How One Random Act Of Kindness Launched Shabana Azeez’s Acting Career

When The Pitt's Shabana Azeez talks about her career, she traces it back to a single, almost accidental moment of kindness that allowed her to follow a dream that had always been inside her. “I got into acting because a lady was really nice to me one time,” she says, laughing. It sounds flippant, but it’s the truth. She grew up in a family where the arts were not encouraged, academics were the priority, and despite wanting to act her whole life, she never studied drama at school. It wasn’t until she was working at Mercury CX, an emerging filmmakers’ hub in Adelaide, that someone finally asked her the right question.

Her boss pulled her aside. "She said, 'You’re great, but this isn't your passion. What is it?' And I was like, 'Well, I’d like to act, but I’ve literally never acted before.'" Within an hour, her boss had secured her an audition for a short film, and she booked it, with no prior acting experience. That led her to secure roles in the animated Lesbian Space Princess and the coercive-control thriller Bird Eater. She expresses the same mix of gratitude as she talks about her leap from Australian indie television to HBO’s The Pitt. The contrast, she says, is both extreme and strangely familiar. “It’s chalk and cheese in some ways, and exactly the same in others,” she explains. The budgets are bigger, the access is better, on The Pitt, she can consult real doctors and benefit from an army of specialists, but the core remains unchanged. “Everyone cares about the story.”

When Shabana first read the script for The Pitt she described it as information overload. “It’s like ten series regulars and then a bunch of recurring characters, and then all the patients, and all the names for the doctors are surnames. So you can’t be like, ‘Who’s a woman? Who’s a man? What are their age?’ There’s no clues. I had to go out and buy more highlighters and colour-code the entire script,” she says. The audition process for The Pitt was surprisingly lowkey: a single self-tape, followed by a Zoom scheduled for twenty minutes that wrapped after just nine minutes. When the call ended early, she assumed it was a bad sign. “I cried for half an hour afterwards,” she says. “The Zoom was nine minutes. The emotional recovery was three times that.” So when she landed the role, and learned the production would sponsor her visa and fly her halfway across the world it came as a genuine shock.

Moving to LA was, in her words, “horrible in so many ways” and yet also strangely exhilarating. There was a joy in not knowing what came next, in stepping into something undefined. “To not know what you’re stepping into, and to have that curiosity, that scared feeling, that’s what life is about,” she says. Once in Los Angeles, the emotional weight of the move fully settled in. “Oh my god, I knew no one,” she says. “I truly knew not a single person in LA.” That isolation became especially clear during her first days at work. Sitting at lunch during boot camp, she watched as coworkers casually texted friends and loved ones. “Everybody was texting their friends, and I was like, I have no friends to text. They’re all asleep,” she says. “That was really lonely and really scary,” she adds.

Everything shifted when she formed a close friendship with co-star Supriya Ganesh, who plays Dr Samira Mohan. Their bond deepened quickly. “I adore her. I think the world of her,” she says simply. “She’s my best friend.” That sense of shared experience extended into their professional lives as well. Shabana notes that her character wasn't originally written to be South Asian, but the production pivoted after her audition. “I remember thinking that would never happen because they already had a ‘brown girl’,” she says, pointing to the unspoken limits that still shape representation on screen.

Season one was filmed in near-total anonymity. By season two, the shift was impossible to ignore. Filming now overlapped with awards season; days were spent on set, nights at the Golden Globes or Critics’ Choice Awards. The pace was punishing. “I got flu-level sick three times,” she admits. Still, amid the noise and spectacle, the work itself never changed. “The show is the same to make,” she says. “And that’s really grounding.” In The Pitt, Shabana plays Victoria, a medical student, a role that could easily collapse into the familiar model minority archetype: hyper-competent, genius-level, and primarily functional. But Shabana was intent on resisting that flattening, shaping Victoria into a character defined as much by her flaws as her intelligence. “When we talk about excellence or prodigies, we tend to think, ‘Let’s play that,’” she says. “But that’s not really how people work. When you’re very good at something, you usually have a deficit that’s just as powerful. For Victoria, it’s social. She’s deeply socially inept.”

What she loves most about acting is the research. “It’s an exercise in empathy,” she says. Through projects like Bird Eater, where she researched stories of emotional abuse, she found it changed her not only as an actor, but as a person. “Every woman I spoke to had a story. It genuinely changed my life.” Rather than focusing solely on the medical aspects of her role, she immersed herself in romance novels, glossy American teen dramas, and studies of loneliness. Victoria, she explains, is “building a life she doesn’t really want,” and fantasy becomes a form of escape. By Season Two, the show allows that internal tension to surface. “We really dig into the icky parts, her jealousy, her exhaustion, her sharpness. She fails a lot. And I think that’s what actually dismantles the model minority myth.”

When I asked Shabana how she stays grounded amid the whirlwind success of The Pitt, she laughs. “My little brother keeps me really grounded. Honestly, they kind of bully me about it, which is actually kind of helpful. When I went home for Christmas, every time I tried to speak and someone interrupted me, my brother would be like, ‘Everybody, excuse me — Hollywood is trying to speak.’ Before I said anything, my uncle would be like, ‘Action.’ It’s that kind of teasing that reminds me it’s just a job."

“It brings me back to earth. It’s meaningful work, but it’s art, it’s play, and it’s fun, it’s not brain surgery. I think there’s a real danger of people taking themselves too seriously, and my family bullying me actually really helps with that.”

Season 2 of The Pitt is now streaming on HBO MAX Australia.