Arian Moayed

Arian Moayed is an Iranian-American actor, writer, and director whose career spans Broadway, Off-Broadway, independent film, and prestige television. Born in Tehran in 1980, he and his family fled Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, eventually settling in the Chicago suburb of Hanover Park, Illinois, in the mid-1980s. That experience of displacement and reinvention has informed much of his work as an artist, both in his choice of roles and in the theatre company he later co-founded to champion stories that sit outside the mainstream of American drama. He studied at the Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, graduating in 2003, and quickly gravitated toward the rigorous, ensemble-driven stagecraft that would shape his sensibility long before television audiences came to know his face.

Moayed's first major breakthrough came on the Broadway stage rather than the screen. In 2011 he starred opposite Robin Williams in Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a dark, surreal drama set during the American occupation of Iraq. Playing Musa, a traumatized translator and former gardener haunted by his past, Moayed drew rapturous reviews and earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play. The performance announced him as one of the most thoughtful and technically precise young stage actors of his generation, capable of holding his own against one of the most protean performers in American entertainment. It also set a template for the kinds of roles he would be drawn to, characters caught between cultures, languages, and moral codes, whose interior lives are far more turbulent than their outward composure suggests.

Around the same period, Moayed co-founded Waterwell, a New York-based theatre and film company, with his longtime collaborators Tom Ridgely, Kevin Townley, and Hanna Cheek. Waterwell has produced socially engaged, formally adventurous work for more than two decades, including stage adaptations, original musicals, and public-interest documentary projects, and Moayed has remained closely involved as a producer, writer, and performer. The company also runs arts education programming in New York City public schools, reflecting his long-standing interest in the civic role of the theatre. Much of his off-camera labour has been devoted to Waterwell even as his on-screen profile has risen considerably, and the company has been a consistent vehicle for the kinds of stories, particularly Iranian and diasporic stories, that he feels are underrepresented in American entertainment.

On screen, Moayed has built an eclectic and gradually escalating filmography. Early appearances included the independent feature Rosewater (2014), Jon Stewart's directorial debut about the imprisonment of Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, and small but memorable turns in films such as Appropriate Behavior and Amira & Sam. He appeared in Jay Roach's Trumbo (2015) and went on to play a Justice Department lawyer in Roach's ensemble drama Bombshell (2019), about the Fox News sexual harassment scandal. He also had a featured role in the 2012 jukebox musical film Rock of Ages, alongside a cast led by Tom Cruise and Julianne Hough. Television work during this stretch included guest and recurring appearances on shows including The Blacklist, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Netflix's limited series Inventing Anna (2022), in which he played lawyer Todd Spodek, the real-life defender of convicted con artist Anna Sorokin, with a combination of exasperation, protectiveness, and slow-burning affection that anchored several of the series' strongest episodes.

The role that has brought him the widest recognition is Stewy Hosseini on HBO's Succession. Introduced in the pilot as Kendall Roy's old friend, sometime drug buddy, and private-equity counterpart, Stewy evolves across the show's four seasons into one of the most consequential antagonists of the Roy family's corporate war. Moayed's performance is a study in controlled menace, equal parts charm, condescension, and genuine affection for Kendall, and his line readings, including the now widely quoted taunts directed at the Roy siblings, became some of the show's most frequently cited moments. Although Stewy is a recurring rather than a series-regular character, his presence is felt in every major inflection point of the plot, and the role cemented Moayed's reputation for bringing full, complicated humanity to figures who could easily be played as stock villains.

He has continued to move between prestige television, blockbuster franchises, and auteur-driven theatre. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe he appears as Department of Damage Control agent P. Cleary, first introduced in the Disney+ series Hawkeye (2021) and then prominently featured in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022), where he serves as the government lawyer opposite Jennifer Walters in her defence of Emil Blonsky, the Abomination. Cleary is a recurring antagonist for street-level and super-powered characters across the MCU's Phase Four television projects, and Moayed plays him with a wry bureaucratic fatigue that cuts against the franchise's more earnest register. He has also been glimpsed in films such as Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), again as Cleary, reinforcing the character's cross-platform role.

Alongside screen work, he has continued to return to the stage. His Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include A Case for the Existence of God, Guards at the Taj, The Humans, and further collaborations with playwright Rajiv Joseph, as well as directing and producing projects through Waterwell. He has spoken publicly about the difficulty of finding roles that treat Middle Eastern and Iranian characters as fully dimensional people rather than caricatures, and has used both his theatre company and his higher-profile screen platforms to push back against that tendency. In interviews he has also reflected on the meaning of being an immigrant artist during successive waves of American political upheaval, framing his work as, among other things, a quiet argument for pluralism.

Now in his mid-forties, Moayed remains an unusually versatile presence in American entertainment, equally at home in comic-book blockbusters, literary stage drama, and cable-television satire. He lives in New York with his wife, director and Waterwell co-artistic director Krissy Shields, and their children, and continues to balance screen acting with his long-running commitment to Waterwell's theatre, film, and arts-education work.