Shabana Azeez knows how rare it is to make it to Los Angeles with a job already in hand. Unlike most of the actors who move to the city in the hopes of making it big, the 29-year-old Australian actor made it out to Hollywood with a character on a soon-to-be hit HBO show. But even while following in the footsteps of fellow Aussies like Jacob Elordi, who also stars in an HBO darling series, Euphoria, she had no idea how much it would blow up. Suddenly, there are red carpets, a slew of awards, and she’s become a household name. But with it came a brand-new city where she feels different.
“I feel like a strange, little alien. I mean, I’m on a visa that’s called the Extraordinary Alien Visa,” she reveals to Cosmopolitan.
Unlike her other cast members, Shabana is pulling a certain trick that is often reserved for shows on The CW or YA rom-coms on Netflix: She is playing nine years her junior as Victoria Javadi, a current fourth-year med student who is struggling to figure out what her next step will be under the shadow of her parents’ medical successes and the never-ending biases that come with being a young genius. In the show’s second season, Javadi was also revealed to be a big TikTok star, with many of her fellow coworkers judging her for content that made her known to patients and fellow TikTok obsessives as Dr. J.
Just like everything on The Pitt, not everything is what it seems. Javadi is revealed to be using her reach to get answers after a nurse was arrested by ICE, and she is also not really posting content from her job but is sharing information surrounding burnout and mental health. Once again, Javadi becomes a beacon among her fellow medical workers, trying to survive some of the worst days of her working life (last season featured an active shooter situation), while also showing the differences between generations as they start to take over hospitals and other workforces.
For Shabana, it’s all a fun challenge, especially as her character is about to go into rare territory. As the character [spoiler alert] chooses to go into emergency psychiatry for her residency—an upcoming time jump may show us a different side of Javadi—it’s an exciting time to be representing the bright young future of the series.
Cosmopolitan chatted with Shabana ahead of the show’s season 2 finale about her character’s surprising new discovery, joining the wild world of Hollywood, and how she plans to tackle this new version of her character to come.
I didn’t realize this until I started my research, but you’re 29 playing 20. And you’re not even the youngest person in the cast.
No, I think Supriya Ganesh and Isa Briones are younger than me. And Jalen! Actually, he’s the opposite. He’s really young playing a lot older. I don’t think they knew my age when they cast me. Because the whole cast isn’t doing it, it still feels grounded in realism and not like we’re in one of those teen shows where everybody is too unreasonably sexy to be in high school.
How did you approach that? Because it feels like a lifetime happens between the ages of 20 and 29.
I used Nicola Coughlan as a reference for that, because I love Derry Girls. Javadi is so peerless in that she’s not like other people her age. Her experiences of life are so different. I related to a lot of her story. I didn’t graduate high school early and I lived a very normal life, but in terms of her feelings of isolation, her feelings of being peerless, I feel that as an actor. I started acting at 21. It’s really a real blessing that I look young, because otherwise, I would have missed the boat already when I started.
Her age is often used against her, but we’re also seeing her parents’ successes used as a way to move her in one direction or another.
All privileges are complex. A struggle is never just a bad thing; you learn stuff from it. But privileges aren’t always going to feel good. You’re going to second-guess yourself because you went, Oh, but I only got here because of my privilege. It’s an incredible privilege to have the financial means and the parents and the childhood where you can pursue academia at that level, that young.
This season, I really want med students to be able to tune in to The Pitt and watch Victoria and feel better about their worst day of med school, because the stakes are so high. They’re life and death all the time. It’s so stressful and it’s impossible to be prepared for that emotionally.
But she’s learning! What was the biggest change for her this season?
We’ve seen this dynamic with her and McKay in season 1, where McKay teaches her some people skills and ways to see the world not through her privileged lens—alternative ways to relate and engage with patients, which is so important and needed.
If you don’t have the people skills for a patient to tell you that their grandma had this illness on their mother’s side, you’re gonna misdiagnose. I really care about the social element of med school because Javadi is so book smart, so watching her flounder socially is incredibly important. And because generationally, too, Gen Z is growing up on iPads and on their phones and having way less social interactions. She struggles to relate to her older peers and then also to her actual peers because of how much younger she is.
I found her interactions with James Ogilvie to be very interesting this season. They see themselves as rivals.
I love that character. It’s something really interesting about Javadi. He fucks up and she helps him. When we get that patient together, it doesn’t work. He’s, like, the worst.
Javadi is socially aware of other med students. She’s relatively good with all of her mentors. Patients are new, so she fumbles. There’s a lot of crying in front of patients, not being able to regulate her emotions, not being able to compartmentalize. Even not knowing how the old system works. Like, what the fuck is a fax machine? Like, Oh my god, we’re going to the dark ages. I want it to be a long coming-of-age story.
It’s funny that we’re only getting small glimpses of her growth because we only see her for one day of her life every season.
