I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV (3 page)

One time my agent called and said, “I'm about to pass on an audition for a big film for you but just wanted to make sure you're cool with it.”

“What's the audition?”

“Three words—United. Ninety. Three.”

“It's about the flight on nine-eleven?”

“Yep.”

“Any good guys?”

“Yeah, but they're all white.”

“I guess it's a pass.”

Sometimes I'd see the advertisements for these films—big billboards posted around Los Angeles—and think,
Am I shooting myself in the foot?
But then the films would come out and I would spend my hard-earned American money to see them and remember how uncomfortable I would have felt portraying an Arab terrorist. Especially after the good feeling I had when I took a stand all those years ago. So I haven't worked in ten years, but at least I feel good about myself.

Okay, truth be told, I
have
worked. I've played cab drivers, donut shop owners, falafel stand cooks, and even doctors. Yes, an actual doctor. One who didn't try to hijack the hospital. Hey, don't judge—breaking stereotypes takes time.

Years ago I ended up on the
Colbert Report,
where my position on the matter came up during our interview.

“You refuse to audition for a part of a terrorist?” Stephen Colbert asked.

“That's right.”

“Well, I agree. That's insulting,” he said. “At this point in your career you should be
offered
the role of a terrorist.”

“I'd rather just not do them.”

“Why not?”

“The reason is, being of Middle Eastern descent, I feel there's more to Middle Eastern people, and you can see terrorism on the news all the time.”

“But someone has to play the terrorists out there. We need the terrorist figure in movies to focus our rage.”

“But you can focus your rage at the news that shows the terrorists,” I said.

“Then who should play the terrorist? Would you want to see white actors in Arab face?”

“Or Latinos,” I suggested. “They kind of look Middle Eastern.”

“They could pass,” Colbert agreed. “They could pass.”

A couple years later I got the part of an Arab-American Secret Service agent in the movie
The Interpreter,
with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn. This was a big win for me because I thought I had no chance in hell of getting the part. I auditioned for Sydney Pollack on tape, which means that you don't even go into an audition room. You just film yourself and mail it in. Even when they called me and told me I had the part I thought that maybe they had picked another guy and gotten me mixed up with him. I know this happens with other minorities where people say all Asians look alike or all black people look alike, so why not with Middle Easterners? It's even happened to me in the past where people have
confused me with my fellow Middle Eastern–American comedian Ahmed Ahmed, who is Egyptian and looks nothing like me (meaning he has hair and a small nose). So I thought that maybe Pollack and friends had seen some other Middle Eastern actor and thought,
Hey, they all look the same, so just call the dude named Maz. He'll do.

The first day I went to work on the film in New York I had a simple scene where I'm supposed to say a few lines to myself as I sit in my car, watching a suspect through binoculars. We did one take and Sydney Pollack's voice came over the walkie-talkie they put in the car with me.

“Do it again, but make it even more casual.”

Take two and Pollack's voice: “This time, try a little more emphasis.”

Take three: “You're trying too hard. Just throw it away.”

Take four: “Breathe, relax, and say the lines.”

At this point I'm melting, thinking,
They're going to fire me and I'll have to go back to playing terrorists. I knew they had the wrong guy!
They wanted Ahmed! I can call him right now! Maybe I'll quit and become a chiropractor. I just hope no one's taken the license plate CHIRODK.

By take seven we got it. And Pollack even came around and was joking with me by the end. The really cool thing with
The Interpreter
was that there was actually a scene where I'm on the bus, following the same suspect I was watching from my car before, and the bus explodes. I get off just before the explosion and survive. So it was one of the first times I had played a character who not only wasn't involved in the act of terrorism, but he actually survived it.

It was a bright day in the Jobrani family.

“You not die!” my mother said. “You didn't kill anyvon like I told you, but at least you not die. Remember, lights, camera, you go!”

Tehran, Iran

I
first saw Tehran as a very, very young child, less than one second old, in fact. Which is a drawn-out way of saying: I was born there. I don't remember much because, like most babies, I was selfish and stupid and probably crying because one of my boundless needs was not being met exactly when I demanded it. I was born on Ashura, which is the day Shiite Muslims mourn the death of one of their prophets, Hussein. While I was crying in the hospital because I was being slapped on the ass, in the streets of Tehran people were crying because their prophet had been martyred years before. A day of crying—an inauspicious moment for the birth of a comedian.

My earliest memories as a kid in Tehran were of soccer, orange soda, Mohammad Ali, Zorro, Spider-Man, and chocolates. Yes, my experiences were very similar to those of a kid growing up
in America. Even back then, America had done a tremendous job of exporting its culture abroad. We did not have the Iranian equivalent to Spider-Man or Superman or any other superhero, so I drank up Western culture wherever I found it. In Iran, that drink came in the color orange. Most people who find out I am originally from Iran think I grew up in a desert, riding camels and living near an oil well.

“Did you guys have camel traffic jams in the old country?”

