Amir Arison

Watch Aram Mojtabai in almost any hour of The Blacklist and he is doing the same thing: standing at a bank of screens while people who lie for a living talk over his head, and telling the truth. Amir Arison played the analyst from 2013 to 2023, and our review called him the warmest thing in the building, no small thing with James Spader's Reddington in it. It is the part he does better than most: the competent man who is a little nervous, admits it, and turns out to be right.

He came to it from the stage and from years of small television parts, The Visitor in 2007, a recurring role on Homeland in 2011, and Aram was meant to be a one-off guest appearance. He improvised through a fluffed line at the audition, the writers laughed, and the character was recurring in the first season and a regular from the second, for 193 episodes. Then he did something actors in that position rarely do. He left the show as a regular after its ninth season to make his Broadway debut as the lead in The Kite Runner (2022), a part that asks one man to narrate, to play himself at different ages and to be difficult to like. We did not see it, but it is not the choice of a man content to be the nice one at the desk.

What Arison has, and what that audition story shows, is a natural rhythm with dialogue: he talks the way people talk when they are thinking, with the hesitations left in, and next to actors delivering exposition it sounds like fresh air. We tired of The Blacklist's central mystery long before the show did, and kept coming back partly because Aram was the one person on that task force we would have wanted at the next desk. The warmth is the trade, and ten years of it is a long time to be reliably kind.

Dope Thief (2025) is his first large television part since, and it is a step up on purpose: Mark Nader, a DEA supervisor, the boss rather than the analyst. He has said "it was fun to sort of take the material and graduate to being the boss." Our review liked the series for Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura and found the plotting tangled enough to make eight episodes feel generous; it did not single Arison out. It is a supporting part in a story about two other men, and he does what supervisors do, which is stand at the edge of it.

The question for the next few years is whether anyone will write him a part in which he is the most dangerous person present rather than the kindest. We would like to see him try, and we would like to see whether the warmth survives it.