Listen to series host and Podcasts contributor Megan Vahdat sit down with actress, writer and producer Tara Grammy to discuss her viral sketches, famous impressions and involvement in the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement.

Megan Vahdat: I’m Megan Vahdat, and this is Persian Perspectives Today, a podcast that explores the viewpoints of Iranian leaders in arts, science, education and politics in the UCLA community and beyond.

Today, I am joined by actress, writer and producer Tara Grammy. You may recognize her from some of her viral sketches, such as “The Persian Bachelorette,” which currently has 1.3 million views on YouTube as of November 2024. She starred in the hit romantic comedy “A Simple Wedding” opposite Maz Jobrani, Rita Wilson and Academy Award nominee Shohreh Aghdashloo. She is also the host of “Persia’s Got Talent,” and she recently starred in Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “English.” Thank you so much for joining us today, Tara.

Tara Grammy: Thank you so much for having me.

MV: I think a lot of our audience knows you especially from your hilarious character, Manijeh, who has been featured in some of your most famous sketches like “The Persian Bachelorette” and “Persian Makeover.” Can you tell us a little bit about the character and how you came up with this personality?

TG: Do you remember “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”? So at the time, that show was really big on Netflix, and I was hanging out with my friend Shayan, and I was like, “How funny would it be if she was Persian, and it’s like the opposite of tidying up – you just bring in opulence to your house?” And so, you know, … so we just started joking about it, and then we decided to write a sketch, and then he wanted to direct, and then my friend Niousha Noor, she got involved too, and she became my translator. And so, yeah, it just turned into something way bigger than us. And then we just took that character, and she’s kind of an amalgamation of all of our moms and “khalehs” – our aunties, all of the greatest Iranian women.

MV: And other than Manijeh, you are a master of impressions. You do an amazing Kate Middleton, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian and so many more. But probably your most famous impression is your Celine Dion. I have to ask you, how did you learn to do the impression so well?

TG: So when I was little, Celine Dion was a huge deal – like a huge deal. So I remember “My Heart Will Go On.” I just used to always imitate her. I was a mimic; I started off imitating Googoosh because I’m Persian. I imitated the way everybody danced. I imitated the Spice Girls. I imitated whatever was on TV. And then Celine Dion, I could really mimic her voice really well. And I used to also mimic, at that time, Britney Spears’ voice. Don’t tell Sam that I do that. So it just kind of happened. I always wanted to be an actor. Since I was 3 years old, I wanted to be an actor. So I think it starts off by entertaining your family members. And so they loved Celine Dion. So I was like, “Look what I can do,” you know?

MV: Can Celine say “salam” to some of our audiences right now? Is she available?

TG: I mean, she’d have to sing it. Oh, no. How would she even sing “salam”? Because she doesn’t talk like that. You know, it’s just how she sings.

MV: Your impression is spot on. We have to hear a little more.

TG: I can just – do you want me to just do “My Heart Will Go On”? “Every night in my dreams” – anyway, it’s not great.

MV: It’s amazing. You mentioned that as a young child, you always loved doing impressions like your Celine Dion, so you were always interested in comedy, even at a young age?

TG: Comedy, yeah, but mostly just imitation storytelling. I’ve always loved stories and storytelling, and I’ve always felt comfortable in front of people. I was never really shy, and I always got a kick out of performing. I mean, of course, all kids want attention and want to be looked at. But I always feel like I liked playing to an audience and receiving from an audience and getting back to an audience and the back and forth. Yeah, that audience-performer relationship is really important to me still now. I studied theater, and I’ve always been a “theater guy.”

MV: Persian relatives are not always the easiest audience. I would say when you can make a large Persian crowd laugh, that’s how you know you’re really funny.

TG: Yeah, that’s – yeah, that’s true. That’s very true.

MV: You said you were not really shy. But I wonder, as someone with such a large platform who’s performed for huge audiences, have you ever in your career had moments of stage fright or times where you felt a little bit scared or nervous to perform?

