SBS’s new drama The Airport Chaplain starts this week staring Hugo Weaving alongside The Pitt‘s breakout star and Adelaide’s own Shabana Azeez
Shabana Azeez said: “I’m so thrilled to be joining this incredibly iconic Australian TV team to work on The Airport Chaplain. What an honour to be bringing such a quirky, diverse cast of characters to life, in a world we all know so well. Airports are such connective places, and The Airport Chaplain is such a timely and heartwarming story – I can’t wait for it to be on our screens.”
The Airport Chaplain is about Tobias Wallace (Hugo Weaving) a fixer with a constantly ringing phone, pockets full of cash and an unorthodox approach to the daily crises unfolding inside the terminal. Convinced the airport couldn’t run without him, Tobias has never encountered a problem he couldn’t solve. Until he meets his formidable new boss Mira (Shabana Azeez), who deems him a walking liability. Their clash sparks a power struggle that reverberates through the terminal, affecting the cleaners, baggage handlers, and passengers, who are all navigating their own hopes and challenges amid the constant chaos of life in the airport. Weaving and Azeez lead a stellar ensemble cast, including Claudia Karvan and Thomas Weatherall
Glam Adelaide was lucky to be able to ask Shabana Azeez a few questions about The Airport Chaplain and her career so far.
Q: What attracted you to the role of Mira in The Airport Chaplain?
It was a big scary challenge. I think to me, as an artist, or just actually for anybody, it’s good to be challenged. You don’t want to only do things you know you’re going to be good at. So, I was very scared of it, and that was really lovely. And then for me, the team, I love an emerging director and like a new voice. Australia is at a stage where it’s figuring out who we are on a global scale, beyond our outback sort of aesthetic.
Q: What was it like working with Hugo Weaving and Claudia Karvan?
That’s some loomeries there, it was very scary. I didn’t really work in the Australian mainstream TV film space when I was here before The Pitt. I was making indies with my friends, working with new talent and so, it was really incredible to work with these people that I never thought I’d get to work with, I’ve watched them for years.
Q: What do you hope the audience takes away from your role as Mira in The Airport Chaplain?
Women are underrepresented in leadership positions in Australia, and women of colour even more so. People don’t see themselves in those roles, or those roles are not available to them.
We need to work on this because diversity all the way up the chain is where there are positive outcomes financially for business, positive outcomes in terms of the cultures of business. It’s an important thing that everybody’s invited and everybody has a seat at the table. Australia is such a multicultural place.
It’s interesting to explore the biases that she has to deal with at work and people’s assumptions about her.
Leadership management is a social job, and then you’re socially on the back foot based on the systems that are quite political in the country. It’s a fascinating thing to have to deal with and that’s when she is drip fed to us in the story, she starts off in episode one on her first day.
And so we don’t see much of her, and we slowly, slowly, across the show, start to see her perspective a little bit and I hope that audiences remember the biases they had about her in episode one, when they understand her more in episode eight. It’s an interesting thing for audiences to learn to have empathy for characters.
Q: The Airport Chaplain is filmed in an actual airport, did it change your perspective of airports?
I love airports. I got to go in and see the back end of the airport and how everything works behind the scenes, all the offices and all the security, It was really incredible because you see one side of the airport when you go to the airport, but to get invited into the back of it and have empathy for people that are working there and what they have to deal with, it was incredible.
Q: Becoming an actor wasn’t necessarily your life trajectory, but did you always have a secret acting ambition?
I had many dreams as a child, which is a classic actor wanting to do one thing, which was everything. I wanted to be a checkout operator and then I got to do that. It was really good, I really enjoyed it.
I want to be the person who doesn’t know what’s going on. And so I realised that acting is basically just research and performance.
I was very lucky that it worked out because it’s literally my dream job. I love working in studios. I love working on set. I love doing research and interviewing people.
Q: You started work at The Mercury in Adelaide and your boss helped you into acting. Is that correct?
I worked at the Mercury and I remember my boss one day said you know, you’re great, but this is clearly not your passion, what’s your passion? So I said I think I’d like to act. But I’ve never been on a film set.
Within an hour she got me an audition for a short film we were funding. And she said, go to this audition, you won’t get the lead, but what you should do is go to it and tell them you want to be a runner on a film set.
I ended up booking a role. It was my first short film and because it was Adelaide, that tape got shared around and some of them were Leela Varghese and Emma Hough Hobbs who made Lesbian Sex Princess a year later.
Shabana Azeez as medical student Victoria Javadi in The Pitt screening on HBO Max.
Q: How did the opportunity come about for The Pitt?
That was my second audition. Really, second audition, so it was very, very, very lucky.
I was ready to audition for five years for American casting directors for them to get to know me, build that trust, and then maybe finally in 2030, but I got very lucky. They didn’t want main actors, they were happy to cast the right people for the role.
Then when they wrote the ethnicity of the character for me, they really just believed in me, and it was a very relaxed casting process. I did not have to jump through hoops at all.
Q: There was a nine-minute Zoom meeting, and you felt disappointed that it was only nine minutes. You thought you blew it?
Casting never tells you that they like you, if you’re doing well.
In fact, if they say, oh thank you so much, you were so great, thank you, that means you did terribly, and they’re trying to make you feel better.
In nine minutes, we did one of the scenes twice, well it was the second scene from my audition, we didn’t even do it a second time. Then they said, we got it, that’s all we need.
Q: What’s next? What’s the next project?
The Pitt, season three. I’m happy to live out of a suitcase or a backpack in the Romanian wilderness, I’m happy to do anything.
The Airport Chaplain Premieres 26 August on SBS & SBS On Demand
