Muslim Typecasting: "You may know me as Terrorist #4"

[summer]

www.gq.com/story/muslim-american-typecasting-hollywood?mbid=social_facebook

You've heard of actors getting typecast. But there is no group more slighted, more narrowly cast, than the Muslim-American actors who earn virtually their entire livings pretending to hijack planes and slaughter infidels. Jon Ronson embarks on a soul-searching odyssey with the bad guys of Homeland, American Sniper, 24, and every other TV show and movie in which the holy warriors get mowed down before they even get to finish one good “Allahu Akbar!”


The right-wing action hero gave Maz Jobrani hope. This was 2001. Maz had been trying to make it as an actor in Hollywood for three years, but things were going badly for him. He was earning peanuts as an assistant at an advertising agency. But then his agent telephoned: Did Maz want to play a terrorist in a Chuck Norris movie? So Maz read the screenplay for The President's Man: A Line in the Sand, and he found within it a moment of promising subtlety.



"Chuck Norris plays a professor of Middle Eastern studies," Maz tells me. We're sitting in a coffee shop in Westwood, Los Angeles. Maz is a goateed man in his early forties who was born in Tehran but moved with his family to the San Francisco Bay Area when he was 6. "There's a scene where he's talking to his students about Afghanistan. One of the students raises his hand and says something like, ‘Uh, professor, they're all fanatics, so why don't we just kill them all?' And the Chuck Norris character goes, ‘Now, now. They're not all bad.' And I thought, ‘Wow! A nuance!' "



The nuance gave Maz hope. Did this mean they'd allow him to make his character nuanced? Maz was aware that fixating on this one line might have been self-deluding, like a drowning man clutching driftwood in a hurricane. But he agreed to take the part.



Then, at the wardrobe fitting, they handed him his turban.



"I said, ‘Whoa, whoa! No! Afghans in America don't wear turbans. Plus, this guy's a terrorist. He's not going to draw attention to himself. You tell the producers I want to bring authenticity to this character.' The wardrobe supervisor replied, ‘All right, all right, I'll talk to them.' "



The message came back from Chuck Norris's people that the turban was mandatory.



And then came Maz's death. It was the one thing he'd been excited about, because the script alluded to a short fight immediately preceding it. Hand-to-hand combat with Chuck Norris!




"But on the day of the scene," Maz says, "Chuck Norris told his son, who was the director, ‘Oh, I'll just take a gun and I'll shoot him.' Oh, great! I don't even get a fight!"



"So how exactly did you get shot?" I ask Maz.



"Okay, so I'm about to set off a bomb at a refinery," he replies. "Chuck Norris runs in. I run away, because I'm scared. He gets behind the computer and starts dismantling the bomb, because he's a genius. I come running back in carrying an Uzi. And I try to shoot him. But he takes out his gun and shoots me." Maz shrugs. "I start to yell, ‘Allah—' Bang! I'm down. I don't even get ‘Allahu Akbar!' out. It was horrible, man."



Maz shakes his head at the memory. It was humiliating. Actually, it was worse than humiliating—it was a harbinger. Maz understood, as he lay dead in that refinery, that Hollywood didn't want him to be an actor. Hollywood wanted him to be a caricature. "I started acting in junior high," he says. "I was in Guys and Dolls. I was Stanley Kowalski. In my head, before coming to Hollywood, I thought, ‘I can play anything.' " But instead he'd become the latest iteration in Hollywood's long history of racist casting, reducing his religion and culture to a bunch of villainous, cartoonish psychopaths. He knew he had to get out.




I glance at my phone. It's 1 P.M. We're running late to meet three of Maz's friends at a nearby Lebanese restaurant. We jump into Maz's car.



Maz refuses to take terrorist parts nowadays. He's primarily a stand-up comedian instead, a very funny and successful one. In fact, he's just published a memoir, I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV. But Maz's friends at the restaurant haven't been so lucky. They still make their livings as actors, which means they still play terrorists all the time.



Maz and I hurry into the restaurant, apologizing for being late. We order a mezze plate for five. These men have been killed while committing acts of terrorism on Homeland and 24, in The Kingdom and Three Kings and True Lies, and in too many other films and shows to list. We've barely sat down when Waleed Zuaiter, a Palestinian-American actor in his early forties, recounts for me his death scene on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. This was about a year after September 11. "I play a guy from a sleeper cell," Waleed says. "I'm checking my e-mails. I hear the cops come in, and the first thing I go for is my box cutter. There's literally a box cutter in the scene."



