In Marie Claire's Meet Cute, we have a chance encounter with pop culture's latest man crush.
Arian Moayed is giving glamour. He’s sitting across from me in a black sweater and gold chain bracelet at Pebble Bar in midtown Manhattan, which he co-owns, along with Succession co-star Nicholas Braun—the gooberish Cousin Greg to Moayed’s shark-eyed private equity investor Stewy—and an Oscar party’s worth of people who Moayed calls “fancies:” Justin Theroux, Mark Ronson, Jason Sudeikis, Pete Davidson.
It’s a few days before the debut of season 2 of Nobody Wants This, the mega-hit Netflix rom-com that Moayed has a starring role on. Moayed plays Dr. Andy, who, along with Succession’s Justine Lupe, comprise this show’s second will they-won’t they/should they-shouldn’t they couple.
The second season will become Netflix’s most-watched current show after its release on October 23. Amid the excitement of the premiere, Moayed is still busy with other prestigious endeavors; he tells me he’s been “quietly” working with New York City’s charismatic mayoral frontrunner, Zohran Mamdani, whom he calls “iconic,” and is about to appear on “my friend Malala” Yousafzai’s book tour for her memoir Finding My Way. Mamdani and Yousafzai are co-executive producers of Champions of the Golden Valley, a film about skiers in Afghanistan that is a contender for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards.
Next year, Moayed will star in the Marvel series Wonder Man, which he speaks about as cautiously as if he has a laser dot on his forehead from a sniper rifle personally held by Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. However, he does say, “Supposedly, it's Kevin's favorite thing right now.” Moayed’s cast mates are Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kinglsey, and though he cannot reveal how or if his character Agent Clery interacts with theirs, he says, “The show is unlike any Marvel show. It's acted differently. It's very realistic. It's not Spider-Man: No Way Home.”
It’s all very dazzling—enough to get to a handsome man’s lustrously-haired head. Luckily, Moayed has people around him to keep him humble.
Paul Marlow Studio blazer, sweater, and jeans
The night before our interview, Moayed tells me his daughters, 14-year-old Ivy Shireen and 16-year-old Olive Joon, said, "Of all the people that Malala's having a book tour with, you're the biggest loser." Moayed pointed out that although book tour guests, like actress Nicola Coughlan and author Jenny Han, are indeed very cool and have more Instagram followers than the 45-year-old Moayed does, he has been twice-nominated for both Emmy and Tony Awards. His daughters replied, “Nominated.” Moayed jokes that he wants to be the first-ever person to TOGE: lose Tony, Oscar, Grammy, and Emmy noms. “EGOT loser,” he says prayerfully, like he’s about to throw dice on the craps table in the Bellagio. “Come on, baby.”
It’s unlikely. Spend any time with Moayed and it’s obvious that he’s an actor-y actor, someone committed to his craft. As we talk, he liberally employs the profession’s tendency toward mimicry; when I lean on my elbow, he mirrors the gesture. If I touch his arm to show that I’m kidding, he reciprocates.
It’s unlikely he believes it either. “I take all of this success that's happening right now with a little bit of, ‘It's all good, man,’” Moayed later tells me. “This sounds like I'm going to be cocky, and I just want to be honest, I'm just telling the truth: A lot of people ask me, ‘How do you always pick the best projects?’ And I say, ‘It's because I'm saying no to the things that I don't think are moving the needle, and I'm working with people that are better than me.’ Working with Jessica Chastain, working with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, working with Kristen, working with Justine—I'm just a sponge to all of this. Again, I don't want to sound cocky, but I'm not an actor that's dependent on making sure that acting represents me totally. It doesn't. It's a part of my life, something that I really care about, but I know my worth.”
