Namak Magazine - Maz Jobrani

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Highlights of Monique Soltani's exclusive interview with Actor/Comedian Maz Jobrani were presented on page 34. Here is the FULL text of their dialog.

Monique: when do you move to the U.S.?
Maz: we moved in late 78 so I was six years old. And we moved originally to New York City for a couple of months. Then we ended up in Merin County, which is Northern California. Then about eleven and a half years ago I came down to LA.

What was it like for you being a kid in the early 80.
You know what, I was a kid. So I didn’t really know what was going on. I just remember leaving Iran and I had my younger brother. I have two younger brothers now, but the one I had then, we were leaving, and he was just recently born, and I was really attached to him. I remember kissing his shoes. My father was here, and my mother and my sister and I were just going to go to two weeks to NYC because we didn’t realize it was going to get so much worse. I remember I was excited because schools kept closing in Iran... so I was like, this is great! The revolution is working for me. I didn’t really realize what was going on. I would hear people yelling stuff in the street and I remember there was curfew. I remember being in my grandmothers house and looking out. The cops were driving out and it was dark. And I was like, this is weird! And then we came here. It was kind of the same until the hostages were taken. Nobody knew what was up. Once the hostages were taken I got a little bit of heat but not a lot. Where we lived people were pretty cool. It was a liberal area. But there was one kid who, ahhh, his name was Jim xxx... and he was a six grader... and I remember him calling me a "f*cking Iranian"... and I was like, this is great, you know?

You remember his first and last name all of these years later... he must have had an impact.
I remember because he was a few years older and kind of a big man on campus. A lot of people remember that guy… other than that I didn’t get a lot of heat. I recently went back and looked at New York Times articles from that era just to see what they reminded me of. It's funny. You see that originally the news on Iran is on page ten, then three, then it’s like the Shah might be leaving, so it’s page one, but it’s not huge until the hostages are taken. Then it blows up!

So you didn’t feel nervous to tell people that you were Iranian? You never lied?
I don’t know that that was an issue because I played soccer so I was athletic as a kid. I was a kid. I dealt with the more typical things that kids were dealing with. It was a cultural thing. I remember my mother bought me a Micky Mouse t-shirt when I was in second grade. I had a crush on this girl and someone was making fun of me, saying"ohh you are such a girl," and I was like oh my God mom, how could you!
So there was that incident. There was Valentines Day were everyone gets those cards. It was my first Valentines Day so I didn’t know... I didn’t want to show the girls I had feelings so I just bought my guy friends really cheesy looking Valentines Cards. Then when I got there people started handing out cards and I saw that everyone had gotten them for everybody! I was like, oh my god I just got it for the guys! This is horrible. This is really bad! I think part of it was culturally we didn’t know Valentines Day. My mom didn’t know what it was.
Another one was we had Pizza Day and everyone was in charge of bringing something. They put me in charge of bringing sausages. In Iran "sausage” means hot dog... so I went shopping with my mother and my aunt. I said I need sausages and they got all these hot dogs. So I showed up for Pizza Day with packages of hot dogs. It’s not that big of a deal as an adult, but as a kid everyone was like, "why did you bring hot dogs?" I said, "this is sausages" and they laughed, "no, it’s not... haha! You brought hot dogs!" And I was like, Mom, again! You know... it’s more of the cultural stuff more than being picked on for being an Iranian perse.

What did you want to be when you were a kid?
I probably went through phases. I was a big Mohammed Ali fan. I didn’t want to be a boxer but I was a big fan of his. Zorro. I think I wanted to be a fireman and a police man, and then I started playing baseball and I fell in love with that. I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Then when I was 12 I started doing some plays, but I never thought of doing that as a career. I just thought "this is fun." It continued to be baseball until I got into high school and I realized I’m not at the professional level. And it was at that point in high school when my acting teacher said "you could do this as a professional." She had faith in me. That’s when I first started thinking about doing it as a career and I told my parents. They said "No, no, no. You can’t do this." They said "You should be a lawyer. You should go to school to be a lawyer. Lawyers act. What do you think they are doing? Performing in front of people. That is what you should do." That’s what pushed me to study political science as my undergrad at Berkeley... thinking I would be a lawyer... then I thought maybe I’ll be a business man. Then I went to Italy for my junior year abroad. There was this professor who was really cool and I thought that’s what I want to do, I want to teach kids.

You wanted to do it all?
Yeah. Then I came back, finished Berkeley, got into grad school at UCLA for a Ph.D. in Poli Sci to become a professor. I became discouraged with that too because the idea was like "publish or perish". It wasn’t about teaching. It wasn't for me. At the same time I hadn’t done any acting except one class in my undergrad. I really loved it and the teacher in that class said I should do it. So I had two teachers tell me to do it. When I came to LA I had some time so I did some plays.

