No one could’ve prepared for the sensational effect of The Pitt and how it’s taken off.
The hit medical drama is one of the year’s greatest series. It is heralded for its realism, authenticity, and ability to genuinely spotlight first responders as real medical heroes while telling their stories.
The Pitt bolsters an impressive cast of talented individuals playing a wide array of compelling characters whom viewers have instantly responded to, none more so than the interns who have embarked on what has to be the longest, most stressful first shift in history.
Seriously!
We had the opportunity to catch up with Shabana Azeez, who plays the socially awkward prodigy Victoria Javadi, about her journey on the series, the impact of playing a character like Javadi, and the mass shooting event.
Check it out below!
The Pitt has been wildly successful and acclaimed. So, what attracted you to the role, and how have you reacted to the positive response?
It’s been so wild seeing the positive response to it. I’m so grateful because it’s such a beautiful show to work on, and that’s not always the case. So it’s — just the fact that all these lovely people are getting all their flowers….
It’s a really important show as well. There’s a real message as we go into these episodes, and I’m glad people engage with it. And with Javadi, I love a smart girl, so I was very excited to play her.
I love her, too. She’s a very compelling character.
How do you think her experience as this prodigy shaped or even hampered her ability to manage the social component of treating patients and working with colleagues?
It’s really interesting, and she’s really interesting to play as a performer. She’s so smart, but there are some deficits. The better somebody is at something, the worse they are at other things. And that is a very exciting part for me to play.
Her social interaction, her inability to read social cues, or how new she is to having a community is fun and exciting.
She is so book-smart, but she lacks social awareness. My secondhand embarrassment when she was third-wheel to Mateo and McKay had me burying myself under the covers!
Oh, that was so embarrassing to shoot. Yeah, there’s something about her being peerless. She’s so peerless growing up around people older than her all the time.
She’s always been sort of a party trick for her parents. I think it’s really hard to say, “I’m going to try to behave with these people who are much older than me as if we’re peers.” And how do I navigate that?
And I’m not watching anybody else navigate this because everybody else is the right age they’re supposed to be. But what’s really special about Javadi is that it doesn’t stop her from trying.
She’s somebody who’s been validated for being so good at this one thing her whole life. And that doesn’t matter. She’s still able to fail and fail and fail and try again and get up and try again and get up and try again. I don’t know that you can say that for many people.
I agree. Of course, we’ve seen that she has a tense relationship with her mother.
Can you talk a bit about maybe the pressure she feels? I can never tell if she’s trying to impress her mother, be like her, distinguish herself from her, or all of the above.
Yeah, exactly. All of the above. All weaved in with each other.
In my head, Javadi graduated high school so young and then put her foot down and said, “I want to do college, and I want to do med school at the pace that it’s done. I don’t want to accelerate these things.”
For her, finding community, having friends, and making connections is really important. Aileen doesn’t necessarily understand that or the price Javadi had to pay for her brilliance and for how her mother pushed her into doing things faster and better and being impressive. Javadi’s over being impressive.
She just wants to be part of the team, which is why this first day at work is so important. By the end of the day, she is part of the team, which is massive for me.
But I hope that, over time and in season two, her mom will learn to understand her more and realize the price of how loneliness because she’s been acting in the ways that her mother wants her to act.
One of this series’s most exciting aspects has been the diversity. It feels very authentic. There are so many incredible characters of color. There’s so much neurodivergence. There are so many languages. There’s just some of everything.
What’s it been like being part of this project that excels at resonating with a diverse audience?
Isn’t it wild?! First of all, I was so shocked that I was auditioning to play a character like this because she’s such a “young man trope.” The kid genius is always a boy, like Doogie Howser.
It’s always a Sheldon. Then, she’s the person who’s pursuing a romantic connection, which is also a thing that she’s very awkward and bumbling, like Seth Cohen.
She’s an amalgamation of all these boyish things. And then they got me to play it, which is crazy to me. Beyond that, I got to work, and I was like, “Oh, Supriya [Ganesh] is here.”
She’s another Brown woman. It’s so rare to work with other Brown women and not play sisters or have people talk about it. “Oh, isn’t it so crazy that there’s two Brown people here in a hospital where there’s always so many Brown people?”
So that was so lovely. And it was very much a testament to these men, like Noah [Wyle], John Wells, and Scott [Gemmill], our showrunner.
