The Exiles of Tehrangeles

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20 hours ago

Shohreh Aghdashloo still remembers the blood, bitter in her mouth. It spilled from a gash in her head after a hail of stones hit her during a pro-democracy rally in Tehran. The year was 1979. The Islamic Revolution was convulsing Iran. She was 26.
'The sky was full of stones,' she recalls. 'I was ever so angry. I was numb. At that moment, I decided that no, no, no. I need to leave.'
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She fled under cover of night, making her way through Istanbul, Yugoslavia and Paris before settling in London and eventually Hollywood.
She's never returned. 'I am banned,' she explains. 'If I do, they will kill me.'
Following recent Israeli and American air strikes in Iran — widely seen as the most direct confrontation between Iran and the West in decades — the Oscar-nominated actress found herself reliving her moment of exile. But this time, grief and fear were tinged with a fleeting hope for change that quickly gave way to despair.
'Wars are about devastation and misery,' Aghdashloo says, her signature gravelly voice occasionally cracking with emotion — the same emotion she once masterfully restrained as Dina Araz, the calculating terrorist matriarch on 24, a cultural touchstone of post-9/11 America. 'But this war gave us mixed feelings, including hope it might bring freedom to Iran. Instead, the regime's grip has only tightened.'
As Israel and Iran retreat into a fragile ceasefire, she and other Iranian artists in Hollywood and beyond are still grappling with the cultural and emotional fallout.
At a time when culture wars over immigration and inclusion are buffeting the U.S., their stories reflect the challenge of carrying an identity inextricably bound to a homeland often vilified in the West while striving to portray it with empathy and authenticity. Torn between belonging and resistance, they show how a new generation is using storytelling to redefine what it means to be Iranian American.
For many, the conflict stirred dashed hopes for regime change while reigniting fears of xenophobia creeping back into politics and pop culture. It also laid bare simmering tensions within America's Iranian diaspora — now roughly 500,000 strong, the largest outside Iran.
Aghdashloo says her accent and Middle Eastern origins have not felt limiting. She has played powerful women like she is, who were shaped by the forces of history while being agents of their own destinies. Her role as a terrorist on 24 drew backlash from the diaspora. But she says she welcomed the chance to play such a complex and layered character.
Still, she fears that today's tensions could trigger a return to two-dimensional villains like those that proliferated during the 1980s and 1990s in the aftermath of the Iran hostage crisis. 'I am hoping from the bottom of my heart that this will not happen,' she says.
If the story of the Iranian diaspora were a film, it would be a sweeping epic marked by repression, exile and reinvention. It might open in 1979, when a profligate monarch — so enamored of Hollywood that he once hosted Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton at Teheran's Niavaran Palace — was toppled in Iran by the fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini, sending tens of thousands fleeing into exile.
Many settled in Southern California, where swaggering creativity and bikini-clad beachgoers offered a striking contrast to the clerics back home. Persian grocery stores, bakeries and synagogues serving the Iranian Jewish community sprouted across Los Angeles — especially in Westwood, Beverly Hills and Pico-Robertson — earning the area the nickname 'Tehrangeles.'
While many first-generation Iranian American parents urged their children to become doctors, lawyers and engineers, some couldn't resist Hollywood's allure.
Aghdashloo earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for 2003's House of Sand and Fog. Bob Yari was a producer on 2004's Crash, which won best picture. Maz Jobrani and Nasim Pedrad chose trenchant comedy as their most potent artistic weapon.
Like Aghdashloo, comedians Jobrani and Pedrad have also been shaped by the rupture of exile.
Jobrani fled Iran as a child, arriving in California at 6. In his 20s, the Eddie Murphy-obsessed comic dropped out of a UCLA Ph.D. program in political science to pursue stand-up. The move horrified his Iranian mother, who hoped he'd become a doctor — or at the very least, a mechanic. 'Everybody needs a mechanic,' she told him. 'Nobody needs a comedian!'
One of his first big breaks was a made-for-television Chuck Norris movie, playing a 'bomb-making terrorist trying to lay low in Chicago by wearing a turban.' He protested that a terrorist wouldn't wear a turban but was overruled. He took the role — then panicked, writing to Norris and begging him not to release the film. He says Norris ignored him.
Over the course of two decades, Jobrani has scaled the heights of comedy by lampooning these tired tropes while mining his immigrant anxiety.
'I'm Iranian American — part of me likes me, part of me hates me,' he quipped at the Hollywood Improv, a week after the first Israeli air strikes. 'Part of me thinks I should have a nuclear program. The other part thinks I can't be trusted with one.'