"Was this in an office?" I ask Waleed.



"It was in my home!" he replies. "I just happened to have a box cutter lying around." Waleed shakes his head, bemused. "The cops burst in, and next thing you know I've got the box cutter to some guy's neck. And then one of the cops shoots me."




"I die in Iron Man," says Sayed Badreya, an Egyptian man with a salt-and-pepper beard. "I die in Executive Decision. I get shot at by—what's his name?—Kurt Russell. I get shot by everyone. George Clooney kills me in Three Kings. Arnold blows me up in True Lies…"



As Sayed and Waleed and the others describe their various demises, it strikes me that the key to making a living in Hollywood if you're Muslim is to be good at dying. If you're a Middle Eastern actor and you can die with charisma, there is no shortage of work for you.



Here's another irony in the lives of these men: While they profoundly wish they didn't have to play terrorists, much of our lunch is taken up with them swapping tips on clever ways to stand out at terrorist auditions.



"If I'm going in for the role of a nice father, I'll talk to everybody," Sayed tells the table. "But if you're going for a terrorist role, don't fucking smile at all those white people sitting there. Treat them like shit. The minute you say hello, you break character."




"But it's smart at the end of the audition to break it," adds Hrach Titizian, who at 36 is the youngest actor here. " ‘Oh, thanks, guys.' So they know it's okay to have you on set for a couple of weeks."



Then Waleed says something you don't often hear actors say, because most actors regard their competition with dread: "Whenever it's that kind of role and we see each other at the auditions, it's so comforting. We're not in this alone. We're in this together."



We're in this together. By this Waleed is referring to a uniquely demeaning set of circumstances. I'm sure practically all actors, Muslim or otherwise, feel degraded. Most have no power over their careers—what roles they can play, how their performances are edited. But Muslim actors are powerless in unusually hideous ways. The last time one became a big star in America was back in 1962—Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. These days they get offered terrorist roles and little else. And we—the paying public—barely even notice, much less worry about it. Where's the outrage? There is none, except from the actors themselves. These roles are ethically nightmarish for them, and the stress can wreak havoc on their lives. Waleed's father, for instance, threatened never to talk to him again if he ever played a terrorist. I thought that was bad enough. But then I meet another actor who had it much worse.




Ahmed Ahmed was raised a strict Muslim in Riverside, California, by his Egyptian-immigrant parents—a mother who learned English from watching soap operas, and a gas-station-attendant father who ended up buying an automotive shop. The day Ahmed told them he was quitting college to try his luck in Hollywood, his father asked if he was gay and didn't speak to him for seven years.



When I meet Ahmed at the French Roast Café in downtown New York City, he echoes Waleed's thoughts about the camaraderie among these actors. "It's always the same guys at every audition. Waleed, Sayed Badreya… You're all sitting in a row in the waiting room. Oftentimes the casting offce is right next to you. The door's shut, but you can hear what's going on."



"What do you hear?" I ask him.



"Oh, you know," he says. "‘ALLAHU AKBAR!' And then…" Ahmed switches to the voice of a bubbly casting director. " ‘Thank you! That was great!' And the guy walks out, sweating. And you walk in and they're, ‘Hey! Thanks for coming in! Whenever you're ready!' And you're thinking, ‘How do I do it differently from the guy before me? Do I go louder?' "



When he auditioned for Executive Decision, he went louder. Executive Decision is, I realize as I talk to people from this world, considered the ground zero (as it were) of ludicrous portrayals of Islamic terrorists. This was 1996, and Ahmed was in his mid-twenties. "My agent had called me. ‘There's this film. It's a $55 million action suspense thriller starring Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, and Steven Seagal. They want to bring you in to read for one of the parts.' I said, ‘What's the part?' She said, ‘Terrorist Number Four.' I said, ‘I don't want to do it.' She said, ‘It's three weeks of work. It pays $30,000.' "



And so Ahmed read for the part. "My lines were ‘Sit down and obey or I will kill you in the name of Allah.' And the director goes, ‘Brilliant! Do it again. But this time, can you give me more of that Middle Eastern, you know…' I go, ‘Anger?' He goes, ‘Yes! Yes! Angry!' "



Feeling a flash of actual anger, Ahmed decided to ridicule the process by going stupidly over-the-top.



