I Hate Suzie's Leila Farzad: 'For a generation of Middle Easterners, acting is not respectable' ⬇️ The actor talks typecasting, representation and why she hasn’t told her grandma what she does
It’s the first day of December’s cold snap and Leila Farzad is reflecting on school nativity play disappointment: “I wanted to be Mary so desperately, but there were a lot of blondies who got it,” she recalls. “I remember my mum saying she actually would have looked more Middle Eastern. But I did have one eyebrow and a lisp so I get it. It would have been an odd choice.
But Farzad quickly discovered she could make people laugh and ended up playing a catalogue of villains and male roles in school plays, “because of the hairy face”. After obtaining a degree in French and Italian literature from Oxford, mainly to appease her mother, she finally went to Guildhall to study drama but emerged into an industry that, like her school, was confounded by a young Iranian actress: “This is a very contentious thing to say but I felt for a while that they didn’t know what to do with Middle Eastern… They’d say I looked Italian. And yeh, we do – a lot of the Middle East does look Mediterranean.
In fact, Farzad’s grandmother in LA still thinks she is a nutritionist: “We haven’t told her I’m an actor. She’s old and isn’t really connected and she would affiliate it with prostitution. I think for a generation of Middle Easterners, you do not want your daughter to go and be an actor – it’s not a respectable profession. My mum is now super proud but there was stuff in
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