IN CONVERSATION WITH REZA DIAKO

interview by JANA LETONJA

English actor Reza Diako's increasingly international career spans film and television. He can currently be seen in Reading Lolita in Tehran, the screen adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s acclaimed memoir, and his recent and upcoming projects include Channel 4’s The Siege and his return as the Apostle Philip in the global phenomenon The Chosen (S6). With a background not only in acting but also in depth psychology and mental health, Reza brings a particularly fascinating perspective to the characters and stories he chooses to explore.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is based on Azar Nafisi’s internationally acclaimed memoir. What drew you personally to this story and made you want to be part of bringing it to the screen? 
I think initially it was the strange feeling of recognition. I spent part of my childhood in Iran, and although I left when I was young, there are certain textures, the humour, contradictions, family dynamics, the way private life and public life can sometimes feel like two completely different worlds that never really leave you.

What I loved about reading Lolita in Tehran was that it wasn’t asking me to represent Iran or explain Iranian people as a political argument. It was much more intimate than that. It was about individual human beings trying to remain intellectually, emotionally and imaginatively alive under enormous pressure in a world that increasingly wants to define them.

Bahri particularly interested me because he’s not easily reducible to a political position. He’s intelligent, idealistic, passionate, sometimes infuriating, and his convictions are intertwined with his feelings for Azar. I love characters where you can’t cleanly separate ideology from psychology where what someone believes is also connected to what they need, fear or love.

And working with Eran Riklis was enormously attractive to me for exactly that reason. He has spent much of his career making films about people living across borders, political, cultural and emotional ones. I felt there was an opportunity to make Bahri very human rather than symbolic.

That’s ultimately what attracts me to material. Not characters who provide an answer, but people whose contradictions create better questions.

There was one scene during the Gatsby discussions that didn’t make it to the film where Azar is talking about love and judgement. I was simply listening and lost in the world, and Eran told me afterwards that he could see the whole world of Bahri in that moment. He also once spent a very long call with me discussing just one line in a scene, because that line contained something important about Bahri and, in a way, also the conflict of the entire film. That told me immediately how deeply he cared about character.There was another small moment during a riot scene outside the campus. Instinctively, I moved to protect Azar, and Eran saw it, kept it and allowed it to become part of the scene. I loved that because, in my own private interpretation, there’s almost another possible Bahri hiding inside the film; a man who, in a freer world, might simply have spent his life talking about literature and philosophy with Azar. In another life, perhaps Bahri could have been the Magician.

The story deals with people finding private spaces for intellectual and personal freedom when those freedoms are restricted publicly. Did making the film change the way you think about the power of art and storytelling?
If anything, it reinforced something I already believed very strongly. Art is one of the few places where two contradictory truths can exist in the same room without one having to destroy the other. It is the attempt to build bridges where language, reason, and politics alone sometimes fail. 

Politics often asks us to choose a side, or a cluster of ideas very quickly and sometimes with force. It can lead to tribal identity warfare around who is right and deprive the opportunity for nuanced individuality. Art, on the other hand, can ask us to stay with another single human being long enough to understand why they became who they are. Understanding isn’t the same as agreeing. I think that’s an important distinction. Once you’ve genuinely entered someone’s inner world, it becomes much harder to reduce them to an enemy or an idea.

That’s one of the reasons I became an actor. I love the idea that for two hours an audience can inhabit the consciousness of somebody they might otherwise never meet, or perhaps even someone they thought they disliked. And mirror the humanity of that person back to them, so they realise they are not that different from what they are watching and possibly judging and disliking. 

Making Reading Lolita in Tehran made that particularly tangible because the books mentioned in the story aren’t luxuries. They’re private territories of freedom. When the external world becomes restrictive, imagination becomes somewhere you can remain internally alive. I think storytelling is at its most powerful when it creates that kind of bridge, not by preaching at people, but by making them feel something they weren’t expecting to feel. It’s the space between political positions, religions, partners, parents and children, even within ourselves.

My mother is a painter, so I grew up around visual art, and I was also exposed very young to filmmakers like Asghar Farhadi and Ingmar Bergman. I think I learned early that art wasn’t primarily decoration or entertainment. It was a way of radically and curiously looking beneath the surface.