TG: Oh my God, so many times. So I started off doing a one-woman show, and when I got invited to perform it in front of the former Queen of Iran, Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi, and her son, the crown prince, that is probably the most nervous I’ve ever been. I was 25 years old, and I was in a banquet hall with 300 Persians who could not care less about me performing a play. And they just wanted to hear singing and, you know, whatever instruments and dancing or whatever. And I was like, “Listen, watch me do this performance of this play.” And at one point they clapped in the middle of it and wanted me to get off the stage. I stopped the show, and I looked at Shahbanou, and I said, “May I continue?” And she said, “Yes, please continue.” So I finished the show, and it was honestly the most nervous I’ve ever been. I was physically shaking because the audience was to the side, and the people directly in front of me were all the Iranian royal family. I was like, “I want to die right now.” That was really intense. And then when I started performing it in LA, I stopped asking to know who would be in the audience. So one time, and my idol growing up – one of my idols – Shohreh Aghdashloo –

MV: Who you’ve worked so closely with now.

TG: Yes, and she’s the kindest, sweetest person – came and saw my one-woman show, and I found out that she was in the audience in LA. And nights where I would find those things out, I would just stand backstage and be like, “Why do I do this? Why do I do this? I’m never doing this again.” But yeah, there’s nothing like live performance. It’s nerve-wracking, but it’s also like the greatest experience as an actor. There’s nothing like it.

MV: Because you see how the audience is reacting to you, whether they’re liking it or not liking it.

TG: But it’s also a give and take, because you’re telling them a story, no? And just like if I’m telling you a story, and you react to it right now, you know, there’s a give and take. If you’re not interested, I move to another part of the story. If you’re interested, I might embellish more. You know, there’s like a give and take – it’s like conversation. So I love that. There’s nothing like it as an actor for me.

MV: So as a child, you were always interested in theater, and from what I understand, the first part of your life was spent in Iran.

TG: I lived in Iran till I was – well, I had kind of a complicated childhood. We left Iran when I was 2, we came to the States, and then we went back to Iran. And when I was a little bit older, we left Iran for good when I was 6. So I kind of always had an outside-of-Iran experience since I was a toddler but then fully left when I was 6.

MV: So you didn’t experience maybe the full extent of the difficulty of the language assimilation. Did you grow up speaking English or Farsi?

TG: My mom was an English teacher in Iran, so I spoke both. I was always bilingual, which was cool. I think that’s why I’m good at both languages, because I really always grew up speaking both.

MV: And your comedy is done in Farsi and in English, which is really unique, because I think a lot of comedians who are Persian speak exclusively in Farsi, and that’s normally for perhaps an older audience, or only in English for a younger audience of people who grew up second generation in the U.S. But what’s unique about your comedy is, I’ll be watching it with my family, and my grandma’s laughing, and my little cousin’s laughing, and I think that’s because you can switch back and forth so fluidly between the two languages.

TG: That is the immigrant experience. You know, I make things more for your generation, honestly, who can understand both and understand the nuances of both cultures and both languages.

MV: Do you have any core memories growing up in Iran, even though you spent just a little bit of time there? Is there something that you think of when you envision your few years of childhood in Iran?

TG: Yeah. I forgot to mention I went back every summer. So I went back every summer till I was 22. Oh, not every summer – every other summer. The longest I stayed away was three years. You know, I would go back a lot. Honestly, my best memories are just being with my family, because in Canada, it was just me and my mom, and we had – it’s a very different experience than being from LA because I feel like people who live in LA, … their families have been here for generations. So you know your aunts and uncles and cousins are here. But my experience wasn’t like that. Everyone was in Iran, and it was just me and my mom in Canada. So when I would go back to Iran, it was like my aunts and my uncles and my cousins, and I just felt so loved, and it was so fun. Iran was so fun for me. We did all kinds of things. And, you know, when you have kind of a touristic experience of a place that’s so different from growing up there, you know, I never felt the oppression. I just felt the love of my family. And of course, it’s there – it’s looming, and you know intrinsically that it’s wrong. But yeah, I’ve had a blast every summer, so I don’t know.

