The Airport Chaplain and The Pitt: Shabana Azeez is OK with playing divisive characters

Even when they’re quiet, airports are strange and hectic places.

On the one hand, it’s a liminal space, a weigh station between you and your holiday or work adventure, but on the other, it’s rife for stress.

Perhaps those last-minute preparations at home were frantic and now your flight is delayed, or you’re a nervous flyer, or maybe you’re starving and you’re still waiting for your McDonald’s cheeseburger (18 minutes and counting) but your boarding was just called.

Chances are, while all that turmoil is swirling around you and your cortisol levels are spiking, unless you’ve needed one, you’ve never noticed the airport chaplain running around the joint. You probably didn’t even know they existed.

The airport chaplain is someone who provides non-denominational pastoral care to the all the people who transit through this microcosm, as well the workers who are there every day. It’s a role that might deal with death on a plane or someone who helps retrieve a handbag left behind in an Uber.

That latter scenario is how new SBS series The Airport Chaplain came about after the chaplain at Melbourne Airport, now one of the only two remaining in Australia, helped a woman who turned out to be a TV producer.

The experience sparked the kernel of an idea and the series stars Hugo Weaving in the titular role and Shabana Azeez as the new manager, whose handbag on screen is the same one that was left in the Uber in real life, sent into the clean things up and turn around a struggling business.

That’s the conflict at the centre of the show, how to reconcile the need to turn a profit from operations that should essentially be a public service.

Azeez, the Australian actor best known for playing an American student doctor in the hugely popular and acclaimed US series The Pitt, warned that The Airport Chaplain has its warm and fuzzy moments, but it’s also stressful.

It’s not going to be easy arrival for her character, Mira, who represents the “new guard”.

“Things need to change, people need to be let go, they need to be restructured, and so I’m the ‘bad guy’ who has to come in and do that really impossible task of managing people who are mad at me all the time,” Azeez told The Nightly.

Azeez is 29 years old but broke through only 18 months ago for playing a 20-year-old, is an interesting casting choice, because she looks younger than her age, and that brings a deeper dimension to the dynamic between her character and Weaving’s, Tobias.

One a young interloper and the other an established figure beloved by the airport staff.

The challenges of being a young woman in charge is something Azeez was keen to explore when she took the role.

“There are a lot of challenges that nobody really wants to acknowledge in the workforce, so I hope we get to shed light on that a little bit,” she said.

“There was a year in Australia when we had more chief executives named Andrew than we had female CEOs. Women are really under-represented in leadership, that is a gate-kept part of the world.

“When you have social biases that work against you, that job is incredibly hard. You’re going to have worse outcomes by no fault of your own, working against these systems that are stacked up against you.”

Azeez described her character as an “antagonistic force” in Tobias’ life, and Mira is kind but not nice.

“We often expect niceness from women. We expect them to be subservient, deferential and accommodating, and she’s not accommodating everyone’s needs in every moment because that’s literally impossible to do, and not her job.

“She catches more flak for that than necessarily other people in her position might.”

The trope of the likeable woman on screen should be anachronistic but it’s not, and Mira won’t be the first character she’s played that might be divisive to audiences.

On The Pitt, her character, Victoria Javadi, is a doctor who is a child genius but can still seem naïve at times. Javadi’s foray into TikTok influencing was a subplot in the show’s second season, which overall generated a heated online discourse.

“I’m trying to stay away from the internet,” Azeez said. “I’m trying and failing to stay away from the internet, I should say.

“It’s really important that there is discourse because people are talking about The Pitt in really complex ways, talking about healthcare, talking the things we’re representing which is insurance in America, biases against women and violence against female health workers.

“It’s so beautiful we’re having a material impact in the world, that’s incredible.”

But the conversation can turn ugly, and Azeez has had to remind herself that it’s not her job to be appealing to everyone.

“I remember reading a script and thinking, ‘Oh, people are going to hate my character when she does this’, and then I thought, ‘That’s not helpful, Shabana, do not try to be palatable, don’t try to be easy to watch’.

“You have to lean into what the scene means and what the story is. If that means you being disliked on the internet or if they say, ‘her character is mean and ugly’, that just has to be OK.

“I wish people weren’t like that on the internet and people were more balanced, but that’s ultimately not my domain. I don’t do my job on the internet, I do my job on set.”

She’s a big fan of considered discourse about art, and if everyone agreed with you all the time when it comes to a widely watched show like The Pitt, then they didn’t do their jobs.

“To push culture, to move the needle, there’s going to be tension there. That’s important, that’s different from hating on people for what they look like, for example. I don’t understand the social value of that.”

In that sense, there’s a parallel to Mira on The Airport Chaplain. Not everyone is going to agree with her, and she’s there to challenge people with the ultimate goal of helping the airport survive.

Even if that means she can come off as a little prickly in a position that people aren’t always comfortable with having a young woman hold.

“I really hope women in leadership are able to watch the show and feel seen and feel better about themselves. You can’t be perfect in impossible circumstances.”

The Airport Chaplain is on SBS and SBS on Demand from August 26