Some of my favourite work does that through very different forms. The Master, by Paul Thomas, for example, fascinates me because it’s really a dance between order and chaos, dependence and freedom, intimacy and destruction. The Lobster, by Lanthimos, takes things that are painfully familiar about love, power, and belonging and strips them down until they become almost uncanny. Mark Rothko can do something similar with almost nothing, colour, space, silence, and through his simplicity somehow arrive somewhere incredibly universally human with the viewer of his work.

That’s also what drew me to depth psychology, Jung and Joseph Campbell, the search for what is common underneath all our differences. That’s the kind of storytelling I want to spend my life doing.

Your own background crosses several cultures. How has that influenced the way you see yourself as an actor and the stories you want to tell?
For a long time, I thought not completely belonging anywhere was a disadvantage. Now I think it’s probably one of the most useful things that happened to me as an actor.

I was born in Geneva, spent part of my childhood in Iran, grew up largely in Britain, have Austrian nationality, Persian-Jewish heritage, and increasingly work between America, Britain and Europe. So, identity has never felt completely fixed to me.

When you’ve spent your life moving between cultures, you become very attentive to behaviour. You notice how people change their language, humour, posture, and sometimes even parts of their personality depending on the room they’re entering. As an actor, that’s endlessly useful.

Strangely, though, the more international my career has become, the less interested I’ve become in defining myself through nationality on screen. I want to play people.

Of course I want to tell Iranian stories, and stories that intersect with my own history when they’re good. But I equally want to play the teacher, the musician, the detective, the doctor, the father, the addict, the suicidal, the romantic lead, the man making a terrible moral decision. Many of those human experiences feel just as close to me personally as stories connected to my heritage.

The actors I’ve always admired are the ones you can’t completely pin down, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, Oscar Isaac, Mark Ruffalo, Edward Norton, Jesse Plemons. You believe them because they seem primarily interested in raw truthful human behaviour rather than preserving a fixed image of themselves. That’s the career I want, specificity without limitation.

Do you feel the industry has become better at allowing actors with multicultural backgrounds to play characters whose identities are equally complex, rather than putting them into a particular box?
Absolutely, although I think there is still another step to go. There are characters being written now who probably wouldn’t have existed in quite the same way twenty years ago, and that’s exciting. I think the next evolution is allowing diversity to become almost unremarkable. Sometimes the most progressive casting decision is simply allowing an actor’s heritage to be true without requiring the entire character to be about that heritage.

If I’m playing a surgeon, for example, I don’t necessarily need a scene explaining why a Persian or Jewish man became a surgeon. He can simply be an exceptional surgeon who happens to be Persian/ Jewish and perhaps the real story is that his marriage is collapsing, or he’s terrified he’s going to lose a patient.

That’s what I find exciting about where things can go now. Cultural specificity can enrich a character without becoming the plot.

I’ve been fortunate to work on projects where my background was integral, and others where it wasn’t the primary reason I was there. I want both. Ultimately, I hope we get to the point where actors from complicated backgrounds are allowed the same privilege actors have always wanted to transform.

You play the Apostle Philip in The Chosen, a series that has developed an extraordinary international following. What has being part of something with such a passionate global audience been like for you?
It’s almost impossible to comprehend from inside the work. When you’re filming, your world becomes very small. The actors around you, the set, what another person is doing in front of you, whether the scene feels truthful. Then you meet somebody thousands of miles away who tells you that Philip helped them through grief, or loneliness, or brought them back into conversation with their faith, or their marriage, and suddenly you understand that something very intimate has travelled much further than you ever imagined.

The other extraordinary thing has been the family we’ve built. You spend years portraying a group of people who are gradually becoming a family while, off camera, the actors are experiencing something similar. Four years with people changes you.

I’m also fascinated by the fact that the audience isn’t culturally homogeneous. The show reaches people across countries, languages and denominations. Whatever someone’s theology is, underneath it you’re watching frightened, funny, jealous, competitive, loving, occasionally ridiculous people trying to understand something much larger than themselves. I think that humanity is probably why it travels.

When portraying someone who is sacred or historically important to millions of viewers, how do you balance respecting that tradition with making him feel like a real, flawed, recognisable person?
Of course, in prep I read the whole Bible carefully and looked at a huge archive of adjacent texts referring to Philip and his journey. However, I think reverence can become dangerous for an actor if it makes the character untouchable. My responsibility isn’t to play an icon. It’s to play a man.