"And the next day," he says, "my agent calls me up: ‘You booked it.' "



By the time Executive Decision came out later that year, Ahmed says, his life had "become dark. Boozing on the Sunset Strip. After-hours parties. I'd wake up at 2 P.M. and do it all over again. It's the same people in the clubs every night. Everyone's trying to fill a void."



"Were you doing all that boozing because you felt guilty for playing terrorists?" I ask him.



"There was an element of that," he replies. "There was an element of not working between those parts. And then I had an epiphany. I called my agent: ‘Hey! Don't send me out on these terrorist parts anymore. I'll be open for anything else, but not the terrorist stuff.' " Ahmed pauses. "After that, she never called."



"How often did she call before then?" I ask him.



"Oh, three or four times a week."



And so Ahmed made a decision: "Get the fuck out of Hollywood." He went to Mecca. And what he saw there were "four and a half million people dressed in white—rich, poor, walking side by side, asking for blessings from God."



For ten solid years after his trip to Mecca, Ahmed quit acting and became a stand-up comedian. He still performs regularly, but he says he'll take a terrorist role from time to time if a good one comes along. After all, he notes, nobody accuses Robert De Niro of betraying other Italian-Americans when he plays a mobster.



The evening after our lunch in Westwood, I visit Sayed Badreya, the older Egyptian actor, at his Santa Monica apartment. When I arrive, he's online, looking at photographs of Arabian horses.



"I'm involved in breeding them," he says, "because I don't know if I can keep playing these same parts." He says his daughter was once asked at school what her father did for a living and she replied, "He hijacks airplanes."



Sayed takes his work seriously and has always gone to great lengths to research his roles. In 1991, he started attending a mosque in Culver City, one that was known to attract some militant worshippers, so he could study Islamic radicalism up close. A few years later, some of the mosque's worshippers went to a movie and recognized Sayed. Back at the mosque after Friday prayers, they surrounded him. "They were yelling, right in my face: ‘You're helping the Zionist Jews of Hollywood in their agenda to make Islam look bad. For money, you're giving up your heritage.' "



"How were you responding?" I ask.



"I felt guilty," he says. "I knew they were sort of right. But I yelled back at them, ‘We have to take their money to make our own movie and tell our own story!' We were yelling so hard we were showering each other with spit."



"What was the movie of yours they saw?" I ask him.



"Executive fucking Decision," he says.



Sayed says he does all he can to intersperse his terrorist roles with more helpful portrayals of Muslims. He wrote and starred in a well-regarded film, AmericanEast, charting the struggles of Muslims in America post-9/11. But he has to play terrorists to pay the bills, so he at least tries to be a realistic one. He does side work as a technical consultant, advising directors on the accuracy of their films. He worked in this capacity on Executive Decision. "We had a really beautiful moment in an Arabic wedding scene," Sayed says. "And the producer, Joel Silver, saw it and said, ‘No, no. This is nice. I want a fucking bad Arab. We don't want a good Arab.' "



Almost all of the wedding scene was cut from the film, Sayed says. But here's a scene that wasn't cut: One of the terrorists takes a quick break from killing people to read the Koran. "If I'm playing a guy chosen to hijack a plane, that means I'm one of the top soldiers. I'm going on a mission. I'm not going to Mecca. He might recite something in his head if he's religious, but he's not going to open the Bible. But producers get really sensitive if you say, ‘No, that's not accurate.' "



In an e-mailed statement, Joel Silver denied the "bad Arab" incident, adding, "Any editorial decisions, made twenty years ago, were strictly creative, and not to perpetuate any stereotypes." I didn't hear back from any of the other producers or directors I approached. Not Peter Berg (The Kingdom, another film that has a bad reputation with Muslim actors for its portrayal of the Islamic world), nor Stephen McEveety (Mel Gibson's collaborator on The Passion of the Christ and the producer of the The Stoning of Soraya M., in which an Iranian husband has his wife stoned to death), nor Joel Surnow, the co-creator of 24. Maz told me that his most offensive acting offer ever was for a Joel Surnow production—Fox's short-lived comedy The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Maz says he was asked to audition for a sketch about a Middle Eastern architect pitching to rebuild the twin towers. The joke was that his design included a bull's-eye right on the building. Howard Gordon, the man behind Homeland and 24, is the only producer I persuade to talk to me. He calls me from his car.



