Mozhan Navabi
Mozhan Navabi is an actor, born 1980.
For most of her screen career she was billed as Mozhan Marno. Since a 2024 guest appearance on Law & Order she has been credited under her maiden name, Navabi, which is the name used here.
The breakthrough was about as unforgiving a lead as exists. In The Stoning of Soraya M. she plays Soraya, a woman condemned by her own village on a fabricated charge, in a film with essentially no relief in it. The performance has to hold an audience through material designed to be close to unbearable, and that she emerged from it with a career rather than a typecasting problem says something about the control involved.
What she does best is a particular kind of contained competence. Samar Navabi on The Blacklist is a Mossad officer embedded in an American task force, someone whose job requires her to be the calmest person in a room of much louder people, and Navabi plays the containment as effort rather than as coolness. She did comparable work on House of Cards, which is not among the credits listed here.
The rest of the filmography is a good actor taking good small parts: a translator in Charlie Wilson's War, Leyla in Traitor, Atti in the Farsi-language vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Tara in Maid, Nahid in Fleishman Is in Trouble, Gail Chwatsky in Pam & Tommy, Dr Cyber in the animated Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, and two 2025 series, Zero Day and The Beast in Me.
Movies (5)
TV (7)
Where to start with Mozhan Navabi
The Stoning of Soraya M. is the essential title and also the hardest watch in her filmography, so know what you are getting: a village drama built around a false accusation, played without softening. If that is too much for now, it is entirely reasonable to come to it later.
The easier entry point is The Blacklist, where Samar Navabi arrives as a guarded outsider and becomes one of the few people on that show with an interior life. For something stranger, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a black-and-white Farsi-language vampire film shot in California, and her scenes carry a bruised realism the rest of the picture stylises away from.
Then Maid and Fleishman Is in Trouble for the recent television work, Traitor for a solid mid-budget thriller with more on its mind than the marketing suggested, and The Beast in Me if you simply want the newest thing.