‘I was put up for a lot of terrorist’s wife roles’: Leila Farzad on her I Hate Suzie breakthrough and taking the lead in BBC drama Better

British-Iranian actor Leila Farzad faced years of rejection before bagging a scene-stealing part in ‘I Hate Suzie’. She talks to Nicole Vassell about playing the clown, using her platform and taking on her biggest role yet

Farzad: ‘I had the most amazing response to me playing an Iranian’ (ByPip)

Until recently, Leila Farzad was asked to read, repeatedly, for the same kind of role. “There were a lot of terrorist wives that I was put up for, and that was how I saw myself represented a lot,” the actor says dryly. “You know, a wife begging someone to not blow something up.” Having grown up in London, Farzad “didn’t think of myself as necessarily needing to be cast as a Middle Eastern person – I was just a girl from London”, but it happened so often that it became a running joke among her friends – “look Leila, it’s your part”. That is, until a job came along that changed everything. Farzad landed the part of Naomi in Billie Piper and Lucy Prebble’s I Hate Suzie, as the straight-talking agent to child-star-turned-shamed-celeb Suzie Pickles.

The role landed her a Bafta nomination and proved, at 37, to be Farzad’s big break. She’s now on the brink of taking on her first lead TV role in Better, a tense police drama set in Leeds. Over a mint tea in the quiet corner of a London hotel restaurant, Farzad is frank about the long journey it’s taken for her to feel some security while doing what she loves. “Being gainfully employed, I cannot tell you, having been on the other side of it for so long, I feel so lucky,” she explains. Since graduating from drama school more than a decade ago, Farzad had long heard a barrage of “no”s – or just plain silence – when she auditioned for roles. When her part in Suzie came along, she’d just begun training to become an intimacy coordinator. Although she never planned to leave the industry, she had started to wonder if her acting career would ever pan out in the way she’d hoped. Nor did it help that, for many years, she’d been told that the chances of achieving success after 30 were slim-to-none. “Don’t bother. Women fall off a cliff, and then you’re not hot anymore, you’re not attractive, no one’s gonna want to hire you. Whatever,” she says, eyes rolling.

When she got the part on I Hate Suzie, Farzad saw the opportunity to personalise Naomi in a way that felt meaningful and didn’t hesitate to voice her idea. “When I sat down with Lucy [Prebble] ahead of I Hate Suzie and said she was considering making Naomi Turkish. I said, ‘Should she just be Iranian, because I’m Iranian? How many Iranians do you see represented?’” And with that, Naomi Jones had a nuanced, specific identity – bisexual, brash, British Iranian. It wasn’t unnoticed by the audience. “I had the most amazing response to me playing an Iranian,” she says with pride.

“Lots of queer Iranian girls were messaging me, like ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing myself represented on TV, I could weep’. Great! Just from telling the truth, we’ve made strides.” Now, after a short second season of Suzie in late 2022, Farzad is the central focus. In Better, she plays DCI Lou Slack, a corrupt cop who is ready to turn over a new leaf after a family health scare shakes up her moral compass. In conversation, Farzad may be breezy and casual, but she comes across as grounded – someone who isn’t taking this moment for granted.

“I feel excited and trepidatious; nervous and anxious and proud all at the same time,” she says. “I never dared to dream that my name would be first on a cast list – I just wanted to be employed. So, to have that privilege is incredible, but comes with its own pressure that you do the role and the writing justice, because you’re carrying quite a lot of it on your shoulders.”

She needn’t worry: as DCI Lou Slack, Farzad is convincing and confident. Slack is cutthroat and calculated, then switches effortlessly into a warm, loving persona when she’s off-duty with her son and husband. “Slack is able to inhabit both of those character traits, and be able to compartmentalise, which I think women can do very well. But you don’t often see it much on television.”

Farzad has waited long enough for a role as meaty as this. After studying modern languages at Oxford, Farzad returned to her home city of London to train at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She’d first had an inkling that she wanted to act when she was around six, when her mother and aunt would bring her to the theatre regularly. They’d queue at the half-price ticket booth in Leicester Square “come rain or shine”, and after seeing a production of The Wind in the Willows at the National Theatre, Farzad knew she wanted a job that involved pretending to be someone else and making people laugh.

Growing up, she used comedy as a defence mechanism against any criticism that would come her way for being “funny looking”. “I had one eyebrow and very buck teeth, and my mum didn’t know how to manage my hair so it was a big frizzy mess,” she recalls. “And everybody at my school had this sleek blonde hair. They all seemed to have these very even features, and I was the ‘creature’ that felt very different and other. Comedy was my way in. I was the class clown, that was my position amongst all those very pretty... Sophies and Arabellas, if you know what I mean,” she says, tilting her head with a smirk. “I felt comfortable and happy being the one that could make everyone laugh. My best friend even talked about it in the speech at my wedding: comedy meant that I felt like I belonged. That was the skill I was offering.”

Farzad as Lou Slack in ‘Better’ (BBC/Sister Pictures)

After first pursuing an academic degree to appease her mother, Farzad believed she was well on her way to achieving her childhood dream when she made it to drama school. But trying to find her feet as a jobbing actor after graduation was a brutal reality check. “What I think drama school doesn’t prepare you for is the level of rejection and pain, and the thickness of skin you’ll need to have. If you have low self-esteem or low self-confidence, it’s gonna make it even lower. You need to have real resilience and be quite self-possessed.”

She knows this now, but at the time feeling as if she was constantly trying to enter a club that didn’t want her around was difficult. It felt personal. “You end up not even prepping properly for auditions because you’ve already decided in your head that you’re never going to get it, so what’s the point? You go into self-sabotage mode. I always knew I wanted to do it, but I was wondering: can I do this? Am I capable? Maybe I don’t have what it takes. I don’t seem to look quite right for it.”

Aside from occasional roles in the London theatre scene, jobs were thin on the ground. To avoid becoming disheartened, Farzad sought fulfilment in the company of her friends and loved ones. Around this time, she also became a mother to a now eight-year-old daughter. “If I didn’t get a job, I had this other wonderful, ball of happiness,” she says of having a child. “That helped me contextualise things. Because it can feel really like it’s the end of the world, and you’ll never feel happy again if you don’t get this job. You need to shift your mindset.”

Billie Piper and Farzad in ‘I Hate Suzie’ (Sky UK)

Farzad hopes that with her growing platform will come opportunities to speak more about the things that matter to her – the ongoing political crisis in Iran being one of them. As a British Iranian, Farzad finds it difficult to engage with the atrocities being committed against women under the current regime. “You feel terrible guilt, and impotence, and sorrow. But you’re in this Western country where everything is pretty much fine and you don’t have to be afraid to just walk down the street. You feel it’s your responsibility to bring it to people’s attention.”

But for now, she’s revelling in finally having the chance to do the creative work that matters to her. “It was like being really hungry and occasionally having a tiny bite of a really delicious sandwich, but that’s all you’re allowed,” she says of her dissatisfying pre-Suzie years. “But when you eat that sandwich, it’s so good. Every bite now is a real privilege.”

‘Better’ airs on BBC One on Monday 13 February at 9pm