Jobrani credits Mindy Kaling, Pedrad and Ramy Youssef for shifting Hollywood's representation of minorities. Still, he says the recent war has stoked fears of a cultural relapse and warns that far-right figures like Laura Loomer spreading false claims about Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S. risk fueling xenophobic violence.
While his Axis of Evil comedy tour — a post-9/11 showcase of Middle Eastern comedians — drew crowds throughout the U.S. and the Middle East, Jobrani has no plans for a new Ayatollah-themed act. A 12-day war offers limited material in a country where most Americans still can't name Iran's leaders, he says.
Still, Iran is never far from his mind.
'It's exhausting. Iran is always in the news,' he muses. 'Sometimes I wish I were Swedish.'
That emotional weight is familiar to Pedrad, the comedian and writer who has helped reimagine what it means to be Iranian American on television. She says she experienced 'emotional dissonance' in response to the recent war.
'On one hand, we wonder if we're finally in a moment of reckoning for this brutal regime,' she says. 'On the other hand, we brace ourselves, knowing how often these moments end in further violence and repression.'
Pedrad made history as the first Iranian American castmember on Saturday Night Live, before bending age and gender to play a gawky 14-year-old Persian American boy in the coming-of-age sitcom Chad. It was one of the first American TV shows anchored by an Iranian American family.
Born in Tehran and raised in California, Pedrad still has family in Iran. She became active during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement and is now developing a project shaped by that work. She adds that even a dark and repressive regime could be a catalyst for comedy: 'While I can't think of anything less hilarious than the Islamic Republic of Iran, humor and satire — like all art — are tools we use to process the world.'
Pedrad says that Chad was a watershed moment for a Persian American like her. 'I didn't grow up seeing Persian people on TV, let alone ones that felt written from a place of empathy or humanity,' she says.
She adds that the wait for fully developed Iranian American stories reflects how young the diaspora is. 'My parents' generation escaped a revolution and fled to this country just trying to create some stability and assimilate,' she says. 'For them, the priority was survival. For me, it was like, 'OK cool, now that we've survived — obviously with my help — how do I become a sketch comedian?' It's kind of a jarring leap to make in a single generation.'
Though Jobrani, Pedrad and others have reshaped how Iranian Americans see themselves — and are seen — in popular culture, the latest conflicts have revealed painful divisions. These religious, political and generational fissures deepened as Israeli and American air strikes pummeled Iran, and the devastation in Gaza forced a reckoning.
At a recent anti-Iran protest outside the West L.A. Federal Building, demonstrators wearing 'MIGA' — Make Iran Great Again — hats blasted Persian music and waved American and Israeli flags, demanding regime change. Others feared that Israeli bombs would only embolden Iran's hardliners.
Sitting in his office covered with movie posters, Mark Amin — one of the few major Iranian American producers in Hollywood — says there has long been a deep cultural kinship between Muslim and Jewish members of the Iranian diaspora. That bond was rooted in the experience of exile; a common language, Farsi; and shared opposition to the Iranian regime.
Still, he notes, the war in Gaza has been polarizing, even as most Iranian Americans reject the Islamic Republic's support for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
'It has been a stressful time,' says Amin, who came from Rafsanjan to the U.S. in 1967 and rose from running video stores to producing Frida and Girl Most Likely. He recently executive produced The Apprentice, the Trump biopic applauded at Cannes. His sister fled Tehran by taxi after Israeli air strikes destroyed a neighbor's house.
The recent 12-day war exposed a fault line within the diaspora. Many Iranian Jews feel an abiding support for Israel, seeing it as a necessary counterweight to Iran and a bellicose regime for which 'Death to Israel' has long been a central tenet. For many Muslim Iranian Americans, however — even those vehemently critical of Tehran — the war also stirred visceral anger and solidarity over the devastation in Gaza. Support for Palestinian rights does not equate to support for the Islamic Republic of Iran, but it is a prism through which many view the conflict.
The Iranian diaspora is extraordinarily diverse, and political and generational outlooks often transcend religious lines. Just as many Muslim Iranian Americans strenuously oppose Hamas, progressive Iranian American Jews are among Netanyahu's harshest critics. One thing appears to be clear: Both groups share a deep desire for a free and democratic Iran, even if they sometimes differ on how to get there.
But the carnage in Gaza has made public expressions of solidarity more fraught.
Jobrani says he felt devastated after the Oct. 7 attacks and struggled to find anything funny to say about Israel. The closest he got was a bit about a parking attendant calling him 'Hamaz.' Risky, but it got laughs.
