Succession’s Arian Moayed on how to play a good bad guy

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Succession’s Arian Moayed on how to play a good bad guy’

Lilah Raptopoulos
The TV show Succession is in the middle of its final season. And whether you watch it or not, if there’s one thing you know about that show, it’s that it’s full of outrageously unlikeable characters. Pretty much everyone is greedy and selfish and mean. There is this one minor character that holds this line very well between deeply unlikeable and somehow sort of loveable. His name is Stewy Hosseini. Stewy is the childhood friend of one of the Roy sons, Kendall, and he’s a private equity bro with a stake in the company. The way I would describe Stewy is probably scared of absolutely no one and just there to win. Here he is talking to the big boss, Logan Roy.

Stewy Hosseini
The issue here, sir, is that everyone fucking hates you.

Logan Roy
It’s cloudy, it’s sunny.

Stewy Hosseini
Your COO is a fucking joke.

Roman Roy
Whoa.

Stewy Hosseini
Bro, that’s what people are saying. Who cares if it’s true? People say that he’s a coked up dough fan that doesn’t know shit from Shinola, and that the two of you aren’t even talking to each other, which I’m getting a vibe of.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Stewy is played by the actor Arian Moayed, and it’s no coincidence that he’s a memorable character. Arian collaborated on the details of Stewy with Succession’s creator Jesse Armstrong. Arian is Iranian, and he insisted that Stewy be Iranian, too.

Arian Moayed
I was just talking to Jesse about this recently. I said, “Do you remember I walked into your room and I was like, There are three reasons why I think this guy could be Iranian.”

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK.

Arian Moayed
He could have come in the fifties with his family. Here’s the reasons why I come in the seventies pre-revolution. And he came in the eighties, and I give specific examples of how he could be at this point. And I told him the whole thing. And he goes, “Which version do you want?” And I said, “Well, I came in the eighties, so I’m, it’s just easier. I’d rather just do this.”

Lilah Raptopoulos
(Chuckles) I’ll take the eighties.

Arian Moayed And he goes, “Cool.” And I said, But I never want to talk about this because I want people to come into the conversation knowing that he’s a high, powerful guy that knows how to do all these things and is also Iranian.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Arian has been in a lot of great stuff lately. He was Anna Delvey’s lawyer in Inventing Anna on Netflix. He’s in the Spider-Man movie, No Way Home. Right now he’s on Broadway in a production of A Doll’s House, opposite Jessica Chastain. He’s playing Nora’s husband, Torvald.

What I think Arian is really talented at is playing a, you know, quote unquote, “bad guy” who’s complex, who you kind of can’t help but like and root for.

Arian Moayed
No actors should think of their character as bad. Because what you’re going to get as a product is not truths.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm.

Arian Moayed
You know what I mean?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Arian Moayed
If you’re going to be judging it in a way that is not helpful to tell that story.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, Arian joins me in person in the New York studio to talk about how to take a character on a page and make them into a fully formed living and breathing human.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Arian, hi. Welcome to the show.

Arian Moayed
Hello. Thank you so much.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So nice to have you. So you are starring in two big things right now at the same time, Succession and A Doll’s House on Broadway. And I’m going to ask you about them. But first, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your roots as an actor.

Arian Moayed
Mmm.

Lilah Raptopoulos
To start, a very simple question, which is just like at the core of it, why are you an actor?

Arian Moayed
I love that you asked that question. I’ve been thinking a lot about that, actually, as I’m getting older. Like what happened? Why? Why? How did I get into this world? There was no one in my family that’s an actor. We don’t know any actors. We were immigrants. We escaped from Iran, came to the States. My parents don’t speak a lot of English, and I think somehow, subconsciously, we all watched these old movies that my parents love when they were in Iran, which were 20 years did it. So we watch like Hitchcock and what Singing in the Rain and Sound of Music. My family loves Sound of Music. And I think what was happening early on is I think I kind of like subconsciously used that kind of entertainment and fun and like making my parents laugh to kind of like, get out of that like muck of being an immigrant in the country, especially in the eighties and with Iran in the news all the time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It’s interesting you talk very freely and comfortably about your childhood and your family’s story and being born in Iran and your family coming to the US. And it’s in your work, too, in some ways. Not everybody is that open about their childhood and not everybody wants to. And I’m curious why that is? What’s important to you about telling that story.