Where at?
I did a couple of plays in the Foothills... what is it called, Tujunga??

That’s where I went to High School!
Oh my God! What High School?

Verdugo Hills.
Yeah I just remember driving and I was like where is this place? This guy was a charlatan. He would write these plays and double cast, thinking everyone would bring their friends and he could make money. I ended up doing it because it was so easy, but after a while, I thought this is shady. The guy was a total scam artist. You drive all the way up there and no one comes to see these shows.

So how did you get into comedy then?
Standup, I had wanted to do since I was a fan of Eddy Murphy's when I was a kid. Eddy Murphy made it on SNL when he was 19 and I wanted to get on there before him. My High School had this talent contest and I said I’m interested in doing stand up comedy. I was 16. One day I would write something and think it was great. The next day I would read it and think, this is horrible. My material was like "Why is our genitalia in that area? Wouldn’t it be great if it were on our hands? You could just be walking around having sex when you shake hands!" Just like stupid stuff.

But that’s funny...
It’s kind of funny, but at the same time I was immature. These were my words up there and it was intimidating. I was too young to really grasp it. I chickened out of that one. Then I was in college at cal and I was having a really bad day. I was sitting at a bar and they were having an open mic amateur competition. There were only two guys who entered it and they were horrible. I thought "I can be funnier than these guys right now, next time there is a competition I’m entering it." I always say you get motivated by greatness and mediocrity.
I was listening to the radio one day in the Bay Area. They announced a comedy competition. You had to submit a tape. I had no material so I had a friend with a camera tape me. I did five or six characters trying to do singles dates. I sent it in and got picked – one of 16 finalists — out of 1000’s. I thought this is great but I have no material! And it was a dirty dozen comedy competition... it was black comedy. I went to the radio station to promote it. It was me and all these black comics who knew each other. They were all like “your Mama’s so this and your Mama’s so that” and I felt like an idiot. I had no Mama jokes. They asked me to introduce yourself and I was like “yo yo yo what’s up? Mazi J. Mazi J. What’s up?” All my friends that I told to listen were like "Hey Mazi J.!!!" I don’t know what happened.

So then what happened?
I ended up going back to UCLA to the Ph.D. program, ended up dropping out, trying to pursue acting a little bit, being discouraged by it in LA. I got to the real world and it was horrible crap. Then I started working at an ad agency while taking improv classes at the ACME. While I was in the class, there was a lady there named Judy Carter who teaches stand up classes. I took the classes and went from there. That was 7 years ago.

What was the best thing you got out of the class?
It was supportive. A lot of young comics come up to me and ask "What should I do? Where should I go?" You have an option of going on your own and learning. But what’s great about this class was they would say, here’s a formula.

What’s the formula?
You need to have a point of view. She broke it down to "It’s crazy when..." fill in the blank. "It’s hard to when..." fill in the blank. She looked at comedy and said every comedian is saying something. There’s a point of view there that most comedians have.

What’s your point of view?
It started out from her class: "It’s hard to be an Iranian in America because…" or like now I’ll do all kinds of material like the question is “How did we end up in the axis of evil?" If you broke it down it’s me saying "It’s hard to be Iranian."

So you were a comedian, then an actor, or vice versa?
I officially started acting when I was 12, then all through High School.

What got you noticed?
It's all sort of been hand-in-hand but my acting got me noticed before my standup. I ran into a friend who said "listen, a friend of mine has written a script about an Iranian couple. It's in English. They go on a blind date. Would you be interested in coming to read?" I read the script and it was really funny. They promoted it one night. It was huge! The capacity was 250 and we had 380 in there. People asked, "when are you going to do it again? You guys have something here."

What was it called?
"The Belindd Date" and there was a second part called "The Vedding". It became this hit all around town and we were selling out 700, 1200 seats then we went to New York and did it. I was doing the play and working at an ad agency. My goal was to become a freelance copywriter to make money. I said, when I'm 30, I’ll go back and do the acting thing. One of the advantages of the ad agency was that I could make free dubs. So I’m doing the dubs and this guy who is the producer at the agency, this older guy, really sweet, he's standing behind me and he's watching. He says, "you have really good comedic timing. Have you thought about doing this professionally?"I said "I've been backing off." He pulled me into his office and said "I'm 62 and I had a lot of things I wanted to do in my 20s but I never did them... If you want to do it, do it." This was when I was 26. I said, "you know what? You're right!" This was when Roberto Benini won for Life is Beautiful and I saw him at the Cannes Film Festival winning, and how excited he was. I thought that's how life should be. It was a combination of that and this older guy telling me go for it that made me say, you know, I'm going for it again.

