When she was small, Leila Farzad spent every summer in Iran, hanging out at her grandma’s house and eating peaches and plums from the trees. The actor was born and raised in London, but this was her parents’ homeland, so it was a confusing shift each time her flight landed on the hot tarmac. “It was so familiar yet foreign,” she says. “It’s that strange thing of belonging in two places. Everyone had names like the people in my family and looked like the people I knew. There was so much cheek-pinching and meeting of random relatives.”
She’s now 44, with a career spanning from the perfect, pulverising feminist drama I Hate Suzie to weep-fest Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and she hasn’t been back to Iran since her teens. “My career choice was not the one to be going across to Iran with, and it got more complicated, and more dangerous … It’s strange to belong to a country that I cannot travel to myself.”
But her latest role has her powerfully reconnecting with the place where she spent her childhood summers. In the play Under the Shadow, an adaptation of the Bafta-winning 2016 horror film opening at the Almeida this month, she stars as a mother and aspiring doctor living through the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Set almost entirely within one apartment in Tehran, it’s a claustrophobic tale of a woman and her young daughter desperately trying to cope as war rages on outside their rattling windows. It’s poignant – and coincidental – that the play is on now, as Iranians once again deal with the daily trauma of shelling, and their dreams lie in the rubble. Back then, it was Iraq firing the missiles. Now, it’s the US and Israel.
Farzad was born in the betwixtmas of 1981, just over a year into the conflict in her parents’ home country. In the 1970s, Iran was run by a Western-backed, secular monarchy and was emulating, in Farzad’s words, “a little Paris”. But after the 1979 revolution, it became an Islamic Republic. Strict religious laws were put in place, women’s rights were reversed, and alliances with the US broke down. “Most Iranians speak in terms of either before the revolution or after the revolution,” says Farzad. “That’s the big punctuation mark in their lives.”
We meet at a rehearsal studio near the theatre, Farzad fresh from performing a candlelit “peak horror moment” in the show. But you wouldn’t know she’d been immersed in something so heavy. She’s all chatter, conversation swinging from family life to the unhealthiness of selfie culture, her outfit popping with colour from her gleaming gold jewellery to her double denim and white and yellow high-tops. For Under the Shadow, she’s working with a Sudanese director, Nadia Latif, and a Lebanese writer, Carmen Nasr. “We are three women, all with our own epigenetic trauma that we carry,” she says. “We come from countries that have struggled with such terrible wars and brutality, and here we are, sitting in a beautiful north London rehearsal space, trying to tell a story of what it is like to decide whether to leave or to stay.”
Farzad feels strange about her physical separation from Iran, especially at this time. “There’s a certain… not guilt, but something in experiencing it on my phone through a news article rather than understanding what it actually is to be there and not be able to get out. It’s an odd sort of melancholy that sits in my body when I can’t go, just because I’m an actress and I’ve worked for the BBC and played all sorts of characters. I have Iranian friends who would say, ‘You’re fine, you should go.’ But there is a risk that someone reads something about you and sees it as a reason to detain you.”
Difficult though the subject is, Farzad is glad to finally be telling a meaningful story about Iran, rather than being asked to play a terrorist’s wife. In the past, she found herself in countless auditions for roles like that with other women of Middle Eastern, Indian or Pakistani heritage. “For a while, my casting was more tokenistic,” she says, “I was representing the ‘other’.” Now, I’m not the other. This is an Iranian story set in Tehran.”
In Under the Shadow, scenes play out at the breakfast table and in front of Jane Fonda workout videos, not in the skies or the streets. “It’s the civilian experience of combat, rather than the heroic shot of men fighting for the cause,” says Farzad. She hopes British audiences will be able to relate to it because of the stifling effect of the pandemic. “You’re stuck at home with a little person, exasperated and exhausted,” says Farzad, who has an 11-year-old daughter. “You’re doing everything and trying to teach them and not lose your mind. I think people forget that sometimes war is boring when you’re just stuck at home and it’s been a quieter spell, and then suddenly there’s a terrible shelling and loads of people are killed. The inconsistency of war is so dysregulating for your nervous system.”