Arian Moayed
Mmm. That’s a great question. I mean, I have the, I mean, this sounds so nuts, (chuckles) but I really do have the privilege of being an immigrant that grew up in this country. I think of that as a as a privilege. I genuinely feel that it’s given me so much perspective. There was so much fear, there was so much embarrassment, there was so much uncomfortable situations and just moments of just pain and trauma. I guess it was. I know it’s a buzzy word, but it’s true. That it all seems to me that I was given a lot of life early on. And I feel that that perspective, maybe by sharing it, other people can realise that they’ve all been through a lot of stuff.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Arian Moayed
And I think it’s in my work. I really do think it’s in my work, whether people see it or not. I feel that work, it’s always like tumbling in there.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Arian came to the US from Tehran in 1986. He was a young kid and he and his family were fleeing the revolution. They landed in Chicago, which was both disorienting and stressful because this was not a great time to be Iranian in America. It was just after the Iran hostage crisis and during the Iran-Iraq war.

Arian Moayed
In the eighties. I remember at going to a party where someone was I overheard someone saying, “Well, it’s better that you say that you’re Iraqi than from Iran.” (chuckles) 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Arian’s parents didn’t speak English, but they moved to a wealthy neighbourhood for the school system, into an apartment complex full of other low-income immigrant families doing the same thing. The schools were great and he studied theatre. And after college, he co-founded a non-profit called Waterwell, kind of an image of the place he grew up. It teaches theatre to students in New York, and it puts productions on alongside different small communities. So like an immigrant community or veterans or labour organisers. And then it helps to tell a very specific story within that community. So he was getting some work. He was running Waterwell, his career was moving but hadn’t totally taken off.

Arian Moayed
And along that journey I was getting acting jobs and then Succession happens.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. (laughter) OK, So let’s look forward to now.

Arian Moayed
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And I have the feeling that all of these sort of threads will come up.

Arian Moayed
Sure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
You’re starring in Succession right now. You play Stewy, everyone’s favourite. (laughter) You’re in A Doll’s House on Broadway, you play Torvald, Nora’s husband.

Arian Moayed
Mm-hmm. Everyone’s least favourite. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Everyone’s least favourite. (laughter) Right.

OK. Here is a CliffsNotes on A Doll’s House. A Doll’s House is an extremely famous piece of theatre about a woman who questions and rejects her role as wife and mother. The catch is that it was written by a man, Henrik Ibsen, in Norway in the 1800s. Ibsen didn’t think he was writing a feminist play, but it was revolutionary, and it’s been used to fuel women’s rights movements for over 100 years.

You know, I’d love to talk about these roles because to me, the characters have a few things in common. What do you think?

Arian Moayed
Mmm. Yeah, I think so. I mean, you know, they’re all coming from me so we have that in common. I think there are some things in common. I mean, misogyny is a serious thing. (laughter) So I think that’s a common thread. I think, you know, it’s interesting. There is, there’s duality to these people. Both Torvald and Stewy. You can see why Stewy is a shark, and, but he’s a shark that tells you he’s a shark. And he’s telling you that I’m not playing anything else other than a shark. But there’s something very freeing about that. So that’s one thing. And so with Glenn, with Torvald, the same, like Torvald is usually played with, like a moustache twirling, you know, male chauvinist stick, you know, go into the room and don’t. And when Jamie Lloyd, you know, offered me this part, to be real with you, we kind of talked about how we don’t want that. I should ask you, what do you think the correlations are?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, I mean . . . Similar, I mean. I find both of them, like, in some ways exceptionally unlikeable. On the page. exceptionally unlikeable. And I guess this has to do with the way that you act them, but that, like, I still want to like them. It is complicated.

