00:00I finished acting school right around the time September 11 happened and I think from that point
00:06on the view of a person who looked like me took a different turn in cinema.
00:30The roles I was kind of being sent for were always, you know, terrorist roles or, you know,
00:36the bad guy with no kind of substance. It's just someone playing a specific
00:43part to sell a stereotype of a society and I wasn't really interested in that. If it's just
00:50the trope of a bad guy for the sake of, you know, making the knight in shining armor look good on
00:55the other end, I don't think that there's a benefit in that. I don't think that's a story
00:59that needs to be told. I think there's enough fear generated around people who look like me.
01:06I play Amir in Stateless. He is an Afghan man who is fleeing persecution from the Taliban with his
01:30family. They've escaped to Pakistan and when the series starts we follow them in their attempts in
01:37Indonesia to try to get on a boat to come to Australia. The thing I wanted to bring out in
01:43Amir that I thought people would easily connect to is the fact that he is a parent and a husband,
01:50someone who's looking for safety for their families and if you strip away the fact that
01:53he's Afghani, that he's escaping a war, everyone can relate for the desire to find safety for your
01:59family and to just want a better life, a chance to not be on the run. We immigrated so we weren't
02:13refugees but we were escaping a war and my parents did have to start from scratch with everything
02:20and rebuild their lives. So I did take a lot of what I saw in my father growing up
02:26and put that into Amir.
02:36The more we use social media, the more we discuss topics like this, it's the only way we're going to
02:41get change because politicians are so used to using the refugee topic as a political ammunition
02:48against each other and scaring society going these people are coming to take your jobs, these people
02:53are coming to hurt us, to be terrorists and all that stuff but these people are just escaping
02:59persecution so let's treat them like human beings and with respect.
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