Neagheen Homaifar chatted about the thriller “Site,” and the play “English.”
Background on Neagheen
Neagheen Homaifar is an Iranian-American actor, podcast host, and founding member of a university. She graduated with honors from Harvard where she studied Social Studies and Spanish.
You most recently starred in the thriller “Site,” what drew you to this project, and what excited you most about this role?
SITE pushed me into completely unfamiliar territory, which is exactly why I wanted to do it. I’m someone who has to mute TV shows when the thriller music gets too intense, so starring in a sci-fi thriller was like jumping into the deep end. But that’s what drew me to it.
The role demanded everything new: playing someone from the 1970s, working with special effects, spending an hour and a half in the makeup chair being transformed from a cute period professional into a burn victim.
The gels, the paint, the prosthetics—it was fascinating to experience how these genres create their worlds so viscerally. I’d never worked with green screens or witnessed the technical choreography that makes sci-fi possible.
As someone who came to acting through comedy and contemporary drama, SITE confirmed that I want to keep pushing into new genres.
Plus, nothing humbles you quite like accidentally terrifying a PA at craft services because you forgot you’re wearing full burn prosthetics.
As an Iranian-American actress, you’ve spoken about breaking away from stereotypical casting. How has your background shaped the roles you choose and the stories you want to tell?
I’m an Iranian-American woman who was born in Alabama and raised in North Carolina. I attended cotillion and had sleepovers but also took weekend Farsi classes and negotiated with my parents to go to school dances.
Living at the intersection of two cultures taught me that identity is never just one thing—it’s a constant negotiation that made me fluent in nuance.
I’m drawn to characters who exist in multiple worlds simultaneously: the high-achieving neurosurgeon whose patient dies on her table, the foreign female scientist in 1970s America navigating a US government lab, the English teacher trying to inspire her students while the very language she teaches fails her. These individuals carry complexity that defies easy categorization.
My background often elicits that cocked-head “oh!” response: people trying to reconcile Iran with North Carolina, Harvard with the South, immigrant with cotillion. That’s what I want my characters to do to audiences.
Just when they think they know who they’re meeting, they realize there’s so much more beneath the surface. The best stories live in that space between expectation and reality.
Your next project is the Pulitzer Prize–winning play “English”… What has that experience been like so far, and how does it resonate with your own cultural journey?
Working on “English” has been invigorating in the most profound way. There’s a special alchemy when you’re in a room with people who know what living “in between” feels like.
We were all raised differently, but we share this tenderness for the culture we come from, and that has created an immediate creative intimacy.
Beyond this incredible ensemble, I get to live inside one of the most beautiful plays I’ve ever read. It also happens to be about people from my culture.
Sanaz Toossi writes characters who contain multitudes—full of humanity and all its contradictions.
My character Marjan is simultaneously put-together and falling apart, ambitious yet craving comfort, rigid in her standards but also a romantic.
She’s trying to teach students to pass an English exam while grappling with what gets lost in translation: not just language, but self.
The play asks: What parts of yourself do you sacrifice to belong? That question lives in my bones.
As we rehearse, I can already feel how this story will land with audiences, how they’ll recognize their own negotiations with identity.
That’s the gift of this play. It’s specifically about Iranians learning English, but it’s universally about the price of transformation.
Before your acting career, you were part of the founding team behind Minerva University after graduating from Harvard. How has that unique academic and entrepreneurial path influenced your artistry as an actor?
The best decisions I’ve made have been when I’ve bet on myself. I did that when I left management consulting in Boston to join Minerva’s founding team.
Seven years later, I did it again when I left Minerva to pursue acting. Both times, I knew going halfway wasn’t an option.
At Minerva, we built a university from scratch. In acting, I build a human from scratch. Both require the same entrepreneurial mindset: question every assumption, iterate fearlessly, trust the process even when others don’t see it yet.
At Minerva, we re-imagined every element of higher education from pedagogy to student life.
That trained me to approach acting and the business around it the same way. Why should a character move like this? What assumptions am I making that I could challenge?
But the real gift from those experiences is knowing that fulfillment comes from the pursuit itself, not the outcome.
When you’re doing something you deeply believe in, whether it’s re-imagining education or bringing a character to life, the work itself feeds you. Both leaps taught me that the joy is in the building.
Looking back at your career so far, from “Site” to other major television series like FOX’s “The Resident” and Peacock’s “Killing It,” what moments have felt the most defining for you?
“The Resident” transformed everything for me. I was still working at Minerva, and I’d told them I was “on vacation for a couple of days,” and suddenly found myself on this massive FOX set. Hundreds of craftspeople, creatives, and business minds were working to create a few minutes of television.
The call sheet had me in Hair and Makeup at 6:07AM. 07?! That level of specificity was weirdly exciting for me.
I remember standing there in scrubs, fake blood dried on my surgical gloves, playing a neurosurgeon, thinking, “This is it. I could do this forever.” It was electrifying to glimpse where the journey could lead while I was still at the very beginning.
More than anything, that moment gave me proof that I wanted more. I went back to Minerva knowing that I was ready for my next chapter. Within months, I’d left to pursue acting full-time.
Tribeca was profound for different reasons. On “Before Dawn, Kabul Time” we were a small, tight-knit team bringing a story about a powerful Afghan woman to life. There’s magic in that kind of intimate collaboration: every choice feels personal, every moment is discovered together.
Then at Tribeca, watching hundreds of people connect with what we’d built in our tiny creative circle, seeing our Executive Producer, Lena Waithe, champion the project, and being in community with other creators whose hearts were on display through their work… it reinforced why I act.
Those intense creative partnerships can create something that touches people far beyond the room where it was made. If “The Resident” showed me the destination, Tribeca showed me I was on the right path.
What does success mean to you?
I’m in the middle of putting up a play right now, so I think about this every day. Theater is the only medium that demands we all be physically present together, breathing the same air. There’s no second take.
Success is being truthful in that live moment, responding to the exact energy your fellow actor gives while feeling the audience’s energy shift and flow.
It’s also about courage and not letting the need to be liked override the truth of your character. My character in this play makes questionable and sometimes disappointing choices.
For me, success is being bold enough to show her full humanity, even when the audience reacts (sometimes audibly) to her failures.
Ultimately, success is when someone who’s never met an Iranian, never thought about language as identity, suddenly sees themselves in my character’s struggle. It’s that moment of recognition across difference.
When the unfamiliar becomes familiar through shared human experience, when strangers in a theater become connected through feeling. That’s why I do this work.
To learn more about Neagheen Homaifar, follow her on Instagram and visit her website.