They opened the door for all of us, and they opened the door wider than anybody’s ever opened it before. Yes, there’s diversity. And then there are layers of it, depth to it, and meaning in it. It’s really beautiful.
We have this massive mass shooting event. What can you tease about that moving forward? I am already on edge about that. It’s been stressful enough.
I’m really looking forward to seeing people’s reactions to these episodes. Scott, the showrunner, worked really hard and spent a lot of time figuring out how we’re going to approach this subject matter because it’s uniquely American.
For me, it was shocking to come into it and start researching gun violence because it’s not my reality at all from where I’m from.
I hope people treat it with the sensitivity that the subject matter deserves. There is this level of desensitization in America to this kind of violence. I was shocked by it when I got there.
Because it’s horrifying, bizarre, and preventable to me, I like that we’re not focusing on the shooter. We’re not glorifying anything.
We’re not going, “You know, there are morbid parts of us. I want to know why. I want to know who did this.” That doesn’t matter here. These are the stories of the people who, during these crises, get up and go to work and often traumatize themselves.
First responders experience intense PTSD from this kind of event. We see that with the COVID episodes and how that affects Robby, Dana, and, to an extent, Abbott.
I’m excited for people to see how these kinds of events affect the people who work them. I don’t know that we talk about that much in culture, and I don’t know that we really focus on the people who drive the ambulances into those spaces.
Following up on that, how do you think your perspective of first responders changed just being part of a show like this and being exposed to their experiences?
Massively changed. The more I learned, the more I went, “Oh, I don’t know that I have what it takes.” I hope that the show helps people see what it’s like and have empathy for people.
The whole Doug Driscoll storyline, being part of that, how people don’t have empathy when they’re having their worst day. That’s what the ER is, right? For all the patients coming into the ER, it’s the worst day of their fucking life because they are injured, hurt, in pain, whatever it is.
And when you’re experiencing the worst, you don’t behave your best. I really hope that people take that away from the show. I hope that people see what it’s like and find the strength to become nurses or doctors because those are really intense jobs, or at least value them.
What’s been your proudest moment being part of this show?
Oh God, what’s my proudest moment? Honestly, just the accent. I was proud of myself, but it was also my first American show.
I’m proud of being part of something where it was such a beautiful place to work. There’s no system in place like that on a John Wells show where you cannot have an ego, and you cannot be an asshole.
We don’t have chairs for people to sit at. We all sit together in a common room and talk to everybody. There are no hierarchies, and we all do background work. And so there was a real sense of family on set. Being part of something like that was special because sets can be really hierarchical.
What was the most challenging for you?
Obviously, it was challenging in so many ways, but I think everybody worked to make the experience easy. I actually don’t even have an answer. I had the best time, though.
For Javadi, probably the most challenging thing is Mateo existing.
Sometimes, depicting those awkward scenes with Mateo. I’m like, “Why would you say I’m free Sunday? Why would you say that?”
Those scenes, trying to pitch them in a way that felt really true and not playing them for laughs and playing them genuinely, honestly. “He’s just so pretty. I can’t focus.” That was challenging.
We would do those things, and everybody would start laughing at me. So even doing it, I was like, “Well, this is so embarrassing.”
Will we get to see Javadi rise to the occasion, maybe in some of the remaining episodes? She’s had some really great moments so far.
For me, because of her, you know, issues with blood, I think just getting through this day is such an achievement for her.
It’s also really interesting because I think people go, “Oh, that child prodigy.” And they think she’s going to be so impressive. And she is so impressive. I think she shows that time and again.
But I think, constitutionally, she’s not the strongest in terms of her reflexes. Her just getting through the day is massive for her. And I hope that she’s proud of herself for that. I hope that her mom sees that, you know?
Yeah. That’s a great message from this show, in general. “Just get through the day.“
We judge ourselves also for the things we’re best at. We expect ourselves to be as excellent as we are at the thing we’re best at. But Javadi is a great example of a smart person, but she’s not thinking about that right now.
She’s trying to connect and build community, and she’s not very good at that. She’s also trying not to pass out during this mass casualty event.
And she’s not so good at that. And so I think that those efforts, those bits of us that are worst, like at our worst, I think when we just persevere, that is a massive achievement.
We edited this interview for length and clarity.
Over to you, Pitt Fanatics. What are your thoughts on Javadi?
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