"I came to this issue when I was accused of having Islamophobia in 24," he says. "We had a family, essentially, of terrorists on the show. The Muslim Public Affairs Council provided an education for me on the power of images."



"What did they say?"



"They asked me to imagine what it might be like to be a Muslim, to have people fear my faith," he replies. "I felt very sympathetic. I didn't want to be a midwife to xenophobia."



Since then, he says, he has done his best. And people have noticed. When I was having lunch with Maz and the other actors at the Lebanese restaurant in Westwood, Howard was one of the only mainstream producers they praised. (Three Kings' David O. Russell was another.)



"Anyone with a conscience has to take this seriously," Howard tells me. "I'd often hidden behind the defense that 24 was a counterterrorism show. We rationalized to ourselves that our primary task was to tell a compelling story." But the truth, he knew, was darker than that: "We all have our personal biases and fears—I suspect we're wired to feel threatened by the ‘other.' And I include myself in that category."



In the lobby of a chichi old hotel in Midtown Manhattan, Anthony Azizi warns me that this interview might get heated. And indeed it does. If you want to know the impact that a lifetime of doing these movies can have on a man, spend some time with Anthony Azizi.



Anthony is a veteran of various CSIs and NCISs and 24. His death scene in 24, he says, made it onto a Yahoo list of best deaths ever. (His throat gets slit with a credit card.) He's a big, handsome, intense man who is not, by the way, a Muslim. He's a member of the Iranian spiritualist faith the Bahá'í.



"Hollywood has the power to snap its fingers and make whoever it wants a star," he begins. "It specifically and purposefully doesn't want to see an Arab or a Middle Eastern star. There's too much prejudice and racism—and the people running it, I don't need to go into the specifics of their backgrounds.…"



I think I know what he's getting at. But all sorts of producers—not just Jews—are behind insensitive movie portrayals of Muslims. There's Chuck Norris. There's John Musker, director of 1992's Aladdin, in which all the "good Arabs" have American accents and all the "bad Arabs" have pseudo-Middle Eastern accents. Stephen McEveety (The Stoning of Soraya M.) is Catholic.



Anthony carries on, turning his anger toward Jon Stewart's Rosewater, in which the Mexican actor Gael García Bernal plays the Iranian-Canadian reporter Maziar Bahari. "Man, if I saw Jon Stewart, you'd have to hold me back. How dare you hire a Mexican-American to play an Iranian-American, with all these amazing Iranian-American artists. I can't stand it. I'm sick of it. I speak Spanish fluently.…"



He effortlessly slides into perfect Spanish for a few seconds, then returns to being Anthony. "Why am I not being hired for Mexican or Latino roles?" he says. "You play my roles, but I can't play yours, and I speak Spanish just as well? Go fuck yourself." Anthony picks up my recorder. "Go fuck yourself, Jon Stewart!" he yells. "Have me on your show if you have the balls! You don't have the balls!"



He's really shouting now. The hotel receptionists keep glancing nervously over at us, wondering whether to intervene. "Hollywood people are pussies!" he rants. "They're racist! They don't want to say, ‘I just built a Middle Eastern star!' Here's how I see it—and this is probably the most controversial thing I'll ever say: The only Middle Eastern star was Omar Sharif. The minute he had a relationship with a Jewish-American woman named Barbra Streisand was the death knell for any other Arab-American actor's career. Hear it again! The minute he had a sexual relationship with a Jewish…"



"I don't underst—" I start to say.



"How dare you make that an incident where no Arab-American actor can ever get a career again!"



Finally I get my question out, or at least some of it: "But what's the connection between Omar Sharif purportedly having an affair with Barbra Streisand and—"



"I think there's a certain type of producer that doesn't want to see that happen," he says. "They don't want their gem—Barbra Streisand was the gem of the Jewish community—sleeping with the Arab heathen! It caused huge riots in Egypt, too. I'd say the same thing to the Egyptian community.…"



Sure, Anthony's Barbra Streisand outburst is crazy. If there is a racist conspiracy in Hollywood to rob Middle Eastern actors of roles, it's not a great idea to rail against it with a racist-conspiracy theory of one's own. But think about what Anthony has been subjected to in his career. He and the other men in this story are going through something that future generations will regard as outrageous. They're the bloodthirsty Red Indians surrounding the settlers' wagons in Stagecoach. They're the black savages in The Birth of a Nation (who were played by white actors in blackface). They are the people Hollywood will be apologizing to tomorrow.



