Omid Djalili: ‘You can’t wash blood away with more blood’
As the actor and comedian returns for a fiery new stand-up tour, he tells Helen Coffey about the best moment of his life (involving Brad Pitt and Robert Redford), how he learnt to channel rage into humour, and why he’s now entering his fabulous second act
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Your support makes all the difference.I’m so sorry I’m late – I just had to stop at the side of the road to piss in a bottle.”
It’s quite the introduction to comedian and actor Omid Djalili, who arrives at Soho House to meet me in a whirlwind of energy and apologies. He is indeed 20 minutes late; but it’s hard to stay mad at someone when they’ve made you burst out laughing within the first 20 seconds of meeting.
The bottle incident was necessitated after he got snarled up in a traffic jam on the way into London from Ipswich, and it was exacerbated by onlookers recognising The Mummy star mid-flow. “They started filming me taking a piss!” he continues indignantly. “So then I had to beg them not to put it on the internet if I agreed to pose for a selfie…”
On that note, he dashes off to find the bathroom to finish what he started – “to squeeze the last bit out” – leaving me in no doubt that, however this interview goes, it’s not going to be boring.
Being filmed while pissing in a bottle is unfortunately an occupational hazard when you’re as instantly recognisable a character as Djalili. While you may not immediately be familiar with his name, you likely will be with his striking, expressive face. The 58-year-old Iranian-British performer has managed to sneak into an impressive number of blockbuster films over the past 25 years, alongside his steady stand-up comedy career and stellar TV credits including His Dark Materials (playing a diplomatic witches’ consul)and Dickensian (as the taxidermist from Our Mutual Friend). He was in the first instalment of the lucrative Mummy franchise as warden Gad Hassan back in 1999, and has since popped up in a slew of big-budget movies, including Gladiator, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, Sex and the City 2, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The World Is Not Enough and Spy Game. He has particularly fond memories of this last role, filmed in 2000 and starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt.
“I’ll tell you a story that is possibly the greatest moment of my life. I had just one scene with [Redford and Pitt] – I had no lines, I was just cleaning my glasses and had to look at the two of them. I said, ‘do I even need to be in this scene?’, but the director said I did. When we were done, they shouted, ‘OK, that’s a wrap on Omid, Brad and Robert’.”
They were filming in Casablanca, Morocco, at the time. The three actors were told to make their way through a marketplace in single file to get to their cars – Omid behind two of the world’s biggest movie stars, topped-and-tailed by security, walking quickly so they didn’t get mobbed by fans. “OK, so here it is,” Djalili recounts excitedly. “We’re walking fast, and we can see this group of Arabs – and they look at Robert Redford, clearly thinking, ‘I’ve seen him before’, but before they realise who he is, it’s too late. He’s gone. Then they see Brad Pitt, and you can see them thinking, ‘Is that the guy from Thelma and Louise?’. But it’s too late, he’s gone. And then they see me – and they immediately recognise me. We had to stop walking because I was surrounded by people asking for autographs.”
As it turned out, The Mummy had been playing on Moroccan terrestrial television that week on a non-stop loop – six times a day, every day. “It was a great moment,” says Djalili, a wistful glint in his eye. “That was one of the most momentous days in my life. There’s a photo of me signing autographs, with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt as blurry shapes in the background…”
I can just picture the scene – Pitt and Redford, visibly confused by being passed over in favour of the significantly less starry Djalili. And yet I’m not all that surprised by this story. As I say, he’s inherently recognisable. And he’s always had a knack for scene-stealing performances, even when he’s only on screen for brief snatches of time. In Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, for instance, the scenes in which he appears as a Greek ferry official are some of the most memorable in the entire movie thanks to his impeccable comic timing and arsenal of facial expressions. It harks back to the old cliche that, in this case, holds more than a grain of truth: “There are no small parts, only small actors.”
More recent on-screen roles have seen him take centre stage though, from one of the wise men in live-action Christmas musical film Journey to Bethlehem – which features Antonio Banderas as Herod and is described by Djalili as “Glee does baby Jesus” – to last year’s The Change, a Channel 4 comedy series about the menopause in which he stars as comedian Bridget Christie’s useless husband.
“Bridget and her [now ex] husband, Stewart Lee, approached me together to say we’re looking for someone to play Stewart,” he tells me. “They said, ‘you’re hairy, like him. And you’re quite overweight.’” There was one additional criterion for casting: “[Bridget] said, ‘do you fart much?’ And I said, ‘I can do it on call’.” During filming, there was a moment when he simply looked at her and broke wind – which was “too close to home”, according to Christie.
It’s crazy – calling for a ceasefire can get you into trouble
“It was a lovely piece about the menopause,” Djalili recalls fondly. “But it was also about the manual labour of women that goes completely unnoticed. [In The Change] she has a ledger where she shows me – and I see she’s kept all these books: putting the kids to bed, 20 minutes; cleaning the lampshades, three minutes; sex with husband, one minute 20 seconds. I go, ‘it wasn’t that long!’”
