Sahar is the housemaid in the home of the Canadian ambassador and his wife. Sahar doesn’t take long to figure out that the six guests of the ambassador—who never leave the house—are not ordinary guests.
As the climax approaches, a suspicious revolutionary intelligence officer drives up to the ambassador’s house and questions Sahar through the gate, very politely. Finally, he asks here how long the guests have been staying with the ambassador. She smiles and says, “Two days,” not the five months they have actually been there. That convinces the intelligence officer the group of six are not the escaped American diplomats and he goes away satisfied.
The film ends with Sahar’s passport being stamped as a guard welcomes her to the Republic of Iraq.
The role of Sahar is played by Sheila Vand, a young Iranian-American actress.
“I’m blessed because I’m Iranian and I speak Farsi fluently, and that has become a portal for me in this industry,” Vand told LAWeekly in an interview last fall, just before she flew off to Turkey to shoot her scenes for Argo.
She said, “I feel lucky that I’ve never been asked to play a terrorist. I think a lot of Middle Eastern roles are often associated with the public’s narrow view of Middle Easterners. My friends are tired of that. They’re capable of so much more.”
Of her role in that crucial nail-biting scene, Vand says, “She [Sahar] has a moment of decision, and, for me, it’s really important that this scene exists. I’m really happy I get to play an Iranian who shows a different side of the story, and who shows that there were many during that time who were embarrassed and ashamed of what was going on.”
Vand also narrates the first few minutes of Argo, which recap the events that led up to the Iran hostage crisis. She called that aspect of her role particularly meaningful—interspersed with archival footage and illustrations, these moments detail a rising enmity between the US and Iran.
Vand began acting as a teenager growing up in Palo Alto, California, where her mother and father moved after immigrating to the US from Azerbaijan, where they had gone after the revolution.
She graduated from UCLA with a degree in theater and directing in 2007. When Hollywood failed to come calling, she sidestepped the problem by continuing to pursue the experimental theater she’d embraced in college.
Portrait of the Architect in Ruins, which she created, directed and starred in for the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 2008, fashioned itself as an avant-garde theatrical interpretation of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, told through animation, film and water.
In 2010, Vand helped create Sneaky Nietzche, an interactive steampunk-themed musical performance featuring a 40-person ensemble and a full band. The show went up in LA’s warehouse district, and enjoyed an encore appearance last Halloween.
In the midst of all this, Vand landed her first major stage role, pulling double duty as the younger sister of a soldier and a prostitute in Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. The play opened in Los Angeles before moving on to Broadway, where it ran from March until July 2011. In New York, Vand put herself on tape for Argo and got a callback for a movie widely pegged as an almost certain nominee for next year’s best picture Oscar.
For Vand, who had never traveled to the Middle East, shooting Argo turned out to be a sort of homecoming. When her mother and father flew out to visit her on set in Istanbul, they told her stories about the history of their relationship that they’d never shared with her before.
“They had gotten married the week before the events that take place in the movie,” she told LAWeekly. “They had just gotten their visas to come to America when the hostage crisis happened. All of the Iranian visas were taken away. They got trapped in the country for another five years.”
Originally, Vand had planned to visit Iran with her parents after the shoot, but the Iranian on-set coordinator told her to get the idea out of her head. The political climate was simply too dangerous. Instead, she and her parents toured Turkey.
Vand currently is working on two screenplays. “I feel a little silly being another actor trying to write,” she said. “Part of the learning curve is getting over the fear of putting stuff out there. People are more forgiving when you’re 26 than when you’re 36, so now is the time to jump off that cliff. It’s only going to get scarier.”
As for finding more studio film and television roles, Vand said she didn’t want to guess what Argo might bring. Her plan, for now, she said, is to continue auditioning and creating her own work.
“I have a friend who is 10 years older than me and 10 years more experienced than me who told me, ‘I hate to break it to you, you’re never going to feel like you’ve arrived,’” she said. “I remember feeling relieved, thinking, ‘Oh, I can stop looking for this moment.”
