You might recognize Shabana Azeez best with a shocked expression on her face. On The Pitt, HBO’s mega-hit medical drama, the actor’s overachieving young med student runs around the ER with a perpetually wide-eyed ferocity as she tackles the baffling work of an emergency department. Off-screen, Azeez, 29, is just as hungry for the next opportunity. A new director comes through? Azeez would like to shadow them. In the editing room? She’s watching clips get stitched together. The lighting tech? She has questions for ’em.
The Noah Wyle-led project is Azeez’s first Stateside, after a relatively compact career in her native Australia that included promising film festival selects like Birdeater and Lesbian Space Princess. But The Pitt is a different beast. In just one season, it launched a cast of relative unknowns to 15 Emmy nominations and five wins (resulting in a now-viral clip of the statuettes lined up on set like a very expensive set of bowling pins). As the second season rolls out, the difference it’s made in Azeez’s career, and personal life, is already palpable.
Amongst The Pitt fans, she’s become known for a sharp wit and brash confidence that contrasts the awkward, mild manner of her onscreen persona. She pulls pranks on set. She needles costars 20 years and several decades of experience her senior. (On a carpet, she was asked, “You’re nervous on the show in interactions with Noah Wyle. Is that a real life thing too?” Cue a shrug from Azeez. At another event, “I called Shawn Hatosy a boomer in Vogue Australia one time and he got offended because apparently he’s Gen X. Like I was supposed to know that.” Eye roll.) Whatever her method, it’s working, as she describes the outpouring of mentorship she’s received in response to an endless series of questions prompted by this strange and opportune moment. (Think: “What do I do if somebody DMs that they know where you live?”)
One recent Pitt Thursday, the actor sat down with CULTURED for a reflection on the last year’s wave of success, and where she plans to ride it next.
Let’s start with how The Pitt came your way. What was the audition process like?
It was my second American audition with my management. I did a film called Birdeater which went to South by Southwest in Texas, and then I got management off the back of that. This was the second audition he sent me. I’m learning an American accent and he was like, “Shabana, we’re gonna sign you but then it’s gonna be five years of auditions and five years of building up. You’re not gonna get a job.” I was like, “Yes, of course, we’re gonna do the slog and then we’ll get a job in 2035.” But then it was so fast.
I get the sense it’s a lot of people’s first moment experiencing this kind of fandom or being in this kind of production. Are you guys helping each other out a little bit?
Oh my God, yeah. It’s really helpful to have Hatosy and Sepideh Moafi to be like, “What do I do if somebody DMs that they know where you live?” That’s not the kind of thing that anybody prepares you for and I haven’t been media trained, which I think you can definitely tell from the Internet. It’s a lot of me to the older cast members being like, “How did you navigate this?” But then also, social media is changing so fast, so there is a level of it being all of our first times experiencing this kind of thing. The show blew up really fast, really organically, and so we weren’t emotionally prepared for that. Season one was a word-of-mouth campaign, so it wasn’t pushed as a big show, and definitely now that I’ve been hanging out with people that are on other casts, like Bridgerton, I go, Oh, that machine is a lot bigger than The Pitt’s machine.
Do you remember the first time someone stopped you and was like, “I love your work”?
I remember South By the year after The Pitt [season one] being really wild, because I was just normal, in normal places. I remember just being like, I can’t check if I’ve got food in my teeth, because I was just taking pictures with around five people on the line to see, like, Fucktoys or something. You’re standing outside the Alamo and you’re like, I can’t do anything embarrassing right now because I feel watched, which hadn’t occurred to me, that you could lose your anonymity in a crowd when nobody was talking to you. It’s just really embarrassing to be alive generally, and it’s a lot worse when people are watching you.
But I definitely did have this experience with Supriya [Ganesh] and our friend Grace [Gregory]. We were talking at a cafe, and I remember Grace threw her napkin at me cause I said something cheeky, and one of the women next to us flinched. I felt like they were listening to us, but I was like, That’s crazy. Then, at the end of their meal, they came up to us and they had heard our full conversation and started talking to us about our conversation. They were like, “Oh, Shabana, you’re lactose intolerant. I know what ice-cream place you should go to in San Diego,” and had all these great recommendations based on an hour of us talking and them figuring out who we were. It was scary. Obviously people are so kind and it’s really lucky that doctors want to talk to us and nurses want to talk to us and healthcare professionals will come up to us and be like, “On my worst day of last year I watched the show and it was really helpful.” But it’s really overwhelming when you’re like, Do I have stuff in my teeth? Do I have a sleep in my eye? I just got off a plane.
Do you have any early mentors that you feel really helped shape what you wanna do in film?
It’s an interesting thing being an Australian Brown woman and then working in America. There’s actually not an abundance of relevant mentors for me to look to. There’s so many conversations where I’m like, “I’d love to work with that director,” and then I look through their filmography and I go, Oh yeah, they’ve never worked with a Brown woman. Probably want to rewrite that dream before I disappoint myself. I’ve been so lucky to have the amount of mentors that I’ve had, whether that’s Hatosy or Noah, or Sepi has been great. Not to say that there haven’t been women of color before me, but it definitely feels there is a level of forging your own path, even though that will be lonely, and maybe it’s not what I want to do, but that’s the circumstance of my life right now.
