Arian Moayed plays creepy men for thoughtful reasons

The actor Arian Moayed has an old passport photo that he usually keeps in his wallet: a black and white image of a small, sweet boy with big dark eyes, wearing a whimsical sweater.

We were talking for almost 90 minutes when he talked about it. I had asked if he remembered anything from his earliest childhood, in Iran in the 1980s.

“What I remember most is fear,” he said. “The feeling of fear. Everywhere.”

Then he told me about the photo. He is about five years old, shortly before his family emigrated to the United States in 1986. vainly urging him to smile.

“And on the car ride back,” he said, “I told my mom I thought the camera was a gun and I was at a shooting range. Because in Iran they would show public executions in the news on television.”

So. The little man in the sweater, trying to be brave, thought he was about to get shot.

At 43, Moayed is a million miles from the fraught reality of that frightened child. He is widely known to fans of the HBO drama ‘Succession’ for his recurring role as Stewy Hosseini, Kendall Roy’s old friend. And he’s currently starring on Broadway as the extremely controlling husband Torvald Helmer in “A Doll’s House,” opposite Jessica Chastain as Nora, the woman who walks out the door.

Still, Moayed likes to keep the photo close at hand.

“I always want to remind myself that this is where it all came from,” he said.

It was late April when we spoke at the Hudson Theater, on West 44th Street in Manhattan, and the show’s six Tony Award nominations were yet to come—his second, for Best Actor in a Play. His first was for his Broadway debut, as a sweet Iraqi topiary artist turned wartime translator, opposite Robin Williams in “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” in 2011.

Moayed’s Torvald couldn’t be more different. A lawyer tapped to run a bank, he micromanages his wife and monitors what she eats and spends. He speaks horribly and comically to Nora at the same time in a voice as soft as a cat’s paw, muscles and claws hidden just under the fur. He never takes her seriously as an adult, but he seems completely oblivious to his own fragile vanity. He is the kind of man at whom it is dangerous to laugh, for he is furious with ridicule.

It’s a treacherously knowing portrayal of one of the stage’s great terrible husbands. But Moayed, who grew up in a Chicago suburb and spent most of his career in Middle Eastern roles, wasn’t sure he wanted to play Torvald.

“I had no relationship with ‘A Doll’s House,'” he said. “When I moved to the city in 2002, the only roles available to me were being an ensemble member in some regional Shakespearean theater thing, or playing a terrorist. ‘A Doll’s House’ and Ibsen was like, Oh, that’s a category of things that will never happen to me.”

British director Jamie Lloyd had other ideas. After watching Moayed in ‘Bengal Tiger’ he found himself consistently giving standout performances over the years – as the scheming Stewy in ‘Succession’, of course, but also in YouTube clips of the Off Broadway two-handed ‘Guards at the Taj’. (Moayed won an Obie for that in 2016) and in the movie ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ as Peter Parker’s enemy Agent Cleary.

Getting ready to stage Amy Herzog’s “A Doll’s House” adaptation on Broadway, Lloyd saw Moayed on a list of possible actors for another role, but felt he was “more of a Torvald than anything.”

“I felt like he’s clearly someone who doesn’t mind being unsympathetic,” Lloyd said over the phone. “Because he knows there’s a reason for it. And he is as compelling as these unlikely characters.”

What initially intrigued Moayed about this version of “A Doll’s House” was Herzog, whose short play – “Gina From Yoga Two, Is That Your Boyfriend?” — he had starred in the Off Broadway incubator Ars Nova in 2010. Like Torvald, his character in that play was something of a creep, though Herzog described Moayed in an interview as “the manchiest person” and “definitely the furthest scream from the real Torvald you could find.”

“His feminism is not an attitude,” she said.

When Lloyd asked her opinion on casting Moayed, she added, “I just knew, I knew he could do it.”

What reminded Moayed of the part was the metaphor that jumped out at him from Herzog’s script. Reading for the first time last fall, he flew from Budapest, where he had shot a film, to Berlin, where he attended a protest against the Iranian government’s oppression of women and girls – part of a movement led by Iranian women and girls.