Djalili has a talent for this – segueing seamlessly between discussing serious issues and making bawdy jokes or flippant asides. It is this mental and comedic dexterity, perhaps – along with his Persian heritage – that puts him in a unique position, enabling him to share his opinions on some of the most polarising and inflammatory topics. He has been particularly vocal about the Israel-Palestine conflict (even when it felt like career suicide to do so) – to the point that one of his shows had to be cancelled in autumn last year following threats to his safety. “Demand a ceasefire now! END THE GENOCIDE ON GAZA,” read one of a number of social media posts he wrote at the time arguing for peace. “It’s crazy, yeah – calling for a ceasefire can get you into trouble,” he tells me now.
Not that security concerns stopped him from speaking out. “I think we’ve all been tipped over the edge with the whole Israel-Palestine thing,” he says. “The rest of the world can’t just stand by. Whatever war it is, you can’t wash blood away with more blood. I think that’s a universal truth that we’ve all come to understand.” There’s an anger that fuels Djalili’s words – just as there was when he publicly stood by the women in Iran as they fought to keep hold of hard-won rights – but it’s measured, controlled. That’s the big theme of his latest stand-up show, Namaste, in which he’ll “peacefully and joyfully control that rage and unleash a torrent of comedic vitriol upon the current state of this dangerously messed up planet” (according to the blurb, at least).
Taking on everything from climate change and terrorism to financial instability, oceanic pollution and depletion of natural resources, he’s aiming to transform fury into funny. “If you’re going to use stand-up comedy to make sense of things with a hopeful lens, you have to really control your anger,” argues Djalili. “You’ve got to be fuelled by it. But don’t be controlled by it.”
As much as comedy can be used as a tool to help people engage with the world’s big issues, the goal of the comedian is always “to make people laugh. Once you make people laugh, if there are messages that get them to act afterwards, or get them to shift perspective, that’s great. That’s fantastic,” he says. But the main thing is getting the laugh in the first place.
Though he has no fear of being “cancelled” and no topic is off limits, Djalili does have two stipulations: he would “never use humour to make fun of human suffering”; and, at the end of the day, the joke has to be funny. Otherwise you’ve failed. “Whenever we talk about cancel culture, and we talk about comedians offending people – the end goal is that we always want to make people laugh. There’s no question about that. If they’re not laughing, you’ve got it wrong.”
There’s a difference between a good joke and a lazy joke. And just because you think of it, doesn’t mean it has to said
The biggest comedy fails he’s personally witnessed are when stand-ups try to make a joke about a sensitive subject – such as 9/11 – but the joke isn’t funny enough. “There’s a difference between a good joke and a lazy joke,” he says. “And just because you think of it, doesn’t mean it has to be said.”
As for Djalili, his three now adult children (with wife Annabel Knight) have always been the arbiter of taste when it comes to his work. In the week I interview him, one of his two sons had instructed him to take down an Instagram post he’d shared because it was “off brand”.
It’s a critiquing process that started early. He tells a story about them coming to see one of his stand-up gigs when they were still kids. In the car on the way home, all three were silent. “I said to them, ‘you haven’t said a word about the show. If you don’t say something, I’m going to drop you off at the next station, and you can make your own way home’.”
A whispered conference started in the back seat; his daughter, the eldest, was nominated to give the official feedback. “We have a question for you. If you go to a Michelin-starred restaurant, and you’re given a lovely plate of food, but there’s a little bit of human faeces on the corner of the plate, what would you do? Would you send it back? That’s how we feel about your comedy. It’s a lovely meal. But there are little bits of s*** ruining it.” Oof. Brutal.
He adds: “I’m always guided by my kids.” It helps that he works with them; they’re in the business too. His daughter, Isabella, is an editor and producer; his elder son, Louis, is an award-winning director; his son-in-law, Ara, is also a producer and director. They’ve even got a production company together, Tiny Speck Productions. Keeping it in the family is clearly working for him. “I’m very lucky. When I say I work with my kids, they pick me up on things. It’s not about me developing them. It’s about me learning from them.”
Learning, growing, evolving – it’s likely the secret to how he’s stayed relevant in a notoriously fickle industry for more than 20 years. After 9/11, when xenophobic discrimination towards people who looked like Djalili was at its height and his name was being pulled from gig lineups up and down the comedy circuit, he thought his career was toast. Two decades on, he’s hailing this period as “his fabulous second act”.
“The world doesn’t belong to 17- to 27-year-olds,” he says confidently. “It’s very possible to have a fantastic second act. And I’m living mine right now.” And with that he’s off, onto the next thing, with the same amount of head-spinning gusto – whether it’s another interview, a scene-stealing cameo, or, indeed, a roadside piss in a bottle.
See ‘Omid Djalili: Namaste in the UK’ as part of his world tour from 10 October 2024 to 27 June 2025. For tickets and more information visit omidnoagenda.com
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