The important thing in an ensemble is to say, What does my character have that no other character? I did a lot of reading of rom-coms, a lot of Emily Henry books, watching glossy American teen shows. Javadi lives in a romantic fantasy land and is often building a life she doesn’t necessarily want to live. There’s something really wonderful about how different her energy is. I listen to a lot of Olivia Rodrigo. A little pop. I go to concerts. I shop at Reformation. I’ve been trying to get into that headspace. Especially when you’re playing a young person, there’s that distinction between who she thinks she is and who she actually is.
I mean, even just seeing her red, white, and blue earrings for the Fourth of July shows how she’s trying to fit in.
Javadi is desperate to be exactly like the other girls. I think eventually she will learn that she needs to learn to belong instead of to fit in. She doesn’t need to mold herself to whatever everybody else is doing. She can show up fully realized and find places where she just naturally belongs. That’s why she loves the Fourth of July and why we made that choice.
I wonder if you’ve had that same experience not just an Australian actor in Hollywood but a Brown actor as well.
Acting is incredibly competitive. You need to get a lot of jobs. I felt this energy shift in L.A. where it felt like everybody—all the actors—wanted to be clean slates that any story could be projected onto. The hottest, blandest version of yourself is incredibly financially viable.
I came to L.A. with so much baggage and mannerisms and strangeness, and that’s why I got cast, because I’m so full of what I actually am. I feel like a strange little alien. I’m on a visa that’s called the Extraordinary Alien Visa. But I found so many great friends on The Pitt and so it’s like, Well, clearly, I am not so strange. Or if I am strange, it’s not unacceptable.
I do need to ask, what is it like to be the one person who can terrorize Shawn Hatosy by calling him a boomer?
No, I need people to know that we’re actually friends.
It must be fun to have cast members as both as mentors and friends.
It’s no more exciting than being friends with anybody else. I think it’s a sign of respect that I just treat him like anybody else. I’m always going to see people’s humanity and not their success or their circumstances or their fame or anything like that. He’s just a normal guy. You come out of the soundstage and there’s people driving by being like, “Oh, Crash!”
Not that nickname!
Everybody loves the nickname! And I love the nickname. I still don’t know what to do when people come up to me. One day, I’ll be cool. But right now, when people come to me, they get a strange, socially inept gremlin, and I’m sorry about that.
You said you saw someone physically cringing while watching season 1 of The Pitt on a plane.
People are so nice! I just never know what to do. I want to be a fun person to meet who doesn’t ruin your day. I had a strange experience where I met a woman in the airport and then I was in the bathroom, and she came in talking about meeting me on the phone last week. I’ll figure it out!
We see Javadi get the validation she’s looking for via her TikToks—we as the audience believe we know what she’s posting, but in the end, we realize that, just like with Robby, we’ve been wrong this entire time.
Originally it was a way for her to process what happened and share what it was like to be a first responder in a mass casualty event. It was her as a character going, People need to know what it’s like. Then that morphed into how to take care of your mental health. R. Scott Gemmill, the showrunner, and I talked about it before we started filming, how there’s this desperate need to help people and that’s what she loves about medicine.
TikTok and the community she finds there is so meaningful. I’m glad it took the entire season to pay off, because I really wanted audiences to explore their own biases. I’m fascinated by the responses people had, like, Oh, you’re on TikTok, an influencer. A lot of it was quite patronizing and gendered.
It’s a really lovely way to explore how society sees young women and how they’re primed not to take us seriously. I love that we release our episodes once a week, so that you can really sit with how you feel about stuff. It’s the best way to make and share TV.
We are seeing that generational gap more and more on The Pitt.
Joy, for me, is a great character. Her just clocking off and leaving is, like…that is so healthy mentally in preventing burnout. Javadi, having grown up in the hospital system, she almost—quote unquote—“knows not to behave like that.” It’s almost so ingrained in the system because of her privileges that she finds other ways to combat the negative impacts it has on her without actually changing the system. So I’m excited for characters like Joy to actually change the system.
We learn that Javadi is considering going into emergency psychiatry as her specialty. How does that make you feel about where her storyline could go?
I’m talking to doctors about her chosen specialty, and I’m fascinated. One of the reasons I enjoy playing her so much is that it’s easy to play genius by playing genius as opposed to playing genius by playing lonely and isolated and socially struggling. Over these few seasons, we’ve seen her not move away from the intellectual but know she’s already got it. There’s nothing really to play with there that we haven’t already seen. I figured out the whole case! That’s been done in TV before. But she’s really pushing herself. Emergency psych is no fucking joke. People don’t last very long in that field. So I’m very excited to see her try something she’s not primed to be amazing at.
It’s interesting thinking back to where she started—she had to be reminded that the patient had to be awake for one of the psychologists to do their job.
I love that she’s not somebody who ever shies away from being bad at something. Her psych cases, they’re a real challenge for her. She’s not somebody who’s only going to do things she’s good at. She’s kind of cooler than that.