The story of Nora, freeing herself from the gilded cage of her marriage to a deeply self-centered man, reverberated with him on a societal level.

“I’m reading it, and all I see in this piece is Iran,” he said.

Moayed stopped in London for a chemistry meeting with Lloyd, and they took a long walk through the city, where an Iranian protest was taking place in Trafalgar Square. Moayed recalled saying he didn’t want to play Torvald as a chest-spit chauvinist, someone who would physically threaten his wife.

“When you see that on stage, it’s very easy for a guy to say, ‘Well, that’s not me,'” he said.

What interested him was more subtle: examining what he called “the microcuts” that men inflict on women—in Torvald’s case, as they coo in admiration.

“If you show humanistic qualities,” Moayed said, “you get a lot of people looking at it and saying, ‘Oh, I wonder if I do.'”

For audiences, the production can work on multiple levels: as a wake-up call to ignorant misogynists, as a catalyst for breakups, as an echo of terrible exes. And, based on what Moayed has heard from Iranian friends and family, also as the metaphor he saw.

The parallel is so obvious for his mother, he said, that she’s convinced—albeit incorrectly, Lloyd confirmed—that his Iranian heritage was why he got the job.

Moayed was born in 1980, the year after the Iranian revolution ousted a secular, autocratic government and ushered in a theocracy. His oldest brother Amir was already in Illinois, and when Moayed’s family joined him there in 1986, his other brother Omid came along. But their beloved sister, Homeira, who had cared for young Arian in Iran, had married there. It took 17 years to persuade her.

Moayed’s initial interest in acting may have come from noticing how much his parents, middle-aged newcomers to a foreign country, laughed at the classic Hollywood films they introduced him to, such as Charlie Chaplin comedies and “Singin’ in the rain’.

“Subconsciously, I tried to mimic that and release a little bit of the tension that was in that trauma…” He paused before finishing his word. Dan: “Well, it was traumatic. But that turmoil was those first 10 years or so.”

Stewy, Moayed’s riotous capitalist in “Succession” — a performance that earned him an Emmy Award nomination last year — is also of Iranian descent. Early on, Moayed and series creator Jesse Armstrong talked about what wave of immigrants Stewy’s family might belong to. Moayed, whose father was a banker in Iran, preferred his own country.

“I said, I think they came in the ’80s, which means he came under duress and lost a lot of money,” he said. “I just love that trajectory, Stewy moving up the ranks really quickly. And was good at it, and went to a bunch of posh private schools, somehow got in and befriended Kendall, and the rest is history.

Both Stewy and Torvald are centrally concerned with money and its acquisition. Moayed, on the other hand, is intrinsically political. Around 2006, he decided he wasn’t going to play terrorist – unhealthy for his bank account in the heyday of ‘Homeland’ and ’24’.

He passionately believes in the idea of ​​artist as citizen, and in using art to “advance the needle”, as he likes to say. For him, that applies to teaching and making theater with Water wellthe New York City arts nonprofit he co-founded in 2002, as well as starring in shows like “A Doll’s House” and “Succession” — a series that, he said, shows “how capitalism really works.” is skewed and there are not a few people who own all that money.

His perspective would come as a surprise to Stewy’s fans, who encountered Moayed in the real world, often fruitlessly inviting him to use cocaine with them.

He’s not that person – even though Stewy is the character who shook up casting directors’ perception that Moayed should only play Middle Eastern and humorless, heavy drama. A whole spectrum of creepy roles has opened up to him, one of which is Torvald.

However, he can channel his inner man in the new Nicole Holofcener movie ‘You Hurt My Feelings’, as he also did in ‘The Humans’, a Broadway hit in 2016.

But what if Moayed could do something as an actor that he never had the chance to do? He would throw himself into a genre he loves, ideally with his “A Doll’s House” co-star.

“Jessica and I, we’re both like, ‘We should do a romantic comedy together,'” he said.

His favorite is “When Harry Met Sally,” but he thinks more along the lines of “Romancing the Stone.”

“A romantic comedy adventure,” he said, “would be really damn fun.”