Interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal about the double-edged sword 9/11 has been for actors of Middle-Eastern descent. Over the last few years, demand for such actors has exploded, and the parts have become more significant and substantive — but they’ve all been for terrorists. Many of the actors would rather avoid being typecast in quite that way, and so the question of how to transition — or whether Hollywood will let them — looms large.
I’ve seen a bit of this following the career of the mega-talented Omid Abtahi, who was my neighbor and occasional babysitter growing up. As his IMDB page details, he’s spent some of his earlier parts on the post-GWOT milieu, playing terrorists on 24 and Sleeper Cell and, somewhat differently, an Arab-American soldier in Over There. But the future projects section suggests he’s been able to transition out almost entirely, and he’ll be co-starring as Mohammed in the screen adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, playing a Sikh surgeon in Ocean of Pearls, and voicing Dr. Jagu in Space Chimps, which sounds pretty awesome.
