How to use a custom breakpoint function without having to return to the place breakpoint was called

I am running an interactive ssh python program, but I'm not always technically interacting with it (piping stdout and stdin). I need to print a string to signal to pexpect on my local machine that a breakpoint has been called and to enter interactive mode.

On my local machine I have:

p: pexpect.spawn
i = p.expect([pexpect.EOF,'__INTERACT__'])
if i==1:
    p.interact()

The reason I do this is because I cannot simply interact() the whole time it is running. This interferes with stdout on the local process.

So on the remote process, I breakpoint with

print('__INTERACT__')
breakpoint()

This works, however I want to have single-line breakpoints. So I tried:

def remote_breakpoint():
    print('__INTERACT__')
    import pdb; pdb.set_trace()
sys.breakpointhook = remote_breakpoint

This allows me to just write breakpoint(). It's also allows me to disable the extra print statement when running locally:

def remote_breakpoint():
    if platform.system() != 'Darwin':
        print('__INTERACT__')
    import pdb; pdb.set_trace()

It works, But now pdb starts inside the remote_breakpoint function and I have to hit r to get out every time. How can I tell pdb.set_trace to start one function up the stack, or make it wait to start the interactive process until remote_breakpoint has returned?

Even if I just call remote_breakpoint() (instead of using sys.breakpointhook), I still have the same problem.