Moayed views this entire thing—24 years living in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood with his family; Pebble Bar; the thriving career—as an improbable culmination of an upbringing dislocated by war. His childhood memories are bombings, sirens, and uncertainty. When he was 3, Moayed’s family fled to Dubai, and when he was 5, they settled in Chicago. His parents spoke no English, and to Moayed, it felt like, “Iran was like the worst word in the world. Not that it's such a great word right now, but it was the worst word in the world. The Iran hostage [crisis] was happening, Iran-Contra was happening, all that shit was on. It was scary, scary, scary, scary times.”
In 1991, a movie called Not Without My Daughter came out, starring Alfred Molina and Sally Field and based on a true story of an Iranian man who kidnapped his American wife during a trip to Iran. Moayed says white mothers started cautioning their daughters to not date Iranian men. In school, kids would “joke” that Moayed might commit some act similar to Molina’s character's. Humor is a defense to parry ignorant taunts and keep them from becoming something scarier, which may partially explain Moayed’s conversational style—long stretches of discursive earnestness on righteous justice, punctuated with antic banter.
Paul Marlow jacket and jeans
At his childhood home, Moayed was put in charge of writing checks and filling out immigration paperwork. Because there was no one qualified to make sure that things were being processed correctly, Moayed’s own citizenship was imperiled. “There's a fucking stupid question that says, ‘Do you want your dependents under the age of 18 to also be citizens?’” Moayed says of one form. “I was 12 or 13, and I'm sure I didn't know what ‘dependents’ means.”
Years later, when Moayed was 18 and nervous about going off to college at Indiana University to study acting, a lawyer friend checked on the status of Moayed’s citizenship. Apparently, the wrong box had been ticked on the stupid form. Moayed had to start the entire process over, wait five years, and re-apply, which took another two-and-a-half years. Being a green card-holder without citizenship made everything complicated, from school to membership in the Actors’ Equity Association, the union for stage performers.
Though he finally got his citizenship at 26, Moayed still has an ingrained anxiety response, which manifests in two ways: The first is catastrophizing. “I walk into every scenario thinking of all the things that are going to go wrong,” Moayed says. “And I'm fixing plan C on a thing that's not going to go wrong. It's just such a waste of my energies, but it's because the trauma of that childhood shit and immigrant shit was very realistic.”
The second coping mechanism is an avoidance of situations, especially jobs, that cause undue stress. When it cannot be avoided, Moayed finds a friend within the chaos to make eye contact and lock in with and find companionship in a shared understanding of the inappropriateness, “Many times, when you're on set, screaming is happening over there,” Moayed says. “But we don't do anything that’s important enough for screaming.”
That’s not to say that acting isn’t important to Moayed—or that he doesn’t see it as a vehicle for progress. In 2002, when he was 22, he and his Indiana University classmate Tom Ridgley co-founded Waterwell, a non-profit that he still runs, which combines his passion for theater with his deep civic convictions. The company eventually partnered with NYC Public Schools to create and co-run the Professional Performing Arts School for children in grades 6 through 12 across the city, while putting on works like a production of Hamlet set in 1917 in Iran, when the country was deciding whether or not to Westernize.
But early Waterwell productions were smaller scale, self-produced affairs—its first one had a $500 budget and ran for one sold out night. It was not enough to sustain a career (or Hell’s Kitchen rental cost), so eight months after founding the company, Moayed was cast in his first major play—a Steppenwolf production of the Tony Kushner play Homebody/Kabul.
On the first day, Moayed got a parking ticket, which forced him into a delayed and dramatic entrance witnessed by Kushner, Tracy Letts, Aasif Mandvi, and a cast full of famous theater actors who had arrived on time. “I walk in late, sweating; [like,] kill me, put me in a hole, I want to die. But in the corner was this beautiful woman sitting on a chair, looking at me like, ‘You are a fucking idiot.’”
It was his future wife, Krissy Shields, who rejected Moayed’s pursuits for two months before agreeing to go out with him. 15 years later, with the then-7-and-9-yeard-old Ivy Shireen and Olive Joon walking them down the aisle, Shields and Moayed married on the stage of Steppenwolf in a Persian ceremony. Shields’s blue collar, New Jersey-based family and his Iranian parents were thrilled that their adult children had finally decided to formalize what felt to them like a relatively bohemian arrangement.
