones, for example, asked if her character “could have a last name that represented my background.” The team obliged and dubbed her Santos (Filipino surnames are often of Spanish origin due to centuries of colonization). Villanueva, who was born in the Philippines and speaks fluent Tagalog, weighed in on some of the translated dialogue and ad-libs. “There’s one scene where I call Dr. Langdon an asshole. In Tagalog we have—I don’t know—20 words for asshole. It's like varying degrees of intensity,” Villanueva explains. “So, then I would go back to the writer and ask, ‘Is Princess joking? Is she teasing? Does she really mean it? Is she irritated?’ Then we have leeway in interpreting that to arrive at the same vibe or gist or objective of that character.”

Even the inclusion of gossip (or tsismis) is, inexplicably, an accurate homage to Filipino culture. But the Tagalog dialogue isn’t only used to talk about someone else behind their back (or in front of their faces). “To me, when I speak in Tagalog, it’s not always necessarily so other people can’t understand us,” Villanueva says, in Princess’s defense. “It’s easier to express in your mother tongue and your native language.”

Nico Santos (you know him from Superstore and Crazy Rich Asians), who plays nurse Rene on St. Denis, the leader of the Filipino mafia, was also able to use his personal experience to inform the show. Some parts of the script would be translated by a service, but the phrasing was too formal or unnatural. “The translation was super-lalim talaga [really super-deep],” Santos remembers. “We just don't use those words.” So he sought to make the dialogue “more conversational” and accurate because there was a lot at stake. “You know how our people are,” he says. “It doesn't matter if there’s a Filipino on screen for like half a second, we will proudly claim and watch the program just to see that one glimpse of our people. So I was really just like, ‘We just have to get this right.’”

“We just have to get this right,” Nico Santos said of Filipino representation on St. Denis.

That also meant paying attention to the details. In one scene where Rene gives a colleague a bag of canned goods and groceries, St. Denis writer Emman Sadorra recalls “specifically telling the props people it should be corned beef. That’s such a Filipino thing.” (It’s not visible in the final cut, but it’s the thought that counts.)

When you’re part of a community that’s rarely in the spotlight, the pressure is high. Santos understands that struggle. “I have sort of a love-hate relationship with the position that I’m in because at the very core of it, this is just what I want to do for a living. …. But when you start working at a certain level, there is that layer of, you are the face of the community. I feel that not only with being Filipino, but being queer as well,” he says. He later jokes, “If I fuck up, please don’t hold it against me. I am just a person, and I will make mistakes. And someday I hope that it gets to a point where we can play all types of characters, and those characters not be seen like, ‘Oh my God, all Filipinos are like that.’”

Santos says, “When you start working at a certain level, there is that layer of, you are the face of the community.”

Briones was glad to be on the set of The Pitt with two other Filipina actors who came from different backgrounds as a way of showing this long-overlooked community is not monolithic. Briones, the daughter of trailblazing TV and Broadway star Jon Jon Briones, is mixed race, Filipino and Caucasian; Villanueva, a seasoned theater actor, was born in the Philippines and immigrated when she was a teenager. Abellera, who hails from California, plays a Muslim Filipina nurse who wears a hijab. (Though the Philippines is a predominantly Catholic country, about six percent of the population are Muslim—some estimates say it’s as high as 10 to 11 percent, especially in the southern Mindanao region, which is closer to Indonesia—the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.)

These shows have been healing not only for viewers, but also for the Filipino actors who star in them. Muirhead, who is queer, says it “felt so serendipitous” to play her character, Sophie, who was written as queer in the script. Portraying a Filipina exploring her sexuality helped her answer her own questions in real life. “I’m learning a lot about myself, to be honest,” Muirhead says. “I’m finding much more confidence in myself by digging through, potentially, what might a character like Sophie feel?”

Daniela Nieves as Camila Perez and Chelsea Muirhead as Sophie Chan in Pulse.

Briones also had an emotional realization while filming a scene in episode 11 of The Pitt when Princess and Perlah are in the midst of gossiping about Trinity in Tagalog, and Trinity chimes in, stunning the pair with her understanding of the language. In her disbelief, Princess says Trinity is “so mestiza!”—meaning she’s so white-passing she couldn’t believe she was Filipina. Villanueva asked Briones for permission to use that line when the director of the episode, Quyen Tran, encouraged her to improvise.

“Kristen was kind of like, ‘Is it okay if I say that?’ to me,” Briones says, noting that the term could be read as an insult to people who are mixed. “Even though those types of words have hurt me [in the past], it felt so powerful to represent it and show it. It didn’t feel painful to do that scene. I would’ve watched this and would've teared up and been like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve had that exact interaction before.’”

Sadorra sums it up well: “The things that make me different used to be things that I was afraid of writing about, but now I fully embrace it and it’s only yielded great results.”

Abellera studied pre-med before pivoting to acting.

But even as more Filipinos appear on screen, I can’t help but wonder if casting them as doctors and nurses will become just another pigeonhole—like the delivery man, the IT guy, and the exotic sex symbol tropes that Asians have long been typecast as. Knowing this, Villanueva made sure to be selective about which roles she takes on. “If it’s a Filipino nurse and there’s more to ‘yes, doctor,’ you get to see more of the personality, or have more of a backstory, then of course, I absolutely would audition for that,” she says.

When she was auditioning for The Pitt and saw the character’s name was Princess—an “if you know you know” nod to the over-the-top names Filipinos give their kids—she knew the writers were “going deep in their research.”

“[Working in] medicine is also a little bit of a [stereotypical career] in the community,” Muirhead says. “It’s like a dream, kind of our golden mountain to chase, especially for older generations. But what a beautiful beacon [it is].” Santos agrees: “It’s the easiest entry into our culture, and then you let them know: We’re not all nurses.”

Abellera says we’re in the midst of a cultural shift “where Filipino and Filipino American stories are really making their way into not only art, but different spaces like cuisine, sports, music, design, and literature in a way that I never experienced growing up.” And as a parent of a 4-year-old, she’s excited to be able to show her child Filipinos on TV, from Josh, the new host of Blue’s Clues, to herself.

Filipino actors hope for more opportunities onscreen, behind the camera, and beyond..

Indeed it is an exciting time, as Hollywood has embraced more stories from people of color in recent years. But it’s also a fraught one, as DEI initiatives are increasingly under threat. The hope for the future is just more. Not only in front of the screen but also behind it. While The Pitt, St. Denis Medical, and Pulse spotlight Filipino actors and storylines, all three shows are led by white male showrunners or co-showrunners. (Pulse has a female co-showrunner.) There’s always more room for improvement, whether it’s in the writers’ room, the director’s chair, or the C-suite. “To the executives: People want these real stories. The Pitt is an example of that,” Briones says. “So seek out new writers, new directors, seek out the people who are going to tell their unique stories about their cultural background, and also stories that don't have to be about their Asian-ness, their Filipino-ness, or whatever—it’s just ingrained.”

The success of The Pitt and St. Denis demonstrate that there’s an appetite for more Filipinos onscreen. “I think what networks were afraid of was, if you get too specific, the show is not going to translate to a wider audience,” Sadorra says. “But it’s almost like the opposite of that has been true—the more specific you get, the more universal it becomes.”

He adds later, “The response of that [nurse mafia] clip that went viral, and people really loving that episode in particular, has shown us that this is really resonating with people, and it would be smart of us to keep exploring stories in that area. So I hope we get to do that for a second season.” My fingers, for one, are crossed to see more Rene and the Filipino mafia on screen in the future. I can’t wait to gossip about it.