The sad and shocking life of Macron’s favourite Iranian actress
by Alexander Larman · Australian Financial ReviewAlexander Larman
May 20, 2026 – 5.00am
If you watched the now virtually forgotten Ridley Scott geopolitical thriller Body of Lies in 2008, you might have been struck by a few features of an otherwise dreary film. It had a high-quality cast, led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, and dared to make a few provocative points about American intrusion in the Middle East. But amid the largely Western cast – including a ludicrously bewigged Mark Strong as the Jordanian intelligence chief – one performer, largely unknown to Western audiences, stood out.
The Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani may have been stuck in a relatively trite role as DiCaprio’s character’s love interest – a nurse of near-saintliness – but whenever she was on screen, she gave the film a jolt of authenticity lacking from her cruising co-stars. They felt as if they were movie stars playing around, but Farahani was the real thing, in both senses. She was the first Iranian to appear in a Hollywood film since the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and many might have hoped that her presence on screen would represent a thawing of relations – cinematically speaking, at least – between East and West. This, however, was very much not the case.
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The Telegraph London
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