And it took off from there?
A friend of mine’s cousin was doing a movie which became "Maryam". So I went out and did this film with them in New York. That was my first film. From there I was just doing standup around town. My brother had a friend who was a young agent so I started doing guest stars.

I read you got cut out from your first TV appearance?
That was like, Oh man! And I got friends calling saying "Maz, I've never seen a guy close a door like that before. That was amazing. You are going to get an academy award!"

So that was in 1999. Now it's 2005 and you are blowing up. How did you go from that to being in the Interpreter starting Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman?
There's a Chinese proverb and that says "the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step." There really has been no one moment for me. I'm not like Ashley Simpson where I was thrust on to the scene and I've become this superstar who doesn't know what the hell it is to work. Having done plays in High School–the lady at that High School, her name was Michelle Swanson–she was really good at instilling in us the work ethic, even though I was still lazy about it. My one agent who was my brother’s friend, he was a young Iranian kid who grew up here, so he totally gets me, so it was like guest star, guest star, guest star, and then they got me an audition for Friday After Next, the Ice Cube movie. I don’t know where I was mentally but it was after Sept 11th and I didn’t realize it could be this big. I just went in and did it and had a great time doing it. It was great, my first big movie. And it was a lot of fun. They let me improvise and add to the character.
That movie became a great step for me and it’s always building. I use the example of Jamie Foxx. I always thought he "made it" but people are now saying "oh he's finally making it!" I was like, he's always been... but in the industry, the thought process is if you haven’t done something in a year, then what are you doing?

How do you deal with all of that... as a person not an actor?
Maz comedy really helps me. If I don’t have an acting gig today or an audition, I will go do a set at the Comedy Store. It makes me feel great. I'm talking about stuff, keeping sharp. It's like hitting the gym. That really helps me with my acting. As an actor I am trying to do stuff that I enjoy. I just did a short film in New York, with no budget. There’s no money but what a cool opportunity to work on a fun project I enjoy. I have also written a script for my self with that guy who wrote The Belind Date. It’s called Jimmy Vestwood, Amerikan Hero. It’s like an Iranian Pink Panther kind of script.

Tell me about some of the roles you have played. Do you feel like you have been type cast?
It’s an ongoing battle. When I first started, I played a security guard on Chicago Hope... no ethnicity, nothing like that... I thought, this is fantastic. I had a couple of other parts like that. I was in an ad agency and I was trying to get out of there. I was try to get my career going and I got a chance to do a Chuck Norris movie of the week in Dallas, where I played a terrorist. I thought, you know what, this is great I get to get out of here and I’m going to put a twist on this character so they see there is a reason he is doing this. I went down there and I got into a couple of arguments because they wanted me to wear a turban. Then I realized this is a Chuck Norris movie... what kind of statement am I going to make here? What an idiot am I? That’s when standup helps, because then I get material out of it. But you do the stereotypical roles. In Friday after Next, I played a guy who owned a donut shop in a strip mall. Those Middle Eastern guys exist. I’ve got a sitcom coming out on March 23 on Fox, called "Life on a Stick" where I play a Middle Eastern guy... or you know what, the creator was saying we are keeping his ethnicity vague. His name is Mr. Hut so he could be anything. It's fun, you know. But at the same I said I won’t do terrorist parts anymore. But I’ll make an exception if it's a great part, like the Hannibal Lector of terrorists, or it's great money.

When did you make the decision?
I made it at a point when I could financially not have to worry about it. I don’t necessarily want to go back and have a day job somewhere. Also, standup allows me to have that. I have turned down a lot of auditions where I have said "This is ridiculous. Anyone else can do it. I don’t care. I don’t want to do this because there is just too much of that on television." That’s another reason why I’m trying to get this movie made…he’s a hero. It’s called Jimmy Vestwood Amerikan Hero. He wants to be a hero and he ends up being a hero. We haven’t had a Middle Eastern hero in American cinema.

So is that your dream role then to play a hero?
My dream role is to play roles as an actor that have layers and they challenge you.

So anything that stimulates you or challenges you creatively?
Yeah. I don’t have to be the good guy. There's the movie Snatch. I would do any of those parts. There are movies that I see and think God, I would love to do those parts.

Who do you want to work with?
Oh my God! I have a lot of guys I would love to work with. I would love to work with Spike Lee, Guy Ritche. I’m a huge fan of John Tortoro as an actor. I got to work with Sean Penn this past year.

What was that like?
It was great! It's interesting because as an actor you also want to be professional, and I was. I hung out with him a little on the set..., I mean I didn’t ‘HANG’ out with him... he was nice, you know... and he would joke around and stuff. But I’m not his buddy or anything... it was just great to watch him... it’s like the basics you gotta do…

So what’s your role like in the interpreter?
It's one of those parts when the star turns around and says "get the report to Jimmy and tell him dad…" You see me in and out in a hand full of scenes. I know the movie is not about me but it was just a great experience.

