In The Pitt Season 1 Episode 12, student doctor Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez) has a pretty big moment. Or, well, she has a big series of moments. The same goes for every single one of the series’ characters, main and otherwise, when the hospital starts treating a flood of patients following a mass shooting at a local festival. But, specific to Javadi, she not only proves herself to be kind of a creative genius under pressure — she also goes off on her overbearing mother. (Deserved, by the way.) So, to kick off our interview with Azeez, we asked what her character might have been thinking just after that outburst.
“There’s something about [having] a parent in a space like that, when…your world is in crisis, and you’re in crisis, and there’s somebody criticizing you for not being perfect when you’re just…you’re doing your best — and your best is enough right now — that’s so painful,” Azeez told us. Also of note, Javadi “doesn’t really raise her voice very, very often,” meaning, it’s taken “a lot for her” to have gotten to the point where she snaps at Dr. Shamsi at all. So, to answer the question of her feeling immediately after telling her mom to “read the F—ing room,” Shabana Azeez thinks “it’s the embarrassment of…having been heard in that way or…not having been perfect in that moment.”
But she’s also concerned with moving on. “This chest tube needs to be done. These people need to be helped, and there’s blood everywhere. And that’s not easy for her, but she has to just overcome everything. She has to overcome this social stuff; she has to overcome Mateo being here.” (That last part about Mateo, said with a laugh.) Most importantly, “she has to overcome all the blood and save this person’s life. And she does it.” This happens despite the fact that “Javadi has never necessarily been in crisis like this before,” which makes her ability to get through it even more impressive. “In this situation, the fact that she steps up is insane.”
In fact, Shabana Azeez told us that during Dr. Robby’s big briefing explaining all the zones, “our director, Amanda Marsalis (our Lord and Savior)…was like, ‘Shabana, I want you to be trying to figure out a way out of this hospital right now…I want you to be trying to escape.'” And the actress agreed with that note because Javadi thinks “there’s no way she’s going to be helpful.” After all, “she’s fainted at the sight of blood this morning. All day, “she’s had a really rough time. This is not the place for her — she’s not sure if she wants to keep being a doctor. And then, for her to step up time and time again and be able to laterally think and problem solve is, I think, really impressive.”
MORE: We also interviewed Gerran Howell about The Pitt‘s other student doctor…and his particularly messy first day in the ER.
Shabana Azeez on preparing for The Pitt‘s gun violence episodes
It’s been pretty well publicized that actors on The Pitt went through a medical “boot camp” of sorts before filming the series. But how did actors prepare for these mass shooting scenes — the filming of which Azeez called “intense” and with something “like a hundred new bodies” on set? Is there even any way to prepare for something like that? (Aside from, you know, constantly hearing about such events in the news far too often if you happen to live in the U.S.)
“Because I’m not American,” Azeez told us, “I asked the writers for some resources about gun violence, specifically what they’d been working towards, because there’s just so much gun violence in America. And it’s also different. And it is so much.” Coming from Australia, where the response to gun violence was quite different than here, Azeez admitted to being “so overwhelmed.”
“And so, I did a lot of research on gun violence” and spent time “figuring out for Javadi…she’s 20. So, she would have gone through shooter drills and what that does to a person,” including having “the level of PTSD she already has going into this situation. So, that was sort of the research I did — trying to figure out what this type of violence means to an American kid. And yeah, that was…that was a lot.”
(Side note: Jealous of her not having to live in “no way to prevent this” land, actually.)
When we asked for a teaser for the rest of the season and how this mass shooting arc plays out, Azeez didn’t have one. But she did have some advice and a little bit of a wish for how this storyline impacts viewers. First off, the advice: “don’t eat while you’re watching it.” Now, the wish: “As much as it could be an event where people go, ‘that was so intense and crazy. I need to forget it after it’s over and go on with my life,’ I hope you remember. And I hope you think about it. I hope it stays with you.”
That doesn’t only apply to the gun violence aspect either: “There is something about [how] you go into the ED and it’s the worst day of your life because you’re at your worst, right? You’re [there because] something’s broken, you’re injured, you’re hurt, you’re sick. And these people are there day in, day out, and they see the worst of us. And they come back and keep going…I think they’re heroes — and I’m going to cry thinking about it — but I hope it changes our relationship to health care workers, this show.”
MORE: Read our Taylor Dearden interview for some insight into how Mel handles some of the more difficult cases this season.
On hopes for Javadi in The Pitt Season 2
With the news of The Pitt Season 2 officially happening, we wondered what Shabana Azeez would want for her character going forward. “I’m the only person on the cast who didn’t get a patient” in Season 1, she told us, joking “you faint one time!” So, definitely let’s get Javadi her own “big case.” Possibly more important than that, though, “I want her to make a friend.”
Since “she graduated school so young, she’s been so much younger than all her peers [and] going through all this stuff relatively isolated.” She also can’t share in “all their coping mechanisms. If people are going to bars, she can’t do that.” Because of all this, Javadi’s “a really great exploration of the loneliness epidemic in young people. And I hope that we get to think about that a bit more.”
Azeez also noted that we’ve seen how the character is “not blinded by her ego.” She’s spent a whole day proving “she doesn’t shy away” from things she knows will be difficult or that she might fail at. Javadi’s kinda like the person who will go, “this boy makes me really nervous, but I’m going to ask him out 13 times in a row” anyway. Because of this, throughout the day, “I think she learns her lessons in a way that I think is really admirable. And I hope we get to see more of that.”
MORE: Ever wonder why Dr. Santos is like…that? Maybe our Isa Briones interview will help.
Watch our full interview with Shabana Azeez here
You can watch Shabana Azeez in The Pitt on Max, with new episodes streaming each Thursday at 9/8c through the end of Season 1.