Motherhood is a strong theme in the play – in one sequence, Farzad’s character Shideh, at her wits’ end, forces herself to patiently play tea parties with her daughter. “She can’t wallow in ‘why me’, and ‘this is too hard’, and ‘I can’t’,” says Farzad. “There’s a child that needs looking after. There’s a house that needs to be looked after. There’s an enemy that may bomb you at any point.” Shideh can be quite cold towards her daughter. “She seems short and unnurturing and unloving sometimes, but it’s because she has no gas in the tank. There is a recognisable thread there, of when mothers just can’t mother for a bit, and have to reset.”
The challenges of parenting in the UK in 2026 are, of course, extremely relative, but still very real. A lot of the concerns are around how to manage phones, social media, and the rise of children’s skincare. “My daughter has been given skincare as gifts, and I’m like, ‘Nope!’ says Farzad, incredulous. “One of them was a cream that’s been proven to be a hormone disruptor in young children. Like, ‘What is going on?’” She knows her 11-year-old wants a phone, too. “She won’t be getting one for a very long time. Unless it’s a brick phone.”
As a mother today, “you have to keep your wits about you”, she says. “I don’t have any answers, but I think their brains are so used to short little snippets of stuff now, so you have to actively, like a hamstring, try to stretch their attention spans. I’ve been trying to get her to watch a lot of old films from the Eighties and Nineties, and she loves them.”
She’s part of a supportive community of fellow mothers who all check in with each other often. “We’re all hyper aware, which perhaps the parents 10 years ago were not. They’ve slightly panicked because they didn’t really know what the effects [of technology] were and how it was basically like crack for the brain. And you would never give crack to anyone, but particularly a child!”
Unlike Farzad when she was a child, her daughter loves being half-Iranian. “Now, ‘other’ is good,” says Farzad. “But in the Eighties, ‘other’ was bad, at least at my school. I wanted my mum to never make Persian food, just frozen pizzas. I really pushed away being Iranian. I wanted to be a blonde, blue-eyed girl called Arabella. I dyed my hair and straightened it and wore green contact lenses. At one point, I was going to change my surname.”
The name change, she’d thought, could help her move away from tokenistic casting. Farzad trained at Guildhall after studying modern languages at Oxford, but on leaving drama school, she found that all her peers were flying high and she was floundering. Was she frustrated? “Not really frustrated, more heartbroken,” she says, with a wince. “I had championed the idea of being an actor to my mum, I was on this mission, and then I just couldn’t get into the rooms. And when I did, I self-sabotaged. I felt like [the industry] was a closed, steel box and I couldn’t find an entry point. Weirdly, I didn’t suffer jealousy, but I suffered sadness – real, low sadness.”
She did some depressing jobs. One was a prank show with a rapper, where she had to play a waitress who kept spilling things. “It was neither funny nor quirky nor interesting,” she laughs. “It was tragic. And I remember a couple of my friends going, ‘Oh babe. Yeah, we watched it. It was so bad.’” Aware that these kinds of roles weren’t going to pay the bills, Farzad did language tutoring on the side, and even began training to become an intimacy coordinator.
Then, when Farzad was 37, I Hate Suzie came along. She had been about to throw the towel in entirely after “a very dry few years”. But when she was called in to audition for the role of Naomi, the funny, bolshy agent to Billie Piper’s spiralling actor, she fell in love with the character. Understandably, given the number of zingers she was gifted in the scripts. “If you’d told your best friend who you were banging,” Naomi told Suzie, “I would have thrown myself across his c**k like one of JFK’s bodyguards.” Farzad got a Bafta nod for the role.
“It took them a very long time to cast me,” says Farzad now, “because I was a complete unknown, and there were probably internal battles about whether they should.” She felt that Piper and the show’s co-creator Lucy Prebble were kindred spirits. “We have a shared dark sense of humour. And both of them have particularly strong voices about the reality of being a woman, how brutal it is, the unglamorous bit, the painful bit. A lot of people found it too uncomfortable and gnarly to watch, but I think that’s part of its genius.”
So, she did get in those rooms eventually. She led the cast of BBC crime thriller Better. She starred in a revival of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. And she’s the standout in the new holiday-from-hell drama Two Weeks in August. Finally, after working so hard to convince her mum that acting was the right choice after going to Oxford, Farzad really did make her proud. “My mum is my number one fan – she has kept every article about me, and I actually felt such relief for her when I got I Hate Suzie. I could say to her, ‘I’m on television, it’s OK.’” Parents will always worry about their children, it turns out, even when they’re 44. “They will, yes,” smiles Farzard, “especially if you’re Iranian.”
‘Under the Shadow’ is on at the Almeida until 4 July
