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Shabana Azeez thinks fame is bad for your health.
Not that she'd call herself famous.
But since landing the role of medical student Victoria Javadi on HBO Max's The Pitt — a show that swept last year's awards season, taking home five Emmys and two Golden Globes — the 29-year-old Adelaidian has had a front-row seat to what being a rising star actually does to a person.
For Azeez, the experience has brought an expected lesson about success: even as her career takes off in Hollywood, home — and the ordinariness that comes with it — remains her way of keeping perspective.
"I think fame is bad for your health," Azeez tells SBS News.
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"It's not that I'm famous or anything — thank God — but there is that kind of thing starting and happening in these small ways. It's bad for you."
Her medicine? Home.
I feel very grateful that I can just opt out and wash my hands of it and go back to Adelaide, Australia, where nobody really cares except to tease me about it.
"I think it's really good for your soul to get off the chessboard a little bit," she says.
It's a grounded way to talk about a career that, by any measure, is having a moment.
The Pitt turned Azeez into one of the more closely watched Australian acting newcomers in recent years — a stardom made stranger by the fact that she remained largely incognito at home even as the show became an international hit.
The series has since been renewed for a third season, giving Azeez another opportunity to build on the role that brought her to a global audience.
When she flew to Los Angeles to shoot the medical drama, she wasn't chasing a long-held plan, and she certainly wasn't arriving fresh out of drama school — she'd actually been rejected from one years earlier.
She got there through a mix of good luck and bad: a safer arts admin job after drama school rejection, then a boss who, sensing her heart wasn't in the work, booked her an audition for a short film without asking (thankfully, she landed it).
That opportunity pulled her into Adelaide's indie filmmaking scene, eventually leading to her feature debut in 2023's Birdeater and, after the film screened internationally, to US representation and an audition for The Pitt.
Growing up in Adelaide, the daughter of Indo-Fijian migrants, Azeez never really considered acting an option.
"The narrative was: do not become an actor, so help me, God," she says of her parents' position.
But she understands why.
"It's not unreasonable for migrant parents — who've given up their culture and their home to give you financial stability, security and safety — it's not unreasonable for them to say, 'I gave up everything to give you safety. Please don't mess this up.'"
Even now, as her profile continues to rise, Azeez talks about the industry as if she's still waiting for her luck to run out.
"It works out for very few actors. This is not a job people can do full-time for a wage — you hit the jackpot or you don't," she says. "It might all go away tomorrow — there's no guarantee."
I had enough privilege as a child that I could choose the thing I loved, and I'm so grateful for that.
Feeling like an alien
That first year in Los Angeles filming The Pitt was, on paper, her dream coming true. In practice, it felt more like grief.
"I spent the first year I was here just being devastated and feeling the injustice that my family's not from here, that other people can live out their dreams of being an actor and don't have to leave everything they know behind," she says.
I felt like such an alien the first year I was here. I just desperately wanted my people who understood me.
What eventually helped her find her footing was keeping one foot firmly in the life she's left behind. Each Christmas, she flies back to Adelaide, where her newfound success is treated less like an achievement and more like material for a stand-up comedy show.
"If somebody asked me a question at Christmas, before I could answer, my uncle would go, 'Action!'," she says.
"It's a thing we play for laughs.
"Now, I'm so grateful for the deeply aggressively normal circumstances of my childhood. I feel very grounded when I go home to Adelaide."
A role for her mum
Azeez's next project brought her back to Australian soil for a different reason.
In The Airport Chaplain, Azeez plays Mira Ansari-Cole — the new airport manager of a bustling international terminal, clashing with veteran fixer Tobias Wallace (Hugo Weaving), whom she sees more as a liability than a saviour.
The eight-part SBS Original drama, filmed in Melbourne, premieres on SBS and SBS On Demand on 26 August before streaming globally on Netflix outside Australia.
It's Azeez's first major role back home since her international breakout.
She doesn't have children and jokes that she can't even keep plants alive, but playing a working mother in a leadership role still pulled her close to home.
"Growing up, my mum loved her job and left her job to take care of us because she didn't have enough help to be able to work and take care of the kids," she says.
She sacrificed that for me, and it was devastating to watch even when I was eight.
She sees little that's changed since, pointing to how much harder and more expensive it's become to raise children while working: "It's really abysmal that it's no better for women now."
In every role she takes on, Azeez talks about impact: Lesbian Space Princess was a vehicle for queer joy, The Pitt was a show centred on the pressures facing healthcare workers. The Airport Chaplain, she says, is for working mums.
"My career has been about representing young women as messy and still worthy of empathy. Now as I get older, that's where I want my career to go."
That framing shapes how she relates to Mira.
"I think it's really important that women don't have to be nice to be likeable or even just to be respected — you shouldn't have to be nice or gentle or accommodating," she says. "For me, that was Mira's quiet power — not pandering to the old way of doing things."
It's a lesson she's trying to take into her own life.
"I want everybody to be happy and I want to be easy to work with … but it's impossible to go into work with 200 people every day and to have all of them be pleased with you in every single moment."
"That's hypervigilance that I think I need to get rid of."
Not proud to be first
Azeez is acutely aware of what her presence on screen can mean to other people, particularly Australian women of colour who rarely see themselves centred in Australian television and film.
"It's such an honour to make people's lives better, to make people less alone, to make people feel like they can dream," she says.
"It's really hard to be mentorless and not see any pathways forward for where you want to go — so in any way that I can help people feel like they're not living on the tightrope between two cultures, that they're actually living on a superhighway with a bunch of other people on it — that's an honour."
But she resists being cast as a trailblazer.
I'm not somebody who finds any pride in being the first to do anything because I think it's lonely and sad.
"It just means that if you are the person who finally gets a seat at the table, it means you're sitting at the table with a bunch of people who don't understand where you came from."
Her reluctance to embrace the label reflects the tension of being called a 'first', when that recognition can also carry the weight of what it took to get there.
"[If people say] I'm the first Fijian-Indian person to do something, I think that it's actually not impressive. It's heartbreaking for everybody who came before me.
"I'm happy for the impact I'm having on anybody who's going to come after me, but it's not a thing of pride. I'm proud — but I'm not proud."
The Airport Chaplain premieres Wednesday 26 August on SBS and SBS On Demand. The first two episodes will premiere on SBS at 8.30pm on 26 August, with double episodes continuing to air weekly on Wednesdays at 8.30pm.
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