Theater seems to pervade every area of Moayed’s life, from processing his childhood damage to his goal to make Pebble Bar into a Broadway hangout spot. We’re sitting in Johnny’s, the private room where earlier this year Moayed co-hosted the bar’s second annual Tonys after-party with former Roys Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook, who won Best Actress for The Portrait of Dorian Gray. (No TOGE for her.)
Moayed’s own first Tony nomination came in 2011, after the then-30-year-old starred with Robin Williams in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. When Moayed got the part, his younger daughter was an infant, and he was unemployed. Though he had been signed by William Morris at 25, Moayed was getting no work in TV or film because he turned down every part in which he was asked to play a terrorist, and there weren’t many other roles for Middle Eastern actors. “Even [in] Argo, there are no Iranian characters that speak,” he points out.
Before the massive career inflection point of being cast—and holding his own—opposite Williams, Moayed remembers working as an IT temp at a mortgage company. The guy who ran the place offered him a few extra bucks if he would drop off his laundry, so Moayed brought the heavy sack to the wash-and-fold laundromat and returned it to his boss a few days later. The man started screaming. “What is this?” he yelled. The load that had gone through the wash was supposed to be dry cleaned, which the man assumed was just how everyone laundered their dirty clothes—he didn’t think to even mention to the temp, who couldn’t conceive that anyone would dry clean 25 pounds of laundry. “It must have been a $200 bill every day!” Moayed says, eyes googling in disbelief. He estimates the man’s laundry expenses were more than he made in a year.
Then, suddenly, Moayed was no longer fucking up rich people’s lives, but a feted Broadway actor attending Williams's 60th birthday party with a few stars (Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal) and lots of Williams’s AA buddies. Moayed says he is so grateful that he had the nerve to walk up to Williams and said, in a marriage of his dueling tendencies toward sincerity and goofiness, said, "I'm telling everyone you're my mentor. So if anyone asks..." Williams said, "That's good, because I'm telling everyone you're my mentee."
One piece of advice Williams gave to Moayed was that he shouldn’t give up on Waterwell because he was doing well; his enhanced status could now feed the non-profit, which had nourished him when he was principled but out of work. Williams also made Moayed realize that success—or at least feeling successful—was not a fixed status. “I hope this isn't speaking out of turn,” Moayed says, “but hearing Robin's concerns about what he was at his career at that point, it's like, ‘Oh, this isn't going to end.’"
Moayed was nominated again in 2023 for his role in A Doll’s House opposite Jessica Chastain, which overlapped with the final season of Succession. Moayed’s schedule during the last two episodes was filming from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. and rehearsing from 2pm to midnight. (Luckily, Moayed is a champion napper, and was able to use any minutes of downtime to sleep on the cot in his dressing room. “I nap all the fucking time,” he says with well-deserved pride. “Daddy's sleeping. He's gone. And my wife hates that about me.”)
Earlier this year, Moayed got triple-texted by Lupe, with whom he had never shared a scripted exchange on Succession, but who he would try to find in the many group scenes where supporting characters were basically extras. I pose a thought experiment: Could Stewy and Willa have gotten together? “He would've tried,” Moayed says. “And I think she would've maybe been game.”
The character Lupe wanted Moayed to play was—spoiler!—her character Morgan’s love interest, who also used to be her therapist. “The character is tricky, and I'm sure on paper it looks like this is the creepiest man in the history of time,” Moayed says.
His instinct was to humanize Dr. Andy. After all: “Everyone's fucked up,” Moayed says. “Give me a break. Everyone I know is fucked up. Some people are more fucked up. And so I try not to judge.” He says of Morgan and Dr. Andy’s ethically clouded transition from doctor-patient to boyfriend-girlfriend, "Whatever that line-crossing moment was, it must have been electric. Sexually charged. This is how I justify. Plus I know her”—the capricious character of Morgan—“and I understand her; it could lead to a hand on a thing, and then all of a sudden it's like, ‘I don't think we should…’" Sounds hot, if also like Dr. Andy should lose his psychology license.
