After years of waiting impatiently in the wings, Leila Farzad has finally landed her first starring role – a ‘callous and cold’ police officer. Here, she talks about Iranian pride, PMT and what she owes I Hate Suzie
In the television show I Hate Suzie, Leila Farzad’s character, Naomi, argues the life-changing benefits of PMT. It’s the moment of Permanent Mega Truth, she says – a brief window every month when a woman’s real feelings are revealed. The stoic veil lifts. Huge problems become clear. We realise we must leave our job or relationship. Or… we wait for it to pass and go back to pretending everything is fine.
I Hate Suzie is a brutal, funny, raw series, starring and co-created by Billie Piper, about a celebrity whose life is upended when her phone is hacked. (Photos of her having sex with a man who isn’t her husband appear online. Everything falls apart.) Farzad’s big break came when she was cast in the role of Piper’s agent. When I tell her I think of the PMT line regularly – at least once a month – she grins. “I’m there right now,” she says. She closes her eyes and sighs, as if she’s just opened a meditation app. “I’m sweating, I’m not sleeping, my sense of smell is heightened. The smell of my cat’s diarrhoea was so bad it literally woke me from my sleep,” she laughs. She tells me she’s an overs-sharer, though she doesn’t need to; she freely lists the symptoms of her polycystic ovary syndrome and bends her arms backwards to demonstrate the hypermobility that means she’s banned from performing yoga. There’s the daily battles of her raging IBS, too. Ah, a comrade. I tell her I have Buscopan, the antispasmodic IBS relief medicine, in my bag. I’ve uttered the secret password of our people. She nods, knowingly. “You get it. Never trust a fart.”
