Playing Victoria Javadi on The Pitt Taught Shabana Azeez About Bravery

ustralian actress Shabana Azeez didn’t realize how much her life would change when she was cast as 20-year-old medical student Victoria Javadi on The Pitt. “I have so much in common with her—and then she’s so different from me in so many ways,” she says of her character on the award-winning HBO Max emergency room drama ahead of the season two premiere. “She’s really in her own world, she’s super intellectual, but she loves romance and fantasy and that she’s living in a fake brain. I’m really lucky to get a role that’s so complex and nuanced.”

The actress, the daughter of Fijian Indian parents, studied at the University of Adelaide and predominately worked in the indie scene in Australia; she never imagined her Hollywood breakthrough would happen like this. “This was a big leap for me,” she says. “I’ve never done a season two of anything. I’ve never worked for seven months straight. I do two months indie shoots, max, that’s the experience.” The Pitt has been “so much bigger than I ever thought,” Azeez continues. “I’m from a small town on the opposite side of the earth. To drive to work and see the Hollywood sign is really wild—and then to go to work with people whose work I’ve watched as a kid is, it could be a lot of pressure if they weren’t so careful about building an environment that is warm and safe and collaborative.”

I did a lot of research on PTSD; [especially] PTSD in a group setting. It’s a really specific thing, acting on this show, because you’re seeing these characters on one day of the year in one environment, in their workplace, all the time. And that’s it. That’s all you see. But people are so… I’m not who I am at work all the time. I’m not who I am at work, [when I’m] on a date, with my friends, or with my parents. And so trying to find ways to show the complexity of a person in this one very contained environment is an interesting challenge.

I like to do all the work around it so that the stuff you see—you only see a small slice of the pie—but I hope that slice is as specific and nuanced as it can be. And so I listen to a lot of Olivia Rodrigo, a lot of the young women. For me, playing the Gen Z character and representing that age range in this ensemble where she’s the only person that that young is really important. Young women are so maligned in society, [but] young women are the most influential group in terms of purchasing power and culture. They make culture in a way that’s really not acknowledged by us as a wide slightest.

Check out the rest of her amazing interview here:

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a69852264/shabana-azeez-the-pitt-interview-2026/