Narges Rashidi's women are angry before they are frightened. In Under the Shadow that anger carried a whole ghost story, and it is what we watch her for; the parts since have wanted her fists more often than her face.
Fi1m perspective
Shideh slams the car door on her husband. It is early in Under the Shadow (2016): Iraj is leaving for the front, she has just been told she may not go back to medical school, and Narges Rashidi plays the moment not as grief but as fury at everyone who has decided things on her behalf. That is what she does best. She exercises to a Jane Fonda tape on a video recorder she should not own, in a flat with tape crosses on every window, and treats the neighbours' talk of djinn as one more piece of unwanted advice. We were more unsettled by her, in a tracksuit with the sirens going, than by anything in the dark corners of Nasser Zoubi's brown flat, because she was doing what any sensible person would do and it was plainly not working.
It took her a long time to get there. Born in Khorramabad and moved through Turkey to Germany at seven, she trained in Berlin and spent a decade in German television and independent films, with small parts in large American productions, a pregnant woman in Æon Flux (2005) among them. Babak Anvari's 84-minute first feature, which he wrote and directed, was the first thing to put her at the centre of the frame, and she filled it. She has said of preparing it, "I had to go back to that time, and it was difficult." Whatever she found there, on screen it reads as anger rather than sorrow, and the film is the better for it.
Gangs of London (2020) uses her differently. Lale is a Kurdish gang leader, a part built on loyalty, betrayal and long fight scenes she performs herself, and the series gives her more to hit than to play. We recommended it for its fights and for Sope Dirisu, and we did not single her out. That is not a complaint about her. She is good in it, and she is also one of a dozen people the writing keeps at arm's length, and a performer who can hold a film for eighty minutes is spending twenty-odd episodes holding one corner of a series.
Anvari brought her back for a supporting part in I Came By (2022), and Prisoner 951 (2025), the BBC miniseries in which she plays Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, puts her back at the centre of a story about a woman held somewhere she does not want to be. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here, but the part is the kind she made her name on: one woman, one set of walls, a great deal of pressure and no intention of being polite about it.
Start with Under the Shadow, and watch her face the first time a neighbour says the word djinn. Directors since have kept giving her fights. Anvari gave her a tracksuit and a video recorder, and that was enough.
Biography
Narges Rashidi is an actress of Iranian descent. Born in 1980 in Khorramabad, Iran, she moved with her family to Turkey and then Germany as a child, where she trained in acting at the Etage school in Berlin.
She is known for her leading role as Shideh in the 2016 film Under the Shadow, which premiered at Sundance. Rashidi has appeared in films including Æon Flux (2005), Speed Racer (2008) and I Came By (2022), and in series such as Hanna (2019) and The Girlfriend Experience (2016). Since 2020 she has played Lale in the British series Gangs of London. In 2025 she portrayed Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe in the BBC miniseries Prisoner 951.
She is married to Christian Straka and has lived primarily in Los Angeles since around 2011. At the 2016 Fantaspoa International Fantastic Film Festival she received the Jury Award for Best Actress.
