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.
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