Arian Moayed
Yeah, yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
As Arian said, this version of A Doll’s House is directed by the British director Jamie Lloyd. He’s known for taking classics and flipping them on their head. And it was adapted and made a little bit more modern by the playwright Amy Herzog.

Arian Moayed
It was written as this, you know, known to be a very powerful feminist piece in which Nora, who’s married to a very controlling Torvald, finally breaks the chains and says, “Why am I not only in this relationship, but why am I on these rules that society has made?” And very controversial at that time. And I always say now are sadly, always relevant. It’s a play that was done in the sixties, and it’s like “It’s so relevant today.” And it’s done in the nineties, “It’s so relevant for today.” And today obviously, it’s, you know, sadly, it’s relevant today as well. And so Nora is trying to navigate how to keep on to this like lie that she’s been holding on to that’s going to maybe potentially devastate the family.  And that’s been done over and over and over again. And then Amy Herzog did this adaptation of it, which takes all of the meat of that beautiful original play and just keeps the emotional core and plot points intact. And though it’s set in 1879, as you comment says, 1879, we remove the artifice of . . . it’s all the way back there and try to present it to you as a this is what it looks like today.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. When Arian got this part, he wanted to update his character, too. He wanted to create a more modern, more subtly misogynistic Torvald.

Arian Moayed
And I wanted to make sure that we do a male Torvald that is, that goes into the micro cuts that men do on women every single day.

First of all, the evidence was there because the script was there. But I can also imagine in future productions of Amy’s amazing adaptation is that people can play those with a heavy hammer. But if you play them with a light little touch,  and think about a thousand paper cuts, you also then get to see men see the show and say, “Oh, I recognise a little bit of those cuts”, and that happens . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
They might do some of that.

Arian Moayed
I hear that all the time actually.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, interesting.

Arian Moayed
Where if you see a Torvald that like hits her and drags her by the hair, it’s very easy for those same men to be like, “Well, that’s not me. I can’t relate to that.” So the duality of both of those characters is something that I’m interested in. I don’t believe in good or evil. I mean, I believe that there are very few people on earth that are pure evil. And those are like history books.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

Arian Moayed  
And so I don’t, and so I want to make sure, and so and also, he loves her. He cherishes her, puts her on a pedestal.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I see Torvald as sort of this, like, unknowing oppressor, (chuckles) kind of. He’s like a . . .

Arian Moayed
Yeah, of course, of course.

Lilah Raptopoulos
He’s always kind of been, like toxic masculinity incarnate, but he’s like more in a more nuanced way in this play. And like, he tells his wife not to eat sugar to keep his sweet baby thin. He says things like, “OK, you little lunatic.” (chuckles)

Arian Moayed
Yeah, “OK, you little lunatic”. Yeah. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. I mean, but he and Nora are also in a dynamic, right? It’s kind of, it’s complicated by the fact that she plays along. It seems to kind of turn them both on until suddenly it doesn’t. You know so, yeah, I mean, I’m curious for me, like, how do you . . . how did you go about making someone like Torvald human? (chuckles)

Arian Moayed
Yeah. Yeah. Someone asked me, I was at the end of the show. There’s an, there’s like a bunch of usually students that are, like, want autographs from Jessica and the cast... And someone asked me, she said, “How can you play someone that I hate so much as an actor? How can you like him?” And I say, I totally get it. I know. And again, I know what I’m reading. I’m not an idiot. I know what’s happening here. But if I start thinking there’s a moment where he, like, talks about, like how to one actor to one to Christine says something like, I’m, “Hey, are you a knitter? You shouldn’t knit. You should do embroidery. It’s so much better.” And it’s obviously mansplaining. It’s like very clearly mansplaining. But if I’m going to play mansplaining, I’m playing, I’m judging my own character. I’m playing it like with the twist of my moustache. And it takes away the audience’s experience of knowing who that is. Because I’m I want it’s almost I’m saying to the audience, I don’t want you to really think that I’m this guy tadada-tadada because I’m, you know. So how do you do this?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, yeah.