Ava Lalezarzadeh, a Jewish Iranian American actress, recently starred on Broadway in English, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play about four adult students in Iran preparing for an English exam. Offstage, she has also been navigating her multiple identities.
'My closest friends are Persian, whose parents are in Iran, and Israeli, whose parents are in Israel,' she says. 'It's heart-wrenching to watch both of your communities hurt and suffer and be scared for their families.'
She grew up 90 minutes east of Los Angeles in a Persian-Jewish household. Her parents fled Iran in 1988, during the Iran-Iraq War. 'They felt prejudice coming from the government,' she says, 'but they never felt prejudice from their neighbors.'
As bombs fell on Iran in June, Lalezarzadeh says many Jewish Americans of her parents' generation hoped for regime change, even as they grieved seeing the landscapes of their youth under attack. 'They don't want innocent people to get hurt,' she says. 'They don't want their childhood neighborhoods to get bombed.'
She says Gaza revealed a 'cleavage of ideology' between her Persian Jewish community — rooted in trauma from religious persecution — and her artistic, non-Jewish Middle Eastern friends.
'There's a lack of acknowledgment of the power imbalance and of having compassion for the magnitude of suffering, death and starvation in Gaza' in some Jewish spaces, she says. 'But also, these Persian Jews have left Iran. They're being informed by their own trauma.' She is also troubled by 'casual prejudice' toward Israelis. 'There's a conflation between the Israeli government and Israeli people,' she says. 'Their beliefs are also shaped by trauma.'
Her family story has inspired her offstage work, too. In In the Garden of Tulips, a 2023 short film she wrote, Lalezarzadeh dramatized her mother's escape from Iran at age 15. 'There's a small hub of us Persian Jewish artists writing our family stories,' she says.
Nazanin Nour, an Iranian American actress, comedian, writer, podcaster and activist, hosts Mehmooni, a podcast spotlighting Iranian voices. She laments that Hollywood and the media often misrepresent Iran — and that Iranians themselves remain largely invisible on American screens.
Even when she makes it into the room, she's been told she doesn't 'look Iranian enough.' She asks, 'Who are you to tell me that I don't look Iranian?'
Like many in her generation, she hungers to create work that highlights acts of defiance and resistance inside Iran. In her latest project, she is producing a feature-length version of the short film Forbidden to See Us Scream in Tehran, directed by Iranian filmmaker Farbod Ardebili, which follows a punk band led by a female singer defying the country's ban on women performing solo.
'It's showing the resilience and beauty of the people inside Iran,' she says, 'and how they fight back against the regime through art.'
Actor and activist Nazanin Boniadi helped reshape the portrayal of Iranian Americans following 9/11. Her parents fled Iran for London in 1980, when she was just weeks old, fearing her father was on an execution list.
She first broke through on Homeland as Fara Sherazi, an intelligent and strong-willed American CIA analyst. Wearing a hijab, Sherazi grapples with her Muslim and American identities while confronting Islamic terrorism, never losing her moral compass.
Boniadi laments that many in the West fail to grasp that most Iranians reject the Islamic Republic. She also criticizes protesters waving the regime's flag to oppose Israel: 'If you want to oppose war, do not raise the flag of our oppressors.'
She worries that the news depicting Iran as a dangerous enemy could distort the portrayal of Iranians in Hollywood storylines.
While her Fara character was a breakthrough, she says the headscarf underscored how Hollywood sometimes falls back on facile cultural markers. As the daughter of exiles who despises the regime, she felt the character would have been more realistic as a secular woman. In Iran, she notes, the hijab holds symbolic weight as an emblem of the state's control over women's bodies.
'I'm so blessed to have played that role,' Boniadi says, adding that at that time, it 'was really groundbreaking to have a Muslim woman portrayed in that way.' Still, she pushed back, unsuccessfully, against the hijab.
She calls for more nuance in Hollywood's portrayal of Middle Eastern characters. 'I think it's something that would be questioned now, and frankly, I would probably resist more now taking on a role that isn't an honest depiction of the Iranian people.'
These days, however, Boniadi relishes simply playing a character not defined by her ethnicity. In Amazon's epic The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, she portrays Bronwyn, a village healer and single mother — no accent, no hijab, no Middle Eastern identity.
More broadly, Iranian American artists yearn for a future when Iran isn't automatically conflated in American popular culture with theocracy, militancy and radicalism.
'They always show us blowing things up,' Jobrani says. 'Just once, I want to see a show where Mohammed in Iran is baking cookies.'
This story appeared in the July 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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