‘I thought I had missed the train’: Hollywood is paging The Pitt star Shabana Azeez
Adelaide actor Shabana Azeez’s career is far from flatlining with a breakout role in hit Hollywood medical drama The Pitt, and animated feature Lesbian Space Princess riding the film festival circuit.
There’s a lot of stress onscreen in hit HBO Max medical drama The Pitt, but for Adelaide actor Shabana Azeez, the process of netting her big Hollywood break was shockingly smooth.
“Oh my god, it was the easiest casting process of my life,” Azeez tells InReview.
Azeez had previously won parts in the Adelaide-made school sexting drama The Hunting (SBS), Working Dog’s public service satire Utopia (ABC) and a handful of indie productions without formal acting training. Having fought for smaller roles back in Australia, she expected auditioning for The Pitt — a melodrama set in a Pittsburgh hospital whose lineage can be traced to the 1990s hit series ER — to be tough.
It was only her second American audition. Azeez, who also voices the heroine in the Adelaide-made feature animation Lesbian Space Princess, picked up American management in March last year and lined up The Pitt audition in May. .
“I did one self-tape, I did one nine-minute casting Zoom and then they said, ‘we’ve got you a visa, move’,” she says. “It was incredible, but I think the thing about John Wells Productions who make the show — he’s also made ER and The West Wing — he knows what he wants, he knows it when he sees it and doesn’t make you jump through hoops.”
The Pitt is not strictly a successor to ER, but its links to the breakthrough emergency department soap that kick-started the careers of George Clooney, Maureen Tierney, Julianna Margulies and Alex Kingston are obvious. The biggest clue is the lead casting of ER veteran Noah Wyle, who in The Pitt plays battle-hardened senior medico Dr Michael ‘Robby’ Robinavitch.
Working with Wyle, who was the fresh-faced Dr John Carter in eleven seasons of ER, and other experienced actors like Katherine LaNasa who plays head nurse Dana Evans, was very cool, Azeez says.
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“Noah is so successful and he is so good at his job and he’s so good off screen as well. He is so giving, he has a mind like a steel trap — he’s the sort of guy if you say you like something, the next day he will have brought you a book on it,” she says. “He really works hard to make the environment so warm and welcoming for us young, new actors.”
Azeez plays a significant ensemble role as Dr Victoria Javadi, the youngest intern who makes a disastrous first impression after fainting on the job. Her efforts to prove herself are regularly undermined by her overpowering mother who happens to be the hospital’s senior trauma surgeon Dr Eileen Shamsi (Deepti Gupta), a woman who inspires fear and awe.
The hospital setting required intense medical training for all the cast, who went to boot camp to learn techniques they would be required to authentically simulate on camera. Azeez and her colleagues were taught by real doctors who guided them through procedures like intubation and suture stitching. On set, a doctor was on hand to make sure the emergency procedures were as accurate as possible.
Azeez came late to acting, largely out of deference to her parents whose concerns about the notoriously unreliable career path meant Shabana didn’t even take drama classes while studying at St Aloysius College. In her early twenties, however, she realised she wouldn’t be happy doing anything else.
“They are immigrant parents and they fought very hard for financial stability and then I want[ed] to be an actor which is very risky — and we didn’t know any actors, we didn’t grow up around that,” Azeez says of her Indian Fijian upbringing. “By the time I realised I had to do it, I thought I was too old. I was 21 and thought I had missed the train.”
She put herself forward in a short film, which led to two more. Through Adelaide’s small industry network she met filmmaker Leela Varghese, and in 2019 appeared in the short film Crush, directed by Varghese. The pair soon formed the musical comedy act The Coconuts, and what began as a joke soon saw them win awards and sell out Fringe shows at Gluttony.
Leela Varghese and Shabana Azeez perform as The Coconuts during Adelaide Fringe
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Then came Lesbian Space Princess, written and directed by Varghese with Emma Hough Hobbs. Featuring old-school neon animation, the film follows an introverted space princess (Azeez) whose ex-girlfriend is kidnapped by ‘Straight White Maliens’ and needs help somewhere across the ‘gaylaxy’. After premiering at last year’s Adelaide Film Festival, in February it won the Teddy Award for Best Feature at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Starting her career in Adelaide has had its advantages as well as challenges, Azeez says.
“Adelaide is very small, we’re all friends and because of that, people have your back and you have their back, and I worked for free a lot, of course, and I flew myself around Australia trying for work,” she says. “You can’t stay in Adelaide full-time; you have to travel around.”
The success of The Pitt, and the individual notice she has received — one US review was headlined, ‘The Pitt’s Latest Episode Finally Gives This Underrated Character Their Moment to Shine’ — has been a big break for Azeez, as much for the learning opportunities as the critical praise.
“It’s a massive deal for me in every way; it’s a massive deal for me artistically, I mean we shot this over eight months and the longest shoot for me before had been six weeks,” she says. “To be match fit like that and to be acting every day is such a gift and it’s a gift that some actors never get in their whole career so I am so, so grateful.”
The show, which is streaming its entirety on Binge after its season finale aired last week, became so popular so quickly a second series has been commissioned and Azeez will be shooting mainly in Los Angeles but also in Pittsburgh later this year. Back home, she also stars in another Varghese short film called I’m the Most Racist Person I Know which is already creating buzz, this month winning a Special Jury award in the Narrative Short strand at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Azeez was cast in The Pitt at the same time Varghese was shooting the dating satire, and returned to Adelaide to finish filming before heading back overseas. With opportunities pulling her back and forth between London, Europe, and Los Angeles, Azeez isn’t sure where she technically lives. But wherever she lands, she knows what she’s there do to.
“I’m giving myself two years to figure out where I live,” she says. “I’m just going to go where the work is.”
Playing a doctor onscreen might not be the kind of medical career many migrant parents would hope for, but Azeez’s late start and her parents’ uncertainty provided the resolve and determination that helped her push through the early auditions that didn’t come quite so easily.
“It meant that I did it for me,” she says. “I was already embarrassing myself; I was already ostracising myself by becoming an actor so when I got 14 rejections in a month, I could handle that because I knew why I was doing it.”
Season 1 of The Pitt is streaming on Binge now