Payman Maadi is unusually persuasive as a man who cannot see why his decency is in question. His understated acting makes flawed people worth listening to; A Separation is where we most strongly recommend starting.
Fi1m perspective
In Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (2011), Payman Maadi plays Nader as a man who finds his own decency much easier to recognise than other people do. He does not need to make him obviously unpleasant; the certainty is enough to make him difficult company. This is the strongest reason to value Maadi's acting: he can make a flawed man's account of himself persuasive without asking us to accept it. We recommend the film without hesitation, though some of its plot complications look carefully arranged.
Leila Hatami's Simin matters just as much to that success. She gives Simin equal force, and the actors make the marriage feel substantial enough for its troubles to matter. We were frustrated by Nader because Maadi makes him so persuasive while Hatami keeps giving us reasons to doubt him. His restraint is useful here: a more emphatic performance might have made the husband's faults easier to dismiss as somebody else's problem.
Farhadi had first cast him in About Elly (2009), his acting debut, and A Separation was the breakthrough. The subsequent move into American work included Ali opposite Kristen Stewart in Camp X-Ray (2014) and Salim Khan in The Night Of (2016). He has continued to work in Iranian cinema, including Just 6.5 (2019) and Leila's Brothers (2022). The recurring attraction is the pressure placed on people by family and circumstance. His restrained delivery, often conveying conflict with little dialogue, is well suited to that work.
Crime 101 (2026) offers a more qualified reason to seek him out. Maadi plays Sammy Kassem in Bart Layton's Los Angeles heist film, which is well cast but wears out some of our patience across its 141 minutes. Layton's debt to Heat is a problem no cast could be expected to solve. Start with Nader instead, and leave time afterwards to disagree about him.
Biography
Payman Maadi, also credited as Peyman Maadi or Peyman Moadi, is an Iranian-American actor, screenwriter and director. Born in New York City to Iranian parents, he moved to Iran as a child and later graduated in metallurgical engineering before entering the film industry as a screenwriter in the early 2000s.
Maadi began acting with a role in Asghar Farhadi's About Elly (2009) and gained international recognition for his performance as Nader in Farhadi's A Separation (2011), for which he shared the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the Berlin International Film Festival. He has since appeared in films including Camp X-Ray (2014), 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016), Last Knights (2015), 6 Underground (2019) and Law of Tehran (2019), as well as television series such as The Night Of (2016) and Westworld (2016).
He is also known for directing and writing films such as The Snow on the Pines (2012) and Bomb: A Love Story (2018). Maadi is credited as Sammy Kassem in the forthcoming Crime 101 (2026).
