In 2012, Farahani posed topless in pictures in France’s Le Figaro magazine. The spread caused a furor in her home country, resulting in a ban from her returning to Iran for insulting Islamic cultural sentiments.
“I don’t say that nudity is liberation, not at all,” she adds. “But I think symbolically, for me, after this taboo was broken, and once it is broken, it is broken forever in Iran. I think little by little we should push the limits even culturally.”
Farahani is perhaps best known in the U.S. for playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s love interest in Ridley Scott’s 2008 CIA saga “Body of Lies.” And now she’s in Afghan director Atiq Rahimi’s “The Patience Stone,” where she plays a woman caring for her comatose husband while militias ravage the country around them.
“I think we should leave politics to politicians,” she says from Amman, Jordan, where she is currently acting in “Rosewater,” the directorial debut of “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart. “We artists have no idea what is happening. But I come from Iran and because of the repression there, I have become a symbol of freedom and of women’s rights.”
She explains: “All I am is an actress who wants to bring beauty to this world by acting in cinema.”
Everyone is born equally capable but lacks equal opportunity. Pierre Omidyar