Arian Moayed
Well, what is mansplaining? Somehow men cluelessly, as you just brilliantly said, think that they’re helping.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. They do. (laughter)

Arian Moayed
Right? That’s what they think.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally.

Arian Moayed
So in this moment, I’m not thinking about mansplaining. I’m going to help you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Arian Moayed
And so and if you cobble those pieces together and really realise that you can love someone and also be a toxic, masculine person to that someone at the same time, then all of a sudden I can just go and not think about the grand old like, “Oh, he’s hated.” And then if the truth is done correctly as artists, hopefully, and this goes with Succession as well, you’re then going to get a lot of people coming and telling you two different things. I have a lot of women as well that come up to me and say, “I get it. He loves her. He wants to do good. He just doesn’t frickin get it. He’s just an idiot and he wants to fit in the society’s norms.” And then I have the person next to her being like, “He’s a complete a-hole, and I think he’d, I want to crush him with . . . “ So, that’s because you’re bringing your DNA to our truths and those that mix is kind of what your result is.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
So you’re playing Torvald in A Doll’s House while there’s a women-led revolution happening in Iran. I imagine you see Iran in this story. Can you tell me about that?

Arian Moayed
Yeah. I mean, I was in Budapest shooting a movie. I got offered this job. I flew out to Berlin. I was reading the script. I had no idea. I didn’t read A Doll’s House in high school or college. I never saw A Doll’s House. I have no relationship with it. When I moved to the city, I was only getting cast as Middle East nerd. So I even put A Doll’s House and Ibsen in another corner and I’m like, “I’m never going to be in that.” But I’m reading this as I’m going from Budapest to Berlin to go to the very famous protest that happened in October. And I’m, as I’m about to, you know, 150,000 Iranians came out as I’m reading this, all I’m reading is Iran. I’m not even seeing anything. Oddly, you know, my entire Iranian family of immigrants that we talk about came 36 of them all. 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Came to the protest.

Arian Moayed
Came to A Doll’s House.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Came to A Doll’s House.

Arian Moayed
And all they saw was Iran. They’re just like, either I represent the Iranian male that’s been putting the Iranian women down underneath their thumb for generations, or I represent the Islamic regime that doesn’t want women to go, you know, and have any freedoms or just be regular people. Either way, Nora wins. You know, she lea . . .  she has a tough road ahead of her. It cannot be easy. There’s going to be a lot of mistakes along the way, but she wins. And so Iranians are seeing a different thing, I think. Like when can we walk out the door? When can Iranian women, I’m saying, can they walk out the door? When can we as an Iranian people get our nation back and our culture back from these, you know, brutal dictators? Murderers, really?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. I like the way that Arian talks seamlessly about being Iranian-American and the work he chooses and how he plays his characters, because it’s clear he’s aware of how all the parts of himself inform those characters. And he also seems to be aware of the other side: us, as audience members and how all the parts of ourselves inform the way we watch.

You also decided to make Stewy Iranian?

Arian Moayed
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Can you tell me about that? Because he really draws attention to being Iranian.

Arian Moayed
Yeah. I mean, the head of Uber, the CEO of Uber is an Iranian man, with a very Iranian name. And no one’s kind of like saying anything about that. No one even knows, really. No one knows. And so I think it’s important that people start seeing Iranians not as just some sort of lightning bolt cultural thing. Like, you know what I mean? Because people have so many connotations about the word Iran that’s messy. So you have to, like, introduce us in a way that’s powerful, strong, and it doesn’t have to be a good guy or a bad guy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Arian Moayed
Can I also go with the opposite version? No Iranian wants to play some sort of saint that’s like, no, we want to play like real people, real human beings. You know, in A Doll’s House, we have this unbelievable actor by the name of Michael Patrick Thornton.

Lilah Raptopoulos
He’s been on the show.

Arian Moayed
Oh, he has?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

Arian Moayed
You know, I talked to him. He’s in a wheelchair. And Mike is like, I don’t want to be going into these stories anymore. As, like, what he called a Wheelchair Yoda. He just wants to have a sex life. He wants to have make breakfast in the morning, go to work, you know. And so a lot of that is by just showing us that we can be powerful positions, we can be regular positions, we can be in desperate positions, but not because of that. Does that make sense?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. It’s not your entire identity is not based on (inaudible). The thing is, it’s a part of your identity the way it is in the world. Yeah.