MV: And as an immigrant, what are some of the main differences you notice between individuals you’ve met living in Iran versus those you’ve met living in LA of Persian backgrounds?

TG: You know, I hate to say it, and this might not come off very well, but I actually find people outside of Iran to be a lot more conservative than people inside of Iran. They’re a lot less open-minded and more stuck to their values and their culture and principles because I think we had to hold on to this culture so as not to lose it so tightly that unfortunately, I find my family in Iran to be more open to, you know, the LGBTQ community or therapy or things that are really old school. I feel like, unfortunately, people really held on to here because they didn’t want to lose their identities, whereas their identities could evolve better in Iran, despite the government, which is anti-LGBTQ and a mess, basically. That’s the main difference. I always feel like, “Wow, people are so conservative and so rigid here compared to Iranians in Iran.”

MV: It’s interesting that you mentioned the openness of Iranian communities living in Iran. I think despite news coverage of massive protests of Iranians frustrated with the political situation in Iran, I’ve noticed that a lot of people assume that the beliefs of Iranians mirror, to an extent, the beliefs of their government. But that is not the case. The Iranian public is not at fault for its political issues.

TG: No, not at all. I think the people of Iran are some of the most resilient, the most just joyful people. You know, I wrote an article for Harper’s Bazaar about joy as resistance. And I think that that’s a really important trait that the people of Iran have, like, there are “mehmoonis” every night in Iran. Everybody’s partying. And of course, I want to say that I’m talking about a certain socioeconomic class that I grew up in. But you know, my experience is that Iranians party even more than the ones here, and they’re just more interested in the world and each other and what’s going on. And it’s less like, “We must keep our culture from dying or we’ll die.” It’s less survival based, because they’re just living. They’re surviving in a different way, you know?

MV: Despite all of the political oppression, social oppression, that Iranians in Iran are facing, you’ll see videos of them dancing, of them celebrating, even during the most difficult times. And I think that is really an essential part of Iranian culture. Whether you’re an Iranian living in Iran, an Iranian immigrant or the descendants of those immigrants, we try to find the joy in all aspects of the world. And that’s something you rarely see on the news.

TG: Yeah, totally. It’s a very joyful culture. Our music, I mean, our music’s kind of depressing. I’m not going lie to you, but overall, in most people’s experience, we are very joyful people. We love to gather. We love to eat. We love to drink. We love to – you know, it’s a very fun culture. It really is.

MV: Your comedy has been viewed by millions of people, and a lot of them aren’t Iranian and find it absolutely hilarious. And although they’re satire, they have a lot of truth to them, and they’re a lighthearted vehicle to understanding the complex and very nuanced experiences of Iranian diaspora culture. What’s another thing that you wish more non-Iranians understood about Iranian culture?

TG: Oh, man, there’s so much. But I think the most important thing that I want non-Iranians to understand about Iranians is that we’re so different from our government. Not “our” government – the government of Iran. I never grew up knowing who was Jewish and who was Muslim and who was Baha’i. I didn’t grow up that way at all, especially in Iran. I had no idea. We didn’t talk about it, you know. I mean, I know that the Baha’is and Jews in Iran are very persecuted against, and that’s a whole other conversation. But even in Toronto, I never had that experience because we all just lived next to each other, and we were all just Iranian. We’re a very united people normally. We love each other. And mostly, I mean, despite all our governments throughout the years, the ones that persecuted the Jews, the ones that persecuted the Baha’is, we all liked each other. But unfortunately, it isn’t like that now, and there’s a lot of infighting and a lot of stuff, and the thing I would love non-Iranians to know about Iranians is we’re very peaceful, kind, accepting, loving people at our core. It’s just – it’s been a rough ride.

MV: Certainly, and you’ve used your platform to promote many aspects of Iranian culture, and specifically, I’d say, the rights of women. You were one of the most prominent voices during the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement. Can you tell us about your involvement in that movement and what motivated you to take action?

