Omid Djalili: ‘Venue staff are still racist to me – but I change their minds’

Comedian Omid Djalili finds stand-up just as rewarding as he did in the 1990s, when he burst onto the scene with the success of his Edinburgh Fringe show Short, Fat Kebab Shop Owner’s Son.

Omid’s show, Namaste, which is touring until early December, is having quite the impact: the 60-year-old Anglo-Iranian comic can see it happening before his eyes.

When Omid recently performed a gig in the USA, the theatre staff initially ignored him, before reluctantly allowing him to do a soundcheck for his own show that evening.

‘They were almost racist in their attitude,’ Omid tells Metro over Zoom. ‘The security people were ignoring me, and I was talking to people. “Can I get water?” “No.” “Can I do a sound check?” “Okay, if you have to.” It was really bad,’ he reflects.

But through Omid’s show, they were won over. It’s not hard to see why: Omid talks generously and passionately through topics from childhood dreams to his biggest career regrets during our 25-minute chat, with the sparkling enthusiasm of someone who treasures every day and interaction like it’s his last.

‘By the end [of the show], the guy doing the sound check wanted to take a selfie. The security guys wanted a selfie. I said, “Why do you want a selfie?” They said, “We watched the show, we laughed and we learned,”‘ he recalls.

‘I think that’s the most powerful thing you can have. It totally changed their attitude. They’d had all these preconceptions about me, but they laughed their heads off, and they learned a few things, and that’s all you want as a stand up comedian.’

Comedy is transformative on micro and macro scales: a point Omid previously made while explaining why he controversially chose to perform at the Riyadh Comedy Festival, organised by Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority (GEA), in October.

The controversy stemmed from claims the festival was the Saudi government’s attempt to ‘artswash’ its human rights abuses.

‘The transformative power of comedy is the reason why comedians are always attacked first,’ Omid says, explaining that performing in Saudi Arabia had always been his ‘red line’ before he got a ‘tip off’ a few years ago that the government was ‘speed running towards progress’.

‘To raise the human rights level of your population, you bring in stand up comedy,’ he says, explaining how an invitation rather than the threat of imprisonment from the Saudi government was actually progress.

Despite backlash, this decision to perform was not a regret for Omid, but an intentional move in a direction he sees as progress.

One career moment that does send a shiver down his spine though, was the time he turned down a major role in Game of Thrones because he didn’t understand the script. He has one rule: if he doesn’t understand a script, it’s not happening. That’s what he told HBO producer Caroline Strausse. Omid!

Now he can’t face to find out what the role he turned down actually was.

‘I was so upset, I’m not even going to go back and look. I’ve not watched a single episode of Game of Thrones,’ he chuckles. But his biggest regret wasn’t really turning down the role: it was having never worked with Caroline, who he admires, as a result.

No matter though: this opened the door for other opportunities.

Omid, who also has titles like West End star, Gladiator actor, and Grand Theft Auto voice artist to add to his string of accomplishments since the 1990s, is in a new animated film called In Your Dreams, which is three years in the making.

To this day Omid, who confesses to suffering from imposter syndrome, doesn’t know why Netflix wanted him to star as the Sandman – a supernatural being with the power to make dreams come true – but he’s exceedingly grateful they did and he’s now a massive fan of the end result.

‘I was absolutely blown away by the movie itself. It’s so gob-smacking. I kind of lost track of it halfway through saying, Well, what am I even watching? This is so outlandish, so elaborate, so complex, but so amazing and funny,’ he raves.

The comedy animation film – which follows two siblings as they navigate their parents’ fractured relationship and adventure through sleep – speaks to Omid personally, too.

‘My dreams were very vivid when I was younger. I think you find that children who are quite traumatised have a vivid dream life,’ says Omid, who has previously opened up about his Kensington upbringing being ‘chaotic’.

The youngest of an immigrant family who made money by taking in sick Iranian lodgers who’d travelled to the UK to get medical assistance, Omid slept in the living room on the sofa and itched to leave home from a young age.

‘I’d be willing to go to bed and then have this amazing dream life. So the fact that I’m playing the dream-maker [in the film] is very significant for me,’ he says.

‘In a sense, I was a dream-maker myself. From the age of five or six, I was hoping for dreams. I would fashion dreams. I would will dreams on.’

If little Omid, curled up on a sofa in the living room, could have made one of his big dreams come true, it would have been for his life to have meaning.

‘My yearning was that whatever my life would be, please guide me to be meaningful for myself and meaningful for others.’

In Your Dreams is on Netflix 14^th November.

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