When she was small, Leila Farzad spent every summer in Iran, hanging out at her grandma’s house and eating peaches and plums from the trees. The actor was born and raised in London, but this was her parents’ homeland, so it was a confusing shift each time her flight landed on the hot tarmac. “It was so familiar yet foreign,” she says. “It’s that strange thing of belonging in two places. Everyone had names like the people in my family and looked like the people I knew. There was so much cheek-pinching and meeting of random relatives.”
She’s now 44, with a career spanning from the perfect, pulverising feminist drama I Hate Suzie to weep-fest Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and she hasn’t been back to Iran since her teens. “My career choice was not the one to be going across to Iran with, and it got more complicated, and more dangerous … It’s strange to belong to a country that I cannot travel to myself.”