“No,” I'd say, “we didn't ride camels. And even if we did, there would be no camel traffic jams because there are no camel lanes. You just go around the guy on the slower camel.”

“Well, you sure seem to know a lot about camels. There's no shame in admitting that you rode them as a kid back in Iran. Did you name your camels? In America, we sometimes name our cars.”

“We didn't have camels!”

“Wow, someone's sensitive. Fine, you've never ridden a camel. Calm down.”

“Okay, fine. I lied. I did ride a camel once. But that was at Marine World Africa USA! In Vallejo, California. USA! And his name was Bob.”

The main difference between Iran and America, transportationally speaking, is that in the United States people actually follow traffic laws. When a car misses an exit, the motorist simply drives to the next exit, turns around and tries again. In Tehran when someone misses an exit, he puts the car in reverse right there on the freeway and goes backward. There is nothing scarier than being in the backseat of a car on a freeway and having the driver look at you as he drives in the wrong direction. All you hear are cars honking, drivers cussing, camels scurrying into the passing lane. You don't dare turn around to see what's speeding
toward you, typically in the form of impending death moving at sixty-five miles an hour. Somehow, though, these eccentric drivers manage to zigzag their way back to the missed exit and arrive safely at the proper destination. This has happened to me a few times in the Middle East, and I've learned that if you don't look back and just do some breathing exercises, you get through it fine. Just repeat this mantra: “I refuse to die going in reverse. I refuse to die going in reverse. I refuse to die . . .”

I don't know why people in the Middle East have no regard for traffic laws. However, I have a theory as to why New York City cabbies are notorious for being bad drivers. It's simple—the worst drivers from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and South America come to New York and get jobs as cab drivers. They are coming from places where going in reverse on the freeway is totally acceptable. When they arrive in New York, they implement this style of driving in city streets. New York cab driving is like the Indy 500 of bad drivers from around the world. The best of the best go there to compete. Or rather the worst of the worst, I suppose, depending on if you're the poor sap in the backseat.

My Dad, the Electricity Mogul

While I was enjoying my American-influenced youth, suddenly protests began in the streets of my hometown in 1978. I didn't know what all the fuss was about. I was only six years old and too busy drinking orange soda to care. A year earlier, U.S. president Jimmy Carter had visited Tehran and made a famous speech where he called Iran an “island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” One year later, Iran was in turmoil. It's safe to say Jimmy wasn't much of a fortune-teller. More of a misfortune teller.

Before I left for America, we would hear protests in the streets and have to observe a curfew every night. I remember being a kid and having to go into the basement a few times when the protests and gunfire got close to our house. I really didn't know what was happening. Mostly, I thought it was pretty cool to be with my family in the basement hiding from danger. I felt like Batman in the Batcave! (Yes, we had Batman in Iran, too. And no, he didn't ride a camel.)

My first six years in Iran were good ones. We lived on the same property as my grandmother, who would spoil my sister and me with gifts and sweets. My father made lots of money owning an electric company, so he had built a compound with two houses—one for us and one for my grandmother. Not an Osama bin Laden–like compound where we were hiding in plain sight by wearing white cowboy hats, but more of a benevolent compound. Do those exist? Why is it always bad guys who have compounds? We had a pool and a big grassy area where my cousins and I would play. I never really understood how my father came to own the electric company. I always thought I was the only one who never knew what his dad did until later in life I asked other people what their dads did. It's amazing how many people really don't know. I'm not sure if that's a reflection of the generation I grew up in or if it's an immigrant thing, but somehow dads didn't do a good job of giving their kids the full story.

“Dad, what do you do?”

“Make money.”

“How?”

“Vork.”

“What kind of work?”

“Vork that makes money. Eh-stop asking qvestions and eat deh food I paid for.”

I was able to piece together stories to discover that my father had come from Tabriz, a city in the north of Iran, and moved to Tehran as a young man. He was employed at an electric company and slowly worked his way up until he was the boss. When the shah nationalized electricity in the 1950s and 1960s, his regime contracted out the work to a few companies, and one of those was my father's. I say 1950s or 1960s because my dad was never good at giving me the timeline of when anything happened.

“Hey Dad, when was I born?”

“Sometime in deh seventies.”

“Early or late seventies?”

“Vhat am I, an accountant? You vere born. Be happy you're here.”

My dad's company would get contracts to do the lighting for roads and buildings all over Iran. This helped him build considerable wealth and eventually become very powerful. When I describe my dad, I often reference Don Corleone from
The Godfather
. My dad was a rich, well-connected man; people would come to ask for favors and he would help them. As a kid I didn't know any of that. I only knew that whenever I needed money I would ask and he would hand me twenty- or hundred-dollar bills. This was where his indifference toward numbers worked in my favor.

“Hey Dad, can I get some cash?”

“How much do you need?”

“I don't know. Five, ten, a hundred.”