Philip presumably got tired. He misunderstood people. He wanted to belong. He was frightened sometimes. He probably laughed at inappropriate moments and occasionally found the other disciples incredibly annoying. None of that diminishes what is sacred about him. For me, it makes the sacred more truthful, accessible, and meaningful.

Probably due to my background in psychology, I’m always asking what existed before the scene internally and externally. What does this person fear losing? What did love look like in their childhood? What do they do when they feel excluded? What part of themselves are they defending without knowing they’re defending it?

My interest in Jung and depth psychology deepened that. I’m fascinated by the distance between the person somebody believes themselves to be and everything operating underneath that identity and self-image.

With Philip, the challenge has been to honour what he represents to people while still giving him an unconscious. Saints become much more interesting to me when they still have a mind, a body, and a nervous system.

As you return to Philip for Season 6, has your relationship with the character changed? What have you discovered about him that you perhaps didn't see when you first stepped into the role?
Completely. Philip begins as this almost wild, buoyant figure, a disciple of John the Baptist, sleeping wherever he ends up, eating locusts, searching very instinctively for something true. I’ve always understood part of that search as a search for the right father and the right place to belong. Then, when I joined the show in Season 4, John the Baptist is killed almost immediately. So, beneath Philip’s faith there is suddenly enormous destabilisation.

By Season 5, Jesus is also telling them that he will leave. And in Season 6, Philip goes almost into overdrive. He’s trying to preserve unity between the disciples, fulfil the presumed mission and, in Jesus’ absence, become a kind of deputy, while underneath all of that he is terrified of losing another father figure and losing the group itself. Faith becomes less theoretical now, when the people and structures that made him feel safe begin disappearing.

That period took quite a lot out of me. I was drawing on heavy personal experiences of loss and abandonment, and I carried a lot of that internal agony for months. When the season finished, I think my body almost shut down. I disappeared from the world for a while.

What I love about the final season we’re filming now is that the circle begins to close. Philip starts discovering something beyond survival. There is finally a candle of hope. For me his journey has been from a very instinctive, almost flamboyant boy with raw faith into a quieter stoic man whose faith has actually been tested, he has courageously faced and lived through its adversities, and has now become unshakable.

In the beginning I had a lot of ideas about Philip, his temperament, spirituality, humour, relationship to the others. Over time those things become embodied. You know how he listens. You know what embarrasses him. You know who in the group makes him feel safe and who unsettles him. And I’ve changed alongside him. When I began, I think I was more interested in finding distinctive characteristics. As the years have gone on, I’ve become much more interested in simplicity allowing thought to happen and trusting that the history is already there. 

Playing Philip has taught me something I increasingly value in acting: you don’t always have to demonstrate depth. Sometimes you accumulate enough history that you can simply let the audience discover it. That has changed the way I play him enormously. I’m less interested now in showing people who Philip is. I just know that he’s moved from a boy looking for something to believe in to now a man capable of carrying belief for other people.

You also star in Channel 4’s The Siege alongside Danny Dyer and David Morrissey. What can you tell us about your character and the experience of working on that production?
The Siege was fascinating because it took me into a completely different register. I play Abbas Fallahi, the doorman at the Iranian Embassy during the 1980 siege in London. What interested me immediately was being inside an event that has become part of British cultural memory but approaching it through an individual human being rather than through the mythology of the event. Abbas was very proud of his Persian coffee, so I spent a great deal of time working in Persian restaurants and coffee shops around London sharpening my coffee making, serving, and hospitality skills. 

Lewis Arnold is a director I enormously admire because his work never seems interested in easy heroes and villains. There’s a psychological patience to the way he approaches people, which is exactly the environment I love working in. He was extraordinary. He’s incredibly precise. He would notice things as tiny as where I put a coffee cup or whether one side of my mouth was carrying slightly more tension than the other and would come and ask for adjustments. 

I love that environment. It almost feels military-like or like my time in med school at A&E, very high standards, everyone was direct and honest with each another, but all in service of the work. What moved me even more was how little ego he had about it. On many occasions, we would be doing a scene with huge action sequences, explosions, blood, broken glass, and whenever the crew needed to reset the floor, Lewis would sometimes literally be down there helping clear things himself. And then naturally I was down there too. That sense of camaraderie from top-down really infected the whole production. 

There was a funny moment when a firearm went off, and the practical sound was so violently realistic that I thought the whole set had collapsed and screamed at the top of my lungs and fell on my knees aggressively. The firearms stunt coordinator came over afterwards and said, “Amazing reaction”, not realising it was my genuine response. It made it very easy to play those moments and the sheer terror in the following takes.