"Don't question my talent," Anthony says. "I should be a star by now. But I'm not. So you explain why."



Perhaps the closest this community has to a star is Navid Negahban. He played, most famously, Abu Nazir in Homeland and also the Iraqi in American Sniper who helps the U.S. military locate "the butcher." He was Ali, the stoner in The Stoning of Soraya M.



"Everyone I've met seems really talented," I tell Anthony. "So why do you think Navid, of all of you…?"



"He's hot right now, playing bad guys," Anthony replies. "He loves to play those roles. I love Navid. He's my brother. But there's no longevity in those roles. You always get whacked. Everybody who's still alive in Homeland is white! Where is Abu Nazir? He got whacked, 'cause he's brown."



terrorist-gq-2015-11.jpg

Getting to meet Navid isn't easy. One minute he's filming in upstate New York, the next he's doing motion capture as a video-game character in Los Angeles before flying off to shoot a movie in Morocco. But I manage to catch him for an hour at a coffee shop near Columbus Circle in New York City. He's already there, chatting with another on-screen terrorist, Herzl Tobey (The Shield, 24, Homeland). They've been working on a movie together upstate, so Navid has brought him along to meet me. Navid is very dashing, with an old-fashioned matinee-idol air to him.



"I'm sure you've had a few of the others say, ‘I won't do terrorists anymore,' " he says as I sit down.



"Yes," I say.



"I've told them that's the biggest mistake," says Navid. "If we don't play those roles, the character becomes a caricature. [The producers] might get some actor from a different background who looks Middle Eastern." Herzl nods, adding, "The writer is sitting here in America, writing about a world he's completely unfamiliar with. So of course he won't be able to write it with the full depth and sensuality that comes with that world. It's up to us to bring that depth."



I tell Navid that I've noticed that the more prominent the Middle Eastern actor, the more awesome the death. Back when Maz was just starting out, he barely got ‘Allah' out before Chuck Norris shot him. But Navid is at the top of the pecking order, the closest thing we have to the late Omar Sharif. I ask him to remind me how Abu Nazir died on Homeland.



"Oh, he was graceful," Navid replies. "It was so…" He smacks his lips. "He's sitting very gracefully on the floor. On his knees. He's ready. The soldiers run in. Everybody's yelling. But he's calm. He's just looking at all of them very, very calmly. And then he reaches into his pocket and they shoot him. And there's a Koran in his pocket." Navid smiles wistfully. "That was beautiful," he says. "I die well."

[ttt]

Man, that's depressing.

Racism and lack of diversity in Hollywood has gotten pushed onto my radar in a big way in the past year, and it's really startling to start noticing things you never really noticed before. Whenever H and I watch TV, we're constantly pointing out how many people of color, or not, are cast in roles that could be played by any race.

[ttt]

Also, has anyone seen that show Tyrant? I was super excited for it but it turned out to be disappointing. Anyway, it's about an Arab family and takes place in a not-Saudi Arabia country, and the main characters are played by: a British/American actor with no Arab heritage, an American, an Arab Israeli, a non-Arab Israeli, a Swede of Ugandan descent, a white South African, an Australian, a half-American half-Persian actor, and both of the kids who are supposed to be half-Arab, half-American are both played by fully American actors with zero Arab heritage.

So out of the top 10 billed actors on IMDB for the show, exactly one is actually Arab.

ETA: AND the character played by the actual Arab is the bloodthirsty rapist murderer dictator. 

[bourbonfan]

Aug 15, 2015 15:19:23 GMT -5 ttt said:

Also, has anyone seen that show Tyrant? I was super excited for it but it turned out to be disappointing. Anyway, it's about an Arab family and takes place in a not-Saudi Arabia country, and the main characters are played by: a British/American actor with no Arab heritage, an American, an Arab Israeli, a non-Arab Israeli, a Swede of Ugandan descent, a white South African, an Australian, a half-American half-Persian actor, and both of the kids who are supposed to be half-Arab, half-American are both played by fully American actors with zero Arab heritage.

So out of the top 10 billed actors on IMDB for the show, exactly one is actually Arab.