Do you think that being Iranian has helped your career? It seems your career has gone pretty quickly. Do you think now people are more open to seeing Persians and other ethnicities on TV and Film?
Yeah, it probably has helped because I remember when I was doing the sketch class at ACME, the teacher said if you got something you can do, do it well and that will get you far. I never thought of it that way. It just so happened the characters I was creating were Middle Eastern, so there came this period when a lot of Middle Eastern parts started coming—obviously after Sept 11th, but even before then. There were Middle Eastern parts because of the world we live in today. Sept 11th brought media attention to my standup more than anything, and then all these parts came along. It’s still competitive amongst Middle Eastern actors. It just so happens you go out, you do it, and one thing leads to the next, and hopefully you do good work on stuff and people recognize you. So I am sure that it’s helped.

Do you ever feel like it’s hurt?
No. I mean, I’ve been lucky enough where I’ve turned down auditions based on "No, I’m not going to do that." That is the only way you can say it would have hurt. A lot of parts do come out where it’s this terrorist and that terrorist. It’s tricky because on the one end you think, this does exist, Middle Easterners are doing this. It's like the Sopranos is interesting... if it were a TV show about an Italian family where there wasn’t something outrageous about them, it might not be so interesting. But then you have Everybody Loves Raymond, and it’s a comedy. But we don’t have the Everybody Loves Raymond of Middle Easterners... more importantly that’s why I keep referring back to this screenplay I am trying to do. I really enjoy it and it’s a fun part, and it’s comedy, and it’s different, and why aren’t more of those parts out there? I was saying on stage last night… I don’t know any terrorists. I’ve never met a terrorist. I don’t have any friends that are terrorists. Most of my friends are doctors and lawyers.

Do you think the media perpetuates the stereotype?
It’s a combination. That’s what makes news. So obviously, when something happens, you are going to hear about it. There's a lot of great Iranians doing a lot of great things — Shirin Ebadi who won the Noble Peace Prize. We have engineers in NASA. The Iranian community gets a hold of that through email. I remember we had that girl who was a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader and we were all "woohoo"!!!

Do you think a lot of people are hiding their ethnicity?
Oh yeah. I make fun of that. There are a lot of Iranians named "Tony". I think in life you kind of have to stay true to yourself and keep an integrity level. I don’t want to have a conversation where I’m like yeah I’m a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I’ve had to do it before and I felt bad horrible. A lot of times the people in positions of leadership are too worried, too scared, so they go "no no, you can’t do this." Like with my script, Jimmy. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from some people who I respect, who come from a studio system, and they say "for this movie to work your side kick can not be your mother; your sidekick needs to be either a white guy or a black guy; or we get somebody with a name and you guys have this whole thing where it’s like a racial thing." Hey, that could be a great movie but that’s not the movie I’m trying to do. I’m not trying to do Rush Hour… I’m trying to do this movie of mine that’s like this. And they say "if you want middle America to go see it, that’s what you need."

Can’t you do it on a smaller version shop it at some of the festivals?
I think that funding for this will be found through Iranians. There are a lot of Iranian that I know or know people who know people who have money. I think there are a lot of people who want to get behind this notion that we are good. Jimmy Vestwood represents what I am saying.

What would you say is your biggest regret?
My philosophy is not to (have regrets) because I feel you learn from everything. The only thing I could say is that I wish I would have started earlier. I have moments in my life where I almost did, and then I stopped. But then the experiences I had from in-between those times might not have happened.

And you are a totally different person for having taken all these different routes in your life?
You know what, it's helped me as a comedian. Especially what is going on in the world today. I try to talk more and more about these issues, about being Middle Eastern. But of course my life is defined by more than that, being male in my early 30's all that other stuff...

What advice would you give to young Iranian Americans looking to get into your field?
When I was in grad school at UCLA, there was this young Iranian girl who wanted to go to Italy for a few months but said "I think my parents won’t want me to." She was really smart and a good girl. The problem with our culture is we get intimidated by our parents and ten years down the line we are miserable. I said you know what, "just go for it and I think your parents will support you. They might fight you at first but they will support you if you show the work ethic and put the time in."

Are your parents supportive of you?
Yeah, they are. I think I got my independence when I went to Italy and my father just went back to Iran. And I said I have to do this. I remember my mom was upset with me at first but then she was supportive and it ended up being the best experience of my life.

What do you believe in?
(looks slightly taken back pauses then answers) Being good to people. None is better than the other. Appreciating what we have. I believe there is no reason to be a d*ck!

visit Maz at www.mazjobrani.com