Golshifteh Farahani

Orig­i­nal­ly from Iran, Gol­shifteh Fara­hani comes from a fam­i­ly of artists and was intro­duced to the arts very ear­ly, study­ing piano from age five. She began her film career as a teenag­er in the Iran­ian film The Pear Tree by Dar­iush Mehrjui (1998). Eleven years lat­er, she broke onto the inter­na­tion­al scene by play­ing the lead role in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly. The film was hailed by crit­ics and con­tributed to the glob­al spread of con­tem­po­rary Iran­ian cin­e­ma. Refus­ing to sub­mit to restric­tions imposed on women, she appeared with­out a hijab in Rid­ley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008). This act of artis­tic free­dom pro­voked the ire of Iran­ian author­i­ties and led to her being banned from the coun­try. She went into exile in France and con­tin­ued a flour­ish­ing act­ing career, col­lab­o­rat­ing with many dif­fer­ent film­mak­ers includ­ing Mar­jane Satrapi (Chick­en with Plums, 2011), Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden, 2014), Louis Gar­rel (Two Friends, 2015), Jim Jar­musch (Pater­son, 2016), Manele Labi­di (Arab Blues, 2019), Arnaud Desplechin (Broth­er and Sis­ter, 2022) and Eran Rik­lis (Read­ing Loli­ta in Tehran, 2025). She has also par­tic­i­pat­ed in more main­stream pro­duc­tions, notably Joachim Røn­ning and Espen Sandberg’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) and Sam Hargrave’s action saga Extrac­tion for Net­flix. Along­side her film career, Gol­shifteh is an accom­plished musi­cian. A singer and pianist, she belongs to the Iran­ian group Kooch Neshin and is cur­rent­ly involved in sev­er­al solo musi­cal projects. She will next appear in Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, pre­sent­ed in com­pe­ti­tion at the most recent Cannes Film Festival.