November 14-2014
The new season of TV’s “Homeland” has seen Nazanin Boniadi’s Iranian-American character, Fara, morph from quiet CIA analyst to a key player on the show, working in the field as the chief assistant to Carrie, played by Claire Danes, the CIA station chief in Pakistan.
Boniadi says she is rarely recognized on the street. “They put a scarf on my head in the last series and I’m wearing little to no make-up. It takes people a while before they go, ‘oh you’re THAT girl!’” she explains.
Tehran-born but London-raised Nazanin originally wanted to be a doctor, but a change of heart in her final year at the University of California at Irvine (where she moved from home in London to study) switched her onto a new career track that began with bit parts in films and on TV.
Recently, Boniadi sat down with InStyle, a British women’s magazine, to talk about her role on “Homeland.”
”She really does get her hands dirty,” Boniadi said. “She’s an agent now, not just an analyst.”
Both Boniadi and Fara (not Farah) are Iranian-born, but Boniadi remembers nothing of when she lived in Iran.
“My parents fled to London when I was 20 days old during the revolution. Going back to visit in my early teens it was so different to the way my parents had described it. Back then my mum would walk around in a miniskirt with red lipstick on and nobody would think anything of it. I remember feeling appalled that I had to wear a headscarf. Clothes are a big part of a free society, I think, and what you wear is so indicative of the political climate you’re living in,” she said.
Her parents weren’t exactly ecstatic when she decided she wanted to become an actress. “The entertainment industry isn’t a line of work encouraged in the Persian culture. When I called my dad to say I wanted to quit medicine, there was about three minutes of silence. I’m not sure he knew what to do with himself! I said, ‘Give me a year and if things don’t work out I’ll have a rethink.’”
Boniadi’s first role was a nurse on the soap opera “General Hospital.”
“Dad never let me live that one down. He’d say, ‘You’re not a doctor; now you’re an actor playing a nurse on television.’”
Homeland airs Sunday nights.