Do we like Shohreh Aghdashloo?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record and years of speaking up for women and Iranians, with the record on LGBTQ+ topics thin rather than bad.
Shohreh Aghdashloo was born in Tehran in 1952 into a wealthy family of intellectuals and started acting in the 1970s, when she remembers Iranian arts flourishing. She studied in Britain, then came to the US with a touring stage production. It's a long way from Tehran theatre to Hollywood, and she did it twice over, once as a refugee of the revolution.
Her breakthrough came with House of Sand and Fog, which earned her an Oscar nomination. She told CBS the role let her speak for women she had seen all her life, and for voices that had not been heard. That sets the tone for the whole career: she picks parts with something to say.
On the harm check, this is a clean sheet. She has campaigned for women's rights in the Middle East, and described Iranian women as having no rights and no voice. In 2017 she told TheWrap she was “saddened and heartbroken” by the US travel ban, and argued countries shouldn't become enemies. We found nothing harmful from her, and none of the company she keeps raised a flag.
Her loudest recent moment was the 2023 Oscars, where she wore a gown embroidered with “Women, Life, Freedom” and the names of three women who died in Iran in September 2022. She told The Hollywood Reporter she wanted the world to know more about what Iranian women face. That's using a red carpet for other people, at the risk of being banned from Iranian media for life.
Drama on the record is thin. In a 2016 memoir interview she said she clashed with Kiefer Sutherland on the set of 24, and suspects he had a hand in her character's departure. That's her account only, and the article carried no reply from him, so we leave it as one side of a set-room stoush.
On the Expanse she played a tough UN politician, and she told public radio she admires Elizabeth Warren as a hero and sees the show as commentary on today's world, water scarcity included. She also argues that studios underestimate audiences when it comes to diverse casts. She has been criticised by one film scholar for taking a role in The Stoning of Soraya M., but she defended it as a message for women.