Omid Djalili was also with us, and he turned every tense scene into a battle not to laugh, with his incredible comedy and truthful improvisations. It was a self-pinching moment knowing I'm working with him, as he was our family hero growing up. 

There was also a moment where all of us were doing a serious scene as hostages, but Omid and the Iranians started hitting some Iranian music, and we started dancing Persian style, and the AD came to tell us off, but he instead ended up joining in. Then Lewis appeared filming it on his iPhone. 

That probably describes the atmosphere better than I can. Our connection with the group was so strong Lewis even improvised a scene and let the camera run to capture some of our genuine bonds forming. That was very beautiful.

It was also exciting for me professionally because I want my career to keep moving between scales and identities. Bahri, Philip and Abbas inhabit completely different psychological and physical worlds. That transformation is the part of acting I’m addicted to.

Before and alongside acting, you studied psychology and worked in mental health and clinical services. How directly does that experience feed into the way you build a character?
It’s probably impossible for me to separate the two now. Before acting, I studied psychology and mental health, worked in clinical environments including King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, the National Psychosis Unit, and with people experiencing suicidality and profound psychological distress. I worked with Iranian refugees, with kids and young people with Down’s Syndrome and Autism. And spent three years in medical school clinics.

What that taught me more than anything is that human behaviour almost always makes sense from inside the person doing it. Somebody can behave destructively, irrationally or even cruelly, but if you understand enough about their history, attachments, shame, fantasies and defences, you begin to understand the internal compass and logic. That’s enormously useful for acting because judgment kills curiosity. I don’t want to stand outside a character and diagnose him, as I didn’t with the patients I worked with. I want to discover the emotional mathematics by which his behaviour becomes inevitable.

My later interest in psychodynamic and Jungian thought deepened that. I’m fascinated by unconscious behaviour, the thing a character says he’s fighting for versus the thing he may be fighting for deep down without knowing it.

So, when I read a script, I’m often looking at what’s missing as much as what’s written. What can this person not say? Who makes him regress? Why does his language suddenly change? What does he joke about when he’s frightened? What does he desperately need another person to give him? But eventually I throw all that psychology away. When the cameras roll, then it’s total surrender of what happens in the moment and co-created, and what best serves the vision of the director. 

You’ve spoken about a longer-term ambition to develop a mental health-centered creative and therapeutic platform. What might that look like, and where do you see storytelling fitting into it?
I moved schools constantly growing up, ten schools across four countries, and for a lot of that time I felt like an outsider. At one point my best friend was a tree. Which sounds funny now, but as a child that experience teaches you something very early about loneliness and imagination.

What also stayed with me was how similar children are underneath culture. I grew up around people from Iran, Britain, Europe, India, Korea, America and many other backgrounds, and the surface language, dialect, and music, can change enormously, but fear, shame, abandonment and the need to be loved are very recognisable. Blood is always red.

Long term, I want to build centres that give children and adolescents who are struggling access to sustained, high-quality therapeutic support, initially in cities where I’m based, like London, New York and Los Angeles, and then hopefully much further. I’d want creativity to be central to that. Through my work and life experience, I’ve found that courage, curiosity, play and creativity are some of our strongest antidotes to trauma. I’m influenced by the developmental psychologists, Winnicott, Klein, Bion, Alice Miller and Jung, but also by people like Patch Adams, Gabor Mate, and Alain de Botton who understand that healing cannot become purely clinical and sterile and need to become palatable to the young. I’d also love an educational arm, perhaps through film, voicing neat animations, and conversations and online platforms, around generational trauma, the crucial role of parenting, emotional responsibility and how we actually develop psychologically.

I’m not interested in pretending art is therapy. They’re different disciplines. But art can sometimes give somebody language for an experience before they’re able to talk about it directly. I saw that when working with suicidal people, or when taking blood in clinics, or with the children with autism. A film, a character, a song or a painting can place something outside you that you’ve carried silently for years. Suddenly you recognise yourself. And recognition can be the beginning of change.

Acting is the great artistic love of my life, and I hope I’m doing it until I’m very old. So, I don’t see these ambitions as competing. To me, they come from the same exact curiosity: How does a person become who they are, and how might they become something else?

TEAM CREDITS:
talent REZA DIAKO
photographer RYAN WEST
interview JANA LETONJA