In partnership with Burberry

Shabana Azeez arrives to our interview in a vintage jacket with bleached eyebrows — a fairly stark contrast to the hospital scrubs many have come to know her in through her role on The Pitt. The eyebrows, she tells me, are a compromise.

“I want to shave my hair off,” she says. “But I’m not allowed to do anything. I really want to do it for work — like, shave my head for a job. I just want to look cool.” She might not feel it, but for all intents and purposes, Azeez already is.

Perhaps a descriptor the 29-year-old actress might feel more comfortable with is busy. Right now, Azeez is in Australia on a press tour for her upcoming series, The Airport Chaplain, which recently wrapped filming in Melbourne. In June, she'll head back to the US to begin filming for season three of The Pitt. She's managed to squeeze in a brief and welcome reprieve at her parents' house in Adelaide – which she describes as both “aggressively normal” and “humbling” — but has since been spending more time in Sydney thanks to a new project she can’t yet talk about.

But despite her jam-packed schedule, Azeez isn’t entirely on board with calling herself successful, either. So much of the language forming around her career right now — it’s hard to find a sentence online that doesn’t pair her name with the word “breakout” — feels, to her, premature. “I’m really wary of deciding what something means in the moment,” she says. “That’s what happens in retrospect.”

Of course, “breakout” also implies something less complicated than the reality; flattening the often uneven path so many young actors find themselves on as they break into the industry. It’s a trajectory that feels particularly charged for Australians working overseas, far from the places and people they know best. "I remember getting to the US to shoot season one [of The Pitt] and realising that I wouldn't have a hug from somebody that I was already comfortable with until December," Azeez recalls.

Nor could she have predicted that The Pitt would explode into one of the most successful medical dramas in recent history, earning 13 Emmy nominations and five wins in its first season. "Nobody knew we were making [the show] and nobody cared," she laughs. "Fame didn't exist as a concept. It was just freedom. We were just making stuff."

That desire to create is palpable when Azeez emerges on set for RUSSH, wrapped in a Burberry trench for the first shot of the day. There’s a paradox in the idea of a garment that has endured more than 170 years, being worn by an actor still early in defining what longevity looks like on her own terms. But running through the streets of Sydney as daylight begins to fade, she holds herself with an ease beyond her years — composed, steady, entirely present.

The acclaim of The Pitt led her to land her next project, SBS's The Airport Chaplain, but Azeez is quick to emphasise that it didn’t dull the nerves of starting again. She plays Carmen — a 34-year-old single mother working in airport management — navigating a workplace made more volatile by her subordinate, Airport Chaplain Tobias (Hugo Weaving).

“It was scary scary,” she says immediately when I ask about her first day on set. “Hugo Weaving? Scary. Oh my God. Could you imagine working with Hugo Weaving?”

Luckily there was no real time to ruminate on that nervousness. She landed in Melbourne from Los Angeles and went straight into a three-hour fitting. Still, any fatigue she might have felt didn’t obscure the instinct that drew her to the project. Azeez tends to talk about work in terms of intention rather than outcome. She's more concerned with how her characters might make you feel, than whether the project itself will be a runaway success. She speaks with the fervor of someone truly passionate about their craft: "Fiction changes your brain chemistry. It changes you as a person. It helps you grow, it helps you understand other parts of the world. And so I really want every story I tell to have an impact, a mission statement — a really strong ‘why."

In The Airport Chaplain, that “why” is particularly charged. Set within the controlled chaos of an airport, the series is less about actual operations than authority — who is trusted to hold it, who is questioned, how easily it can be undermined. For Azeez’s character, that tension is constant: a young female manager navigating a system where leadership is rarely taken at face value, and where competence must be continually proven.

Without any real corporate experience to draw from, Azeez turned to TED Talks and leadership podcasts, immersing herself in a world that felt both distant and uncomfortably familiar. “Management is such a social job, but women are so socially on the back foot because of how society has biases against women… and how people struggle to see women as authority figures,” she says, adding thoughtfully, “I look so young, and I’m a woman of colour.”

It's true that Azeez is one of few Asian-Australian actresses breaking through on this scale right now, though her thoughts about on-screen representation are refreshingly simple. She beams, for example, talking about Kavitha Anandasivam, one of her co-stars in The Airport Chaplain, who became a close friend only after beating Azeez out for a role in SBS's The Hunting.

“You can have community without competition,” she says simply. “Like, what’s the beef?”

PHOTOGRAPHER Jake Terrey @ Hart & Co. 

FASHION Hannah Cooper 

TALENT Shabana Azeez  

HAIR Kieren Street @ AP—REPS  

MAKEUP Isabella Schimid 

STYLIST’S ASSISTANT Koby Dulac-Daley