Some ‘bad guys’ don’t wear hats
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Following dozens of television credits and comparatively little film work, Faran Tahir’s latest movie role gives him his greatest big-screen exposure yet. Tahir plays one of the principal villains in the superhero hit, Iron Man.
Tahir shares scenes with Robert Downey Jr. and Jeff Bridges in Iron Man, which earned $98.6 million in its opening weekend at the United States box office. His previous film credits include Charlie Wilson’s War and Picture Perfect. His TV appearances include episodes of Lost, The Practice, NYPD Blue, 24, Alias and The West Wing.
For Iron Man, Tahir portrays Raza, the menacing, multilingual leader of a band of brutal arms dealers who operate on the treacherous border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Speaking a few weeks before Iron Man’s smashing first weekend, Tahir expressed his excitement about being a part of a project that had “hit” written all over it.
“It’s a well-put-together movie to begin with,” he said from his home in San Diego. “There’s something for everybody in there. Of course, it has a lot of action, but it has some levity, lighthearted moments mixed in with some really dark stuff. Also, they’ve done a really good job of connecting it to today’s world and what is going on around us.”
Raza captures Downey’s character, Tony Stark, the future Iron Man, and demands that the billionaire playboy-arms dealer-inventor build one of his vastly destructive Jericho missiles.
“What I love about Robert Downey Jr.’s performance is that he presents the great conflict within his character,” Tahir said. “At a certain point he realizes that not all of his weapons are going out in the world to do good. Weapons have no conscience. They serve only the master who is holding them.”
Unlike so many screen villains, Raza is multidimensional, too.
“He’s in garb that triggers the idea that he’s a warlord from a remote region of Afghanistan or Pakistan, but by listening to him and watching his body language, you see that he has been around the world. He’s not just a tribal lord. It’s the same thing they did with Iron Man. Yeah, here is a man who wears armor, but let’s go deeper than the armor and get to the man inside.”
Before Iron Man, Tahir appeared with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman in last year’s Charlie Wilson’s War. His other projects include the new Star Trek movie, to be released next year, in which he plays the first Federation captain of Middle-Eastern ethnicity. Another forthcoming film, Ashes, stars Tahir portraying a mentally ill man in New York City struggling to survive without health insurance.
“It’s been a really good mix of projects,” Tahir said. “Longevity in this business kind of depends on that. If people can’t pigeonhole you as a good guy or a bad guy, or a dramatic actor or a comic actor, it’ll serve you well in the end.”
A third-generation thespian, Tahir was born in Los Angeles while his Pakistani parents were studying theater at UCLA. He returned to the United States at 18 to study theater at the University of California at Berkeley and remove himself from political strife in Pakistan. He later worked in Bay Area theater; attended graduate school at Harvard; and performed with the Cambridge, Mass.-based American Repertory Theatre.
Tahir moved to the West Coast about 10 years ago.
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