I love to look at [people] like Childish Gambino and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I’d love to do lots of different things and be a bit of a Renaissance man. But it’s also always bringing those people’s pathways into my reality, a strange task that I don’t think everybody necessarily has to do … I would love to be like Robert Pattinson particularly, just because every time a movie starts with him, you’re like, “What’s he gonna sound like?” Nobody knows. He could do anything. I know it takes many decades to build that, not to call him old, fuck. It takes many years to build up that level of trust with audiences. You don’t know what you’re gonna get from him and that’s exciting, as opposed to terrifying and strange.
What are some of those things that you would like to do? I know you said that you were taking a peek at how people were directing on The Pitt.
I’ve shadowed every director, and then I’ve shadowed every department. I’ll go to village and be like, “How does this work?” I’ll go continuously and watch how they do their script write-ups. Or all the people who work in making all the screens go up in the control room of The Pitt, that’s so cool, lighting, everybody’s been so generous. I’ve started shadowing post-production. I love it so much, it’s insane. Those people don’t get enough credit because the director is so exciting, but I do think, if I am to ever direct, I really want to understand every department’s role. I don’t want to be the kind of director who asks for something without knowing how long that’s gonna take, what it’s gonna cost, if there is a cheaper, easier solution. I really want to have empathy for everybody I’m working with, and as an actor too.
Is there a piece of advice you’ve gotten on set that you feel is just gonna always stick with you?
Noah tells us this thing that Jalen [Thomas Brooks] particularly loves. He talks about how your life is like a jar, and you’ve got golf balls in your jar that are like your biggest things—like your family, your friends. Make sure that acting isn’t one of your big balls and fill your jar and then afterwards fill your life with sand… I’m fucking this up.
This is a crazy metaphor.
I just remember Jalen, like, on the edge of tears about it. What was his thing? Fill your life with big important things first and then fill it with fun—fill it with sand and little things. I mean, actually the thing about this is that I could just make up stuff. You would never know.
Well, one of the questions that I wanted to ask you is if there’s a rumor you want to start about yourself early on in your career.
People keep sending me tweets and memes of Robert Pattinson spreading misinformation. I lie all the time. I understand that man, spiritually. There’s so much potential. I would like to start a rumor that my mother was one of the people who invented antihistamines. My birthday was wrong because I lied about it on Twitter and then I convinced somebody at work that I was 45 years old. That felt really good.
A beautiful, glowing 45. I think the antihistamines is a good lie, because it kind of gives you standing in the medical field.
I also have a drag persona that I’m building with people at work where I’m a drag queen called Annie Histamine, or Annie Biotics. Maybe the misinformation is that before The Pitt I used to perform drag as Annie Biotics.
I’m happy to provide the opportunity. You have also gotten a reputation for teasing the cast members, getting in there online.
I just wanna make people laugh. I want to make people happy. The Pitt makes people so sad and so disgusted and it’s so visceral. It’s good to provide some fun, but I want to clear up: I like them all. The people with mortgages are great, and I like them, and I really respect them. We’re friends and that’s why I can do that to them, but I’ve started feeling bad, a little bit.
Do you have a go-to party anecdote?
I almost died like three times because I had a phobia of cats and I would run out into the road when I saw my neighbor’s cat and I got hit by cars. I used to get hit by cars regularly. Three times it happened and then my mum was like, You need to go to therapy lady, to heal from this. I did systematic desensitization. You create a hierarchy of fear, so it starts with, like, I’ve got to look at a picture of a cat without crying, and then the next week I’ve gotta look at a video of a cat without crying, and then the next week it’s the video of the cat with the sound on without crying, all the way to holding a cat. I did this year of therapy and then at the end I was holding a cat and I was sobbing, I was so scared. But, then I realized that I was snotty and then I was sneezing and my throat was closing up and I was like, Oh, I’m deathly allergic to cats.
What age was this at?
Nineteen.
Oh! I thought you were going to say 9. What was the craziest way you made money while trying to break into the industry?
I accidentally started a comedy career, and I didn’t like it. It was horrible. But we just kept getting asked to do stuff. It was me and my friend, [Leela Varghese]. We were both queer and women of color. [In] a comedy line-up there’d be five acts and they’d be like, “We need to tick some boxes. Let’s get Shabana and Leela in.” Comedy’s a humiliation ritual. I will never do it again.
We were a musical comedy duo, but I don’t play any instruments. My friend just signed me up for it as a joke I guess, to perform in a comedy competition, which is how comics break out in Australia, and then we got to state finals. I used to play a guitar that was shaped like a cushion. Looking back, I’m like, What were we thinking? You can waste a lot of time on a shenanigan.
This is my last question for you. Do you have a best celebrity encounter so far?
The first one I ever had, I regretted. The person meant so much to me. It completely killed any sort of celebrity worship I’ve ever had. It was Quinta Brunson. I walked out of the soundstage and she was walking past me and I fell to my knees because Abbott Elementary means so much to me. What she’s able to achieve there is incredible. I didn’t grow up in the industry; I took a lot of really embarrassing jobs. There’s some actors you get to look at their credit list and it’s all good projects. They’ve had that integrity, but for me, that wasn’t really an option because people that are that selective from Adelaide, Australia, without a drama school degree, without any connections, without an agent, they don’t get to where I wanted to go. Quinta Brunson just means so much to me. But I saw her and I screeched and I fell to my knees and Jalen came running out of his trailer, like, “What’s wrong, is somebody hurt?” And Quinta was like… [makes uncomfortable face]. Since then I was like, She’s just a person. What she represents to me is my business. I’m just going to treat everybody like a normal person.
She was weirded out just like the rest of us would be.
She was like, Oh, this little girl is obsessed with me, and she was right. But I’ve played it cool since then.
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