Arian Moayed
No. We’re . . . that a part of our identity. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I wonder if you’ve been asked to play a typecast immigrant bad guy. And how that might compare to playing someone like Torvald or Stewy, or someone who might be considered a more complicated bad guy.

Arian Moayed
Well, to be real with you, one of the Waterwell shows that we did in 2005 was called The Persians. And I got signed by a big agency right after that. I was 25 years old. And early on in those conversations, I told them that I didn’t want to play terrorists or victims. This was in 2005. And you know what happened? I didn’t work. And the reason I didn’t work is because that’s all that was being written. There was nothing else. And then, you know, shows came along. Big popular hit television shows, that I won’t mention. But they come and they’re like in the cultural zeitgeist in which basically the bad guy is some sort of vague Middle Easterner. And I would say no to these things. I get offered these things and then, you know, cynically or rudely along the way, when I say no or I pass on it, they offer me more money to be like, Oh, this is what I really want. They think it’s some sort of like. And you’d say it again and so that was the only thing that was available. Has it changed completely? Absolutely not. There are still moments in which I am literally battling and saying there was a project that happened a couple of years ago where they saw me as in Succession. And they knew I was Iranian, and they you know, they wrote this, like, villainous Iranian bad guy, you know, mafia or something or whatever. And OK, fine. So I’m reading in, trying to figure out what is. And in the middle of this thing, I yell at my mom and I say, “Give me tea” in Farsi. And I said, No, this would never happen. I mean, I just literally would never. So you have to say that. And you’re also navigating some really tricky waters here. You know what I mean, where you’re this is, you know, a lot of the stuff is, you know, pre-George Floyd where, like, we have a movement right now where people can at least try to talk about it or try, you know, But you’re also wanting a job and you don’t want to be ostracised or blacklisted because you do. So you walk in these things and you show how you navigate like, well, you know, just an FYI, this section right here is very not Iranian. And to be honest, it’s so falsely Iranian that it would take us out.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Before Arian left, I wanted to find out what was next for him, including with his non-profit Waterwell.

Arian, my last question is just: what are you doing next? What are you working on next? What are you thinking about next? What’s exciting you?

Arian Moayed
A bunch of fun things. One is I’m excited, very excited, to have everyone see Nichole Holofcener’s new movie this summer called You Hurt My Feelings, starring the incredible Julia Louis-Dreyfus, which is going to be out in theatres on May 26. It is a good old-fashioned, beautiful, heartwarming comedy.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. It looks great. Yeah.

Arian Moayed
It’s cool. It’s really fun and sweet and actually really kind of powerful. With Waterwell, we have so much going on. Last year, we took one of our old plays called The Courtroom, which was a re-enactment of one woman’s deportation case that Waterwell performed inside of courtrooms all around New York City . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Wow.

Arian Moayed  
. . . including the Second Circuit Court of Appeal. During the pandemic, we made it into a movie that premiered at Tribeca, and now we’re working alongside American Immigration Council to kind of present this movie to a bunch of cities all across the country and cities that don’t get an access point to something like the courtroom. So we’re working on that. I have a bunch of things that I’m writing myself. I just finished a new script that I’m really excited about, but I have four or five different projects right now that are in different levels of development that I’m leading on and all of which are just very cool and Iranian and new and fun.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cool. Arian, I loved this conversation.

Arian Moayed
Thank you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thank you so much.

Arian Moayed
I loved it, too.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the Life and Arts podcast of the Financial Times. If you’re in the US, the second annual US FT Weekend festival is coming up. It’s on Saturday, May 20th, in Washington, DC. We have Salman Rushdie, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Waters, Pati Jinich, Daniel Boulud, tons of people. There is a special discount link in the show notes alongside a deal on an FT subscription. You can use the link in the show notes or go to ft.com/weekendpodcast.

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