Internationally known for her role in the acclaimed Netflix series Sacred Games, Iranian-German actress Elnaaz Norouzi has broken her silence on the political crisis gripping her native country – and she’s not holding back.
Tehrani actress Elnaaz Norouzi talks about the current state of Iran
The 35-year-old actress, who holds German citizenship and has built a successful career in India and Hollywood, has expressed her deep frustration with the direction Iran is taking in the wake of the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a series of candid interviews. In particular, she questioned the appointment of his son Mojtaba Khamenei as the country’s next supreme leader – a decision she says was made entirely without the approval of the Iranian people.
“As a 6-year-old, we were forced to sing ‘Death to America, death to Israel’ in school. These are the things that this regime forces on people. There are so many rights that people in this country don’t have. This regime has no plans to go away, it doesn’t listen to its people, people can’t even vote,” she told Screen magazine in an exclusive interview.
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The anger in her words is rooted in something personal. Norouzi was born in Tehran and moved to Germany with her family as a child. Her parents, she says, witnessed decades of regime domination of Iranian life.
“As an Iranian who was born when this regime was in full force, my parents saw what the country was before and what it is now. It is one of the few countries extremely rich in oil and other resources. It has everything, when I see this country going down even further, our currency has lost 98 percent of its value. The average person in Iran earns $100 a month, so the cost of living is so high that the country is holding itself back.” they have been killing young people since they came to the ruins, they don’t care about humanity or people,” she said.
She is equally open-minded about who will lead Iran. “The next leaders are being chosen by them. People don’t have the right to say if they don’t want it when they protest, are shot down, raped or imprisoned. How exactly do Iranians expect to overthrow this regime, empty-handed? When the regime brings foreign militias into the country from Afghanistan, Iraq, to make them realize that there are people working in this place too,” she said. Internally, the IRGC also stopped doing this.
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Norouzi has also taken aim at what she describes as the deliberate use of Iran’s oil wealth to destabilize the wider region. “All they want is to use the money that comes from Iran to fund Hamas, Hezbollah and others who are indirectly attacking Israel, creating unrest in the Middle East. They are funding terrorist organizations to do their dirty work. Iranians have to live with that and we don’t want that,” she said.
The pattern of undemocratic succession is not new, she told NDTV. “Just like the last 47 years, people who were not chosen by the Iranian people are coming to power. The same thing happened with Ali Khamenei; now comes another supreme leader who was not chosen by Iran. This has been happening for 47 years. Now they are choosing another leader. They chose a leader that none of the Iranians knew. They killed us, we have no son of Khamenei. Now he is their leader. don’t say.”
She recalled the 2009 protests as a defining moment that revealed the system’s contempt for ordinary Iranians. “In 2009 there was a huge protest. Millions of people took to the streets chanting ‘Where is our voice?’ Many people died in the process. People realized that this is not the person we voted for, but the person who has now come to office,” she recalled.
“Even the leader of a country never gets a hundred percent of the votes. The whole point of life is that there are so many different types of people with different opinions in this world. That’s exactly what freedom of speech means,” she told Hindustan Times.
For Norouzi, the freedom she enjoys outside of Iran — the freedom to simply speak — comes with a responsibility she takes seriously. “I’m trying to be the voice of the deaf because in Iran you don’t have a voice. You’re not allowed to speak against the government. The government will kill you. So what I and many other Iranians outside the country are doing is trying to be the voices of those who don’t have one,” she said.
She is also aware of the limits of emigration as a solution. While her own family was among those lucky enough to leave, some 90 million Iranians cannot do the same. However, living abroad sharpened her sense of what her homeland needs. “I wish child marriage would stop. There are many young girls whose parents marry older men. I wish women could go to football stadiums and watch a match. I wish women could become judges. I wish women could have the same rights as men when it comes to inheritance,” she said.
During his childhood, he remembers that leaving was always planned. “They realized this during my childhood when the revolution happened in 1979. Many other Iranians were born into this mess. As far back as I can remember, my parents were talking about leaving Iran because life there was already terrible,” she said.
Norouzi’s workplace
Norouzi moved to India in 2015 and has since established herself as one of the most recognizable international faces in the entertainment industry there. Her breakthrough came with Sacred Games – Netflix India’s first Emmy-nominated original series directed by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane – in which she played the complex role of Zoya Mirza opposite Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui.
She then appeared in the Apple TV+ spy thriller Tehran, the Hollywood action film Kandahar with Gerard Butler, Amazon’s Made in Heaven and a number of Bollywood and regional Indian productions.
Before acting, she spent over a decade working as an international model for brands including Dior and Lacoste. IMDb She was also offered roles in the Iranian film industry, but turned them all down, citing restrictions there.
Despite everything, he says he has hope — and a desire to return. “In a free Iran, I will return home. I will return to my country and see my family. But then I will return to my other country, which is India, where I live, where I am very happy and where I feel very safe, and I will continue my work here.”
