Sometimes embellishing the truth is a necessary evil. So it proved when New Zealand-based actor Roxie Mohebbi auditioned for the new Stan Original series Critical Incident. Desperate to land the role after speed-reading the gripping script, she told the producers what they needed to hear.
“I was obsessed with the episodes. I hadn’t read something in a really long time that I felt was aligned with me politically and morally,” Mohebbi tells Broadsheet. “So I told them a mild lie, saying ‘Yeah, I pretty much live in Sydney so a Sydney shoot will be fine,’ when I was really only half here,” she says with a laugh. “I got the call-up and my agent said, ‘Remember how you said you live in Sydney? You need to be living in Sydney in three days.’”
Three days later Mohebbi arrived in the production office, suitcase in hand, and got stuck into pre-production. A tense, psychological drama, Critical Incident follows Senior Constable Zilifcar “Zil” Ahmed, a popular officer who seeks to absolve himself after becoming involved in a police pursuit that goes badly wrong. Working a double shift, in plain clothes, Zil pursues teenager Dalia Tun, who matches the description of a suspect wanted for assaulting Zil’s fellow officer, friend and some-time lover, Sandra Ali (Mohebbi). Zil’s world begins to unravel when, while laying chase to Dalia, he inadvertently knocks an innocent young passerby into the path of an oncoming train, only to learn later Dalia was innocent. But why did she run?
For Mohebbi, joining the cast of Critical Incident was a dream come true. An Iranian refugee, she arrived in New Zealand aged five. Although the small town of Nelson, where her family was placed, was welcoming enough, Mohebbi stood out and missed being surrounded by Middle Eastern culture.
“It was a lack of familiarity and culture,” she says. “You leave your identity behind when you move to a place like that – by force.”
With the support of the local youth theatre club, she landed her first acting role, age 10, playing Cinderella.
“I was so excited because I thought Cinderella was blond. Not anymore!”
Nevertheless, in honour of her mother, a “brilliant nurse” in Tehran whose education and experience wasn’t recognised in New Zealand, Mohebbi trained in neonatal nursing instead.
“It’s a huge thing for a lot of migrants who are so highly skilled, but bureaucracy inhibits them from contributing meaningfully to society,” she says.
After burning out from the relentless Covid-induced hospital workload, Mohebbi decided to give her first love, acting, a shot and was ecstatic to have a role written especially for her in New Zealand’s cult hospital soap, Shortland Street.
“It was an amazing experience,” she says. “I still wore my scrubs every day when I left the house. It was like going to acting school during Covid and getting paid for it.”
From there, despite having no formal training, the roles kept coming in: TVNZ drama One Lane Bridge; manic action-comedy Give Me Babies; Going, Going, the directorial debut from actor Loren Taylor (Eagle vs Shark); and ABC miniseries Ladies in Black.
Keen to move to Sydney, and narrowly missing out on a number of roles that would bring her here, Mohebbi was gratified to land the role of Critical Incident’s morally upright but conflicted cop Sandra Ali. She relished working with a culturally diverse cast in an area of Sydney – Blacktown – where she felt so comfortable.
The cast includes British actor Akshay Khanna (doing an impeccable Australian accent), Zoë Boe, Hunter Page-Lochard, Erik Thomson and Zindzi Okenyo.
“Ultimately it’s a story about power and the power imbalances we have in society … but Bas [creator-writer Sarah Bassiuoni] has done such an incredible job of having this equilibrium in the storytelling and removing biases where she can to just present facts … it lets audiences make up their own minds,” says Mohebbi.
“You get so used to thinking being white is the norm, but in society that’s not the case at all. I think it’s really important to have casts who are what they are, without making it about diversity – it’s just the truth. I don’t remember the cast talking about race at all.”
Beyond the show, working with actors like Page-Lochard (Cleverman, The Newsreader, Barons) has given Mohebbi the confidence to continue writing and working on her own material. It feels like the beginning of a new era for the artist.
“My best friend, who works in costumes, has moved over and we’ve made a pretty little life here,” she says. “It’s been a real gift to have had this job bring me here, because it’s a really meaningful one and it’s marked an important time in my life. I feel very lucky.”
The Stan Original series Critical Incident debuted on August 12.