Wasn't there also a movie recently set in Hawaii that got a lot of backlash too for having a white American play a native Hawaiian? Or something like that?

[ttt]

Aug 15, 2015 16:48:47 GMT -5 bourbonfan said:

Aug 15, 2015 15:19:23 GMT -5 ttt said:

Also, has anyone seen that show Tyrant? I was super excited for it but it turned out to be disappointing. Anyway, it's about an Arab family and takes place in a not-Saudi Arabia country, and the main characters are played by: a British/American actor with no Arab heritage, an American, an Arab Israeli, a non-Arab Israeli, a Swede of Ugandan descent, a white South African, an Australian, a half-American half-Persian actor, and both of the kids who are supposed to be half-Arab, half-American are both played by fully American actors with zero Arab heritage.

So out of the top 10 billed actors on IMDB for the show, exactly one is actually Arab.

Wasn't there also a movie recently set in Hawaii that got a lot of backlash too for having a white American play a native Hawaiian? Or something like that?

It was Emma Stone, playing someone half-Asian! 

[mie]

Aug 15, 2015 16:48:47 GMT -5 bourbonfan said:

The movie was Aloha and Emma Stone played a Chinese-Hawaiian character. 

[bourbonfan]

Aug 15, 2015 17:15:20 GMT -5 ttt said:

Aug 15, 2015 16:48:47 GMT -5 bourbonfan said:

Wasn't there also a movie recently set in Hawaii that got a lot of backlash too for having a white American play a native Hawaiian? Or something like that?

It was Emma Stone, playing someone half-Asian! 

She's the red head right? I'm terrible when it comes to basic pop culture. Lol

[ttt]

Aug 15, 2015 19:07:57 GMT -5 bourbonfan said:

Aug 15, 2015 17:15:20 GMT -5 ttt said:

It was Emma Stone, playing someone half-Asian! 

She's the red head right? I'm terrible when it comes to basic pop culture. Lol

Yep.  Spoiler alert: not Asian, not even a little bit. 

[aprilsails]

This seems so terrible to me, and now that I think about it I can barely think of any characters in major movies that are good.

And now I want to kick myself since I looked up the cast of Little Mosque on the Prairie (which I watched for years) and they are mostly all of Pakistani or Indian descent.

[Deleted]

Aug 15, 2015 19:41:31 GMT -5 aprilsails said:

This seems so terrible to me, and now that I think about it I can barely think of any characters in major movies that are good.

And now I want to kick myself since I looked up the cast of Little Mosque on the Prairie (which I watched for years) and they are mostly all of Pakistani or Indian descent.

I think Pakistani and Indians can be Muslim too. I don't know what nationality the characters purported to be.

[aprilsails]

Aug 16, 2015 7:12:30 GMT -5 @hannymaren said:

Aug 15, 2015 19:41:31 GMT -5 aprilsails said:

This seems so terrible to me, and now that I think about it I can barely think of any characters in major movies that are good.

And now I want to kick myself since I looked up the cast of Little Mosque on the Prairie (which I watched for years) and they are mostly all of Pakistani or Indian descent.

I think Pakistani and Indians can be Muslim too. I don't know what nationality the characters purported to be.

Yes there are large Muslim populations in both India and Pakistan. I was thinking more in terms of this article describing how difficult it is for Arab actors to get jobs, where this is yet another instance where they could have had positive casting roles but missed out.

[Deleted]

Aug 16, 2015 8:13:41 GMT -5 aprilsails said:

Aug 16, 2015 7:12:30 GMT -5 @hannymaren said:

I think Pakistani and Indians can be Muslim too. I don't know what nationality the characters purported to be.

Yes there are large Muslim populations in both India and Pakistan. I was thinking more in terms of this article describing how difficult it is for Arab actors to get jobs, where this is yet another instance where they could have had positive casting roles but missed out.

True. But I also doubt any Pakistani and Indian actors are the next Julia Roberts either.

I find it so odd that John Stewart chose to cast a non-Iranian in that role. However there is that one Iranian woman that plays Iranian, Spanish, and other roles. I think she is the only Iranian Hollywood actress. Shohreh Aghdashloo (sorry spelling might be off)

[cherryvalance]

I was also surprised about Stewart.

Michael Moore included a clip about this in the extra scenes for Fahrenheit 9/11. Ahmed Ahmed speaks about the Terrorist #4 role in it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFVjiq7MIFY