TG: It all started when I was at a wedding. I was at a wedding in Spain, on, I think, Sept. 15, a Persian wedding, one of my really good friends from kindergarten, actually, in Iran. And there was another girl there, and she had her phone, and she was looking at this picture of this girl in the hospital in Iran with tubes. And I’m like, “Who’s that?” And she’s like, “This is a girl named Mahsa Amini.” And I was like, “Oh my God, put it away. We’re at a wedding.” You know, I didn’t think anything of it. And the day after that, she died, and all of a sudden my phone started to blow up. And at the time, what Iranians in Iran were doing was they were sending all their videos that they would take on the streets when people started to protest, to anybody who had a platform. So I started getting the videos from people in Iran on the streets, watching protesters being shot. It was insane. I was like, “Oh my God.” So I started to post them. I just started posting everything. And then I made this one post where I said, “Anybody who’s scared to post because they have family in Iran or whatever, send me whatever you want to post, and I’ll post it.” So I became a place where I just started to use my platform for that. Just constantly posting stories about Iran. I just wanted to get Iran on the news. There were so many Iranians, anybody who had a platform, pretty much, that I knew was doing the same thing. And you know, my friend Nazanin made a video. Nazanin Nour made a video that went super, super viral about it. She does this really good job of saying exactly what’s happening. So she did a whole video about exactly what was happening in Iran for Americans, and then that went viral. So it became this thing that grew where we were just trying to keep Iran in front of everybody’s eyes. We just wanted everybody to know what was going on. And then it grew from there, and it became something bigger than all of us. And it was a very exciting time because it felt like maybe this could make change, and then it wasn’t. And it’s been a rough couple of years for all Iranians. But yeah that’s how it started.

MV: With all of the media suppression in Iran, many were afraid to showcase the violence and devastation happening. And because of that, people in the U.S. were largely unaware of the political situation, and you, in a way, became almost like a journalist unveiling what was happening on the other side of the world and allowing American audiences to grasp that. I had friends who would mention to me that they’d seen your posts or a video that you shared, and it made them recognize the gravity of the situation.

TG: Totally. Yeah, it was really a time for Iranians to use their voices to be the voices of the people in our country. I should say this, because it’s really important, my husband will hear this and he’ll be like, “Yeah, it was me.” So we were at a restaurant – we were in Portugal. By the way, at this point, we’d moved from Spain to Portugal. This was our vacation, and I was on my phone the entire time. My poor husband. And at one point he looked at me, and he went, “Hey, you’re kind of going into activist territory, and your family’s in Iran. Like, going to be a little careful, you know?” And he’s like, “I want you to set an intention and not just do whatever. Set an intention. What do you want to be, what are you using your platform for?” And I said, “I want to be a voice for the voiceless. That’s it. I just want to mirror whatever the people of Iran want. I will put it out there. I’m just a vessel.” And then that’s what I tried to do. That’s what I tried to stay true to the whole time, for the past two years. And then I did a couple of talks at schools that went viral, where I went to an all-girls school and talked about what was going on in Iran and the young girls that were killed that were the same ages as the girls at this school. And then I did another talk at another school, talking about human rights violations and what are human rights. So these are the things that started to really – I learned about what really matters to me.

MV: You’ve used your platform so many times to unite the Persian community in times of difficulty and turmoil both politically and socially. During the pandemic, I remember you made a video with tons of Iranian celebrities and influencers, and you did a music video to “Age Ye Rooz.” Can you tell us about the process of making that and how you came up with the idea? For me, it was a very core memory of the pandemic – sitting around with my family watching it on our computer when we hadn’t seen friends or relatives in so long because of the quarantine.

TG: Yeah, that was another thing. Me and Shayan were like, “Can we do something like – can we make something with ‘Age Ye Rooz?’” Because it’s such an important song. You know, every Iranian knows it’s the go-to. It’s like our “Hotel California.” So I – yeah, we just started. And then with Bita Milanian, we just kind of put it together. I don’t even know how we did it. We shot it all remotely on iPhones. And then Shayan, who’s a brilliant editor, edited it all together. And then we went out to all these different influencers, and we just – yeah, we got everybody to sing it. And it was – it’s so cool how it came together. You know, I always say there are some things that a higher power creates. You know, you don’t know how it comes together, but it just comes together. And that was one of them. I think that all art, in a way, is from a higher power – I don’t know where it comes from, but it comes.