“I'm no accountant. Take vhat you need. Give me back deh rest.”

I was too young to ask why this man always had so much cash around. Was he a drug dealer? A stripper? An electric company CEO? He sure as hell was no accountant—he made that clear.

Escaping Revolution in First Class

I left Iran at age six for New York City, where my dad was on business. He was staying at the Plaza Hotel in a suite when my mother, my sister Mariam, and I joined him. We thought we would only be there for two weeks during our winter break, enough time to let the protests in Iran settle, but things never cooled down. We even left my baby brother, Kashi, back home and had to get him out later as things got worse. We packed for two weeks. We stayed for thirty years.

My first few months in America, my father would take business calls in the hotel room, forcing us to go shopping at FAO Schwarz or Macy's. One of my earliest purchases was an orange and white Snoopy winter set—a hat, scarf, and gloves. (I'm not joking. We Iranian children were OBSESSED with orange soda. The color orange became my favorite color. Anything I found with orange in it was something I loved.) I would spend the days running around Manhattan in my orange regalia and the nights going to dinners with my family ordering strawberries and whipped cream for dessert. I didn't know the details of the revolution taking place back in Iran, but it was working out fine for me. After all, I had escaped the revolution aboard a Pan Am flight, first class no less. In contrast, many of my friends had to escape through Pakistan or Afghanistan, spending years living a transient lifestyle while waiting for a visa to come to the West. Often when I hear these stories I feel guilty, so I try to compensate.

“It was so tough living across the street from FAO Schwarz when I first moved to America. Just to get to the toys I had to take the elevator down, wait for the light to turn green, and then cross traffic. And my dad typically gave me hundred-dollar bills so I was
always having to make change. You know how hard that can be on an immigrant who barely knows how to do math in English?”

Iranians are like Lebanese or Cubans in that we are spread all around the world. Yes, there are millions of Iranians in Iran, but there is also a huge diaspora. When you come from a country that's had a revolution, or a monthly natural disaster, or simply a great deal of strife, it's good for your touring career because you are guaranteed to find people from your country wherever you go. If you're Iranian or Lebanese or Cuban, I advise you to pick up a guitar and learn to sing. Your audience is waiting for you.

I've done shows in Sweden, Norway, Australia, Dubai, Beirut, Canada, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and even Kansas City. There's always at least one Iranian in every audience. How an Iranian ends up in Kansas City, I'll never know. Did he get off on the wrong flight? Was he kidnapped? What the hell is he doing in Kansas City? Nine times out of ten it has to do with college. Iranians are big on education, and since the 1950s, they would send their kids abroad to study. Some of the kids made it home to Iran. The unfortunate ones were stranded in Kansas City.

Happy New . . . WHAT? SPEAK UP!

Living in a diaspora has its pluses and minuses. One of the biggest minuses as a kid was that every Persian New Year we would have to call our relatives around the world and wish them a happy New Year. This seems like a simple enough task, but there's a catch. The Persian New Year is not like the Western New Year. In the West, it happens at midnight in each time zone around the world. So come midnight you scream, “Happy New Year!” to the people at your party, you kiss the person next to you, and then you post a message
on Facebook and go to sleep. The Persian New Year is based on the Zoroastrian calendar and indicates the first moment of spring. So the moment occurs at the same time all around the world. Meaning it could occur at 3:26 p.m. in Iran, which would be 3:56 a.m. in California. I know this math seems a bit off, but Tehran is actually eleven and a half hours ahead of California. I don't know how they were able to split time zones into thirty-minute intervals, or why they would do such a thing. It's tough enough doing the math when you travel and have to convert money from dollars to Iranian rials. Whenever I travel anywhere outside the United States, I'm very confused for the entire first week. You give someone dollar bills and they give you what feels like Monopoly money. And the conversion is never basic math like 1:5 or 1:10. It's always 1:3.8675309. When dealing with Iran, you not only have to worry about converting the money, you also have to convert the time into thirty-minute intervals.

Back to the Persian New Year. Most normal people would let the family sleep and wake up the next morning to make their phone calls. Iranians are not normal. It is customary for younger family members to call older family members. So my dad would be up at 3:56 a.m. calling Iran and yelling into the phone. That's one thing I've never understood. Technology has made so much progress, but anytime you make a call to Iran, it feels like you're calling a village that just installed its first phone booth that week. To this day you must yell. Then there's a pause as your voice travels. Then you hear an echo of your voice. Then the person on the other end answers. After a few sentences you don't know if you're talking to yourself or to someone else. I assume part of the problem might be that someone from the government is listening to your call so maybe the third line is what's causing the difficulty
in communication. I used to think that it was only Iran listening in on the calls, but I guess nowadays the United States might be listening, too. So that's four lines, which would further explain the bad quality and the need to shout.

Growing up, it was perfectly normal to wake up at four in the morning to your father shouting at relatives on the other side of the world. You would think he was mad at them, when in fact he was offering good wishes.