How Shabana Azeez Stays Grounded in The Airport Chaplain

Indo-Australian actress Shabana Azeez has spent the past year moving between two very different emergency environments. After starring in the Australian indie films Birdeater (2023) and Lesbian Space Princess (2025), Azeez crossed the globe to portray medical student Victoria “Doctor J” Javadi for two seasons on HBO’s back-to-back Emmy-winning drama The Pitt. After season two wrapped, Azeez flew back to Melbourne to star in The Airport Chaplain, a new Australian series set within the unusual, often unseen world of airport ministry and management. In the series, Azeez plays Mira Ansari-Cole, a young woman who begins a new administrative job at a major airport, only to find herself in a power clash with Tobias Wallace (Hugo Weaving, The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings), who has his own way of doing things.

“I knew reading the scripts, she gets drip-fed to us, sort of an antagonistic force, and then becomes a co-lead later on in the series,” Azeez says. “ I thought that was a really fun way to introduce a powerful female lead, because I think it plays to the audience’s expectations a lot.” Mira’s gradual introduction also allowed Azeez to explore the assumptions people make about women in positions of authority. “For a lot of women, particularly in positions of power in public spaces like being a manager in a workplace, a lot of people have opinions about her, who don’t necessarily know what she’s dealing with. And so there’s a lot of projection onto her.” That projection was something Azeez encountered even while making the series. She says she spoke with other actors and members of the crew about their early perceptions of Mira, whose interiority isn’t immediately apparent. “I think the scripts did a really good job of mimicking that experience in the way the characters were introduced,” Azeez says.

The actress also conducted firsthand research into the world of the series, visiting Melbourne Airport and meeting the real airport chaplain who inspired the story. The series itself grew out of the experiences of its creators, Elise McCredie and Jude Troy, including an encounter with an airport chaplain who helped after one of them accidentally left their bag in an Uber. “I had no idea that airport chaplains existed,” Azeez says. Azeez had the opportunity to meet chaplains, managerial staff and other airport personnel while seeing areas of the airport that passengers normally never encounter. “The experience of walking through an airport as a customer of the airport, working in that space is very different, because you’re in a transitionary space,” she says. “People don’t really think about it — nobody goes to the airport just to go to the airport. We’re going somewhere else.” That sense of transition also resonated with Azeez because of her experience on The Pitt. “Hospitals are the same. Nobody really wants to be there. They wanna get to the other side.” 

The transition from The Pitt to The Airport Chaplain was also very physically demanding. After wrapping the former, Azeez had only a few days to pack up her apartment before flying to Melbourne. She went directly from the airport into a three-hour costume fitting, followed by hair and makeup, additional fittings and then filming. “It was very, very intense,” Azeez says. The challenge was compounded by switching from the American accent she uses on The Pitt to a British accent for The Airport Chaplain. “I was so tired — more tired than I’ve ever been in my life. I remember my mouth not working. I can do accents, but I couldn’t get my mouth to work. I couldn’t get the muscles to activate. I was so tired.” Still, Azeez sees the experience as an important lesson in understanding her own physical limits — and as an unusual opportunity. “I think it’s very lucky that I got two opportunities that aligned for me,” Azeez says. “I’m very grateful that people in Australia believed in me to play this character that’s very different to the character I play in America.”

For Azeez, Mira also represents another step in an ongoing interest in playing women whose complexity isn’t immediately apparent. “People are gonna have biases about who my characters are,” Azeez says. “And then we sort of play with that, and we have fun and we humanize young women in TV.” Mira gives her the opportunity to explore that idea from a different perspective. “Mira does not trade on likability. She trades on competence,” Azeez says. In the first season, Mira is tasked with fixing a workplace in disarray, while people repeatedly withhold information from her and blame her for problems she didn’t create. “As soon as she learns things about the workplace, she does her job, and she does it well.”

Now hard at work on season three of The Pitt, which premieres in January 2027, Azeez hopes that if there is a second season of The Airport Chaplain, the series can delve even further into “what it is to be a woman in leadership a little more,” Azeez says. The Airport Chaplain is streaming now in the US on Netflix.

Read more film interviews by Patrick Gibbs:
Edie Arnold Is A Loser Brings Its Utah-Made Punk Comedy Home
Jess Bush on Christine Chapel’s Journey in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Four

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