MV: And now you’re working on a new project called “Foozooli.” Can you tell us about it and what we can expect for future episodes?

TG: Yes. So I am not a “foozool” person. That’s a lie. I am. With my friends, I am. with my husband, I am. If someone’s texting, I’m like, “Who are you texting?” But I don’t ask a lot of questions of people, but it’s such a thing in our culture. People are very upset with me because I call it part of Persian culture. Obviously, it’s not a part of our greater culture. It’s like we have an amazing, beautiful centuries-old culture. But we like to know what’s going on with everybody. I wanted to make something like “MTV Cribs.” And my original idea was I would show up to celebrities’ homes as my different characters, and then my different characters would go through their things. But then I was working with – I was kind of bouncing off ideas with Sina Valiollah. Do you know him? He’s like Persian Jimmy Kimmel. He’s incredible. So, and he was like, “No, you should kind of do it as yourself.” And so I became this really annoying character. And then, so now it’s like this mixture of “MTV Cribs” meets a really annoying host that goes through the homes of Persian celebrities. So I just, I did Shally Zomorodi, I did Maz Jobrani and Shohreh Aghdashloo. And then I have a couple of really good ones coming up. I can’t say who, but I kind of want to. I’m going to Sam Asghari. We go on set with him, which is really fun. And, yeah, it’s a really fun little comedic, funny little thing that I’m doing. It’s on YouTube.

MV: It’s such a fun idea. And I think not a lot of people recognize what an essential part of Iranian culture that is, whether we like it or not. I watched the first couple, and I’m really excited. OK, Tara, to end today’s interview, we wanted to do a Persian Perspectives Today rapid fire. We’re going to ask you a series of questions, and you can answer the first thing that pops into your head. Are you ready?

MV: What is your favorite Persian song?

TG: Probably “Age Ye Rooz.” That’s not true. It’s “Adama” by Googoosh.

MV: What is the best Persian restaurant in LA?

TG: These are getting a little intense. It’s probably Raffi’s. Don’t be mad. I just like their kebab, okay? I just like it.

MV: Controversial opinion.

TG: I also really like Sadaf a lot. It’s Sadaf or Raffi’s. I like both.

MV: What is your favorite Persian expression?

TG: I really like – I say “khak to saaret” a lot. It’s a good one. OK, this is not a Persian expression, but for some reason, I really like “vasate kheyaboon” – in the middle of the street.

MV: Such a very dad thing to say. I’ve seen so many Persian dads use that even when it’s not meant to be used.

TG: Totally. It’s like, you know – I don’t know why I say that a lot.

MV: Who is a Persian celebrity you’ve always wanted to work with?

TG: Googoosh. Yes.

MV: Googoosh, if you’re listening –

TG: I love you. I worked with her once.

MV: What is the best piece of advice you’ve gotten from a Persian grandma?

TG: Wow, that’s a good question. Oh my God, these are supposed to be rapid fire. Oh, my grandma’s given me so much good advice. My grandma’s a good advice guy. Oh, she always tells me – you know, she always told me, “Buy gold.” I did one year. I went to Iran for Eid, and I got a bunch of money, and I bought gold. And, man, that stuff is really expensive now. Yeah, see, gold. Buy gold.

MV: And lastly, and most important, what is your go-to Persian khoresht?

TG: I make ghormeh sabzi. I’m a ghormeh sabzi-er.

MV: Thank you so much for joining us today, Tara.

TG: Thanks for having me.

MV: It was so wonderful having you on the podcast.

This episode of Persian Perspectives Today was brought to you by the Daily Bruin Podcasts. You can listen to this episode and all other Daily Bruin podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud. The audio and transcript of today’s interview are available at dailybruin.com. I’m Megan Vahdat – thank you for listening.