Amielynn Abellera ’04 is thrilled to be here

Amielynn Abellera ’04 is just as cool as you thought she’d be. Zooming from her sunlit dining table, a fridge full of children’s artwork behind her, she’s the epitome of L.A.-chic in a black tank top and fringy bob. She’s breezy and friendly, commiserating over the buzz of an electric leaf blower outside and genuinely thanking me for nearly every question. 

It’s not until we’re wrapping our conversation an hour later that she mentions she’s due at the studio the next day to continue filming season 3 of the hit HBO Max show “The Pitt.” It’s a grueling schedule, each episode shot chronologically and following a single hour of a brutal day-long shift in the emergency department (ED) at the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. But sure, she’d be more than happy to look for old photos of her college days at Santa Clara University. And, no, she can’t spill any spoilers for the new season but really wishes she could. Oh, and here are a few takes of belting, “Go Broncos!” into the camera for good measure. 

If only all of Hollywood was this chill.

Of course, it makes a certain kind of sense. Anyone cast to play the steadfast, impossibly calm ED nurse Perlah Alawi would have to tap into their own innate confidence and warmth. And it doesn’t hurt that Abellera has some experience with medicine. She grew up in a medical family—her dad was a family practice physician; her mom was a nurse practitioner; various aunts, uncles, and cousins are physical therapists and dentists—and for a long time intended to go to medical school herself. Playing Perlah as her first big television role feels like a full-circle moment for Abellera.

But that’s not to say the character and the actress are one and the same. “I think she is so confident in her job, in her vocation. I think she knew she wanted to be a nurse. She knew she wanted to be in the ER,” Abellera says of Perlah. “She jumps in every time there’s a trauma and knows what she’s doing, and she doesn’t ever question herself.” Abellera hasn’t always known herself so well. “I had a lot of questions as to what path I was going to take,” she says. 

Born and raised in Stockton, Calif., to parents who immigrated from the Philippines, Abellera felt like medical school was a bit of a foregone conclusion. “I was surrounded by people in the medical field … that was just what was talked about as a successful, respected career,” Abellera says. Meanwhile, “I was so passionate about the arts and theater, like in an obsessive way, but it was just never an option in my mind.” 

Abellera watched a lot of television and movies as a kid and harbored dreams of “getting out of Dodge” and going far away to college. But she remembers being disoriented and feeling “a lot of anxiety” around “what this next step of college was supposed to be.” Shouldn’t she feel more certain? More resolute that medicine was really her calling, as it was for so many in her family?

Santa Clara was one of the last campuses she toured. “I remember walking around campus and [it’s like] I didn’t know what I needed until I got to Santa Clara,” she says. “There was something that was just so calming and settled and quiet. It’s like I could finally hear my own thoughts and the space wasn’t trying to sell itself to me.”

Abellera majored in psychology and minored in psychobiology with plans to go to medical school. And though she was very focused on the science track, she kept finding herself auditioning for plays at least once a year. “I was always going up to San Francisco to watch theater,” she says. “I would always go watch all the plays at Santa Clara. I had a lot of friends in the theater department. I was trying to live both lives.” She’d often daydream about becoming a doctor who also acted on the side—because, you know, doctors notoriously have so much free time.

Following graduation, Abellera spent a year working in AmeriCorps then got a job at Stanford University Hospital doing cancer research. She figured she’d eventually get around to applying to medical school. Looking back now, she thinks she intuitively knew she didn’t really want to become a doctor. 

“That was the best thing for me, working in that [Stanford] hospital with the cream-of-the-crop research doctors of the world and seeing their passion for it, seeing their drive and their motivation,” she says. Meanwhile, Abellera was living in San Francisco, taking Caltrain back and forth to Stanford, working all day alongside researchers “going nuts” for looking in microscopes and reading dense journal articles and all the things doctors go nuts for, then spending her nights and weekends auditioning and rehearsing for plays.

“And I thought, I’m never going to go nuts for that [research] stuff. … I’m going nuts for doing this play for absolutely no money in some podunk black box theater in the Tenderloin,” she remembers. Ultimately she realized, acting “is what I need to be doing–this is where I’m going to thrive, and this is what I’m going to be good at.”

Passion was the missing link. “I would’ve been a fine doctor,” Abellera says. “But when I want to do something right, I want to be so sure of it and so passionate about it.” So instead of med school, she got her master of fine arts in acting at University of Southern California.

Today, she’s enjoying getting a taste of what might’ve been by putting on scrubs every day, memorizing dialogue full of complex medical jargon, and acting as a nurse in medically accurate ER procedures and surgeries—“The Pitt” has board-certified emergency physicians and former healthcare workers on its writing and advisory staffs. The show is resonating so much with viewers, she thinks, because it highlights people who are passionate about their jobs. And who are just really, really good at them. 

“I can relate to that, watching the show or anything where someone is an expert at what they do and they’re passionate about it,” Abellera says. “I love the competency aspect of it, but I also love how it shows that these experts are humans with flaws and also need care.”

She’s also pleased by the show’s diversity. For one, it portrays the rich history of Filipino nurses in the United States. Perlah is a Filipina Muslim who wears a hijab and gossips in Tagalog with her bestie and fellow Filipina nurse, Princess (played by Kristin Villanueva). Abellera is not fluent in Tagalog but grew up more or less understanding it and says she can deliver lines in a passable accent. Before filming started, she researched a backstory for Perlah by speaking with Muslim nurses about their experiences in hospitals.

There weren’t a lot of people that looked like Abellera on the big or small screen when she was growing up, but “there does seem to be a shift recently of Filipino and Filipino American stories making their way into artistic spaces like art and sports and cuisine and television and film, literature,” she says. Last year, Abellera voiced one of the characters in the DreamWorks animated film “Forgotten Island,” which premieres September 25 and features Filipino folklore. She’s so glad her six-year-old daughter with partner Anastasia Coon is growing up in this media landscape.

Because, who knows, perhaps if Abellera had encountered more examples of diversity in the pop culture she so hungrily consumed as a kid, she wouldn’t have denied herself from pursuing her true passions. There’s an expectation she’s had to learn to forget that you choose a path in life and it’s a straight path and it’s “going to lead to the next step and that’s going to lead to the next step and all of those steps have to be correct,” she says. But life isn’t like that. Straight paths leave very little room for mistakes and learning and joy. 

If she could go back to her time at Santa Clara, she’d tell herself “to be open to those moments that I learn something new about myself.” Of course, you can’t go back, she says emphatically, knowingly. All she can do is encourage the people coming up behind her to “allow the path to be messier.” You’ll be so much happier in the end.