Moayed also felt like the part—in, again, a romcom—didn’t work if Dr. Andy is a predator. “If you play ‘it's wrong’ from the jump, then Morgan's an idiot,” Moayed says. Nobody wants that.
If you enjoyed the first season, the show provides more of the same. Kristen Bell’s Joanne is selfish, and, separately, hesitant to convert to Judaism. Adam Brody’s Noah is managing his faith, career, and love for Joanne. They adore each other and want to be together despite their great obstacle. Since the central relationship is inspired by creator Erin Foster’s ongoing marriage to her Jewish husband, we can assume Joanne and Noah eventually work things out. Around the pleasant stasis of the central drama, the supporting cast provides cartoonish comic relief, including a fairly remarkable dance number from Timothy Simons.
Dr. Andy is a demented menace who also seems to deeply care about and understand Morgan. One scene with the actor provides a template for what the show might be going forward as we inch toward Joanne’s inevitable conversion: an ensemble comedy. Moayed, Lupe, Brody, Bell, Simons, and the miraculous Jackie Tohn, who plays Simons’s wife, all sit around an outdoor table playing a relationship-building game in which every character’s answer seems to mystify their fictional partner and provoke an amusing, character-revealing argument—after one card pull, Morgan realizes she doesn’t know Dr. Andy is a twin because she’s never asked him a question.
Paul Marlow blazer, T-shirt, and jeans
I ask Moayed how it was to navigate his relationship with Foster, given her vocal support of Israel and his equally public defense of Palestine and calls for an end to what a United Nations special committee has deemed to be a genocide taking place in Gaza. “Erin, yeah, we might not see eye to eye on what's happening over there,” Moayed says. “And I think we both are pretty fucking passionate about what we feel. But okay, relax for a second. Does that mean that we can't hang out anymore? I don't believe in the binary of that. I think we don't have to live in a world where we always have to hate each other because we disagree on something.” He cites Iranian members of his family who have voted for Trump, which he says “doesn't even actually legitimately make a lick of fucking sense.”
What was supposed to be a daytime bar hop romp has become a serious conversation—we were going to go the boxing themed Times Square dive Jimmy’s Corner, but it’s tough to stop hours of conversation about the lifetime impact of fleeing a war and navigating your friend (and boss) being on different ideological sides of what one party considers to be an atrocity to go grab a $3 Budweiser. We stayed put and drank water out of crystal highball glasses.
As the discussion shifts from what has been and how we navigate it, Moayed shows me a tangible way that he carries his past with him. He takes off and hands me his bracelet, which his mom purchased during the few months they lived in Dubai and had secreted away until life was stable. She just recently found it and gave him the chain with an ID plate that says his name.
Then Moayed states his goal: to do what he’s been doing at Waterwell since he was 22 on a bigger, for-profit scale and have Middle Easterners make more appropriately-financed films and shows and plays about their own people, so that it’s not just half the story being told, or the story of one sensational and aberrant kidnapping, or made up terrorists he elected not to play as a younger actor.
“Oprah Winfrey has an opportunity to tell Black stories because she's a Black woman,” Moayed says, naming inspirations. “Tyler Perry. Ryan Coogler. Charles King,” a manager who runs the production company Macro, which produced the Keke Palmer and SZA-led One of Them Days and Oscar-winning Judas and the Black Messiah.
“We need to also have a seat at the table with our own buns,” Moayed says. Will it be Moayed’s buns in the seat of power? “I don't see why not,” he says, smiling.
Photographer Ruben Chamorro | Stylist Paul Marlow | Grooming Emily Amick | Location Special thanks to Pebble Bar
