A metallurgical engineering graduate who never worked in a factory, Payman Maadi found his way into film almost by accident, first as a screenwriter and then, well into his thirties, as an actor who would go on to win Berlin’s top acting prize. Best known internationally for A Separation and About Elly, both directed by Asghar Farhadi, Maadi has spent the past decade splitting his time between Tehran and Hollywood, appearing in everything from HBO’s The Night Of to Michael Bay’s action blockbusters. His latest role, in Bart Layton’s Crime 101 alongside Chris Hemsworth and Halle Berry, continues a career that keeps finding an audience on both sides of the Atlantic.
Quick Facts
| Date of Birth | June 30, 1970 |
|---|---|
| Age | 56 years |
| Nationality | Iranian-American |
| Zodiac Sign | Cancer |
| Occupation | Actor, Screenwriter, Director |
| Net Worth | $3 million – $6 million |
| Also Known As | Peyman Maadi, Peyman Moadi |
| Place of Birth | New York City, USA |
| Height | 5′ 7″ (1.70 m) |
| Education | Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch (Metallurgical Engineering) |
| Spouse | Faranak Qavanlou (m. 2005) |
| Children | Baran (daughter), Ryan (son) |
| Known For | A Separation, About Elly, Camp X-Ray, The Night Of |
Biography
Maadi was born on June 30, 1970, in New York City to Iranian parents. English-language sources, including Wikipedia, often list his birthday as July 9, 1970, a mix-up that appears to trace back to how his Persian birth date, the 9th of Tir on the Iranian calendar, got converted into the Gregorian calendar. Persian-language biographical outlets consistently place his birthday in late June instead.
His father, Hassan Maadi, was studying law at Columbia University in New York around the time Payman was born, before the family returned to Iran when Payman was five years old. He is the second of three children, with an older brother and a younger sister, Parisa Maadi, who has since worked in the family’s watch retail business. Maadi went on to study metallurgical engineering at the Islamic Azad University’s Karaj Branch, graduating with a degree he would never end up using professionally.
His love of film started young, and traces back to his father. Speaking to Your Living City during the 2019 Stockholm Film Festival, Maadi said his father was a devoted film lover who, during the Iran-Iraq war years when theaters and imported films were scarce, would gather the family around a television to watch underground VHS copies of movies like The Godfather with the doors and windows shut. Maadi has credited those nights with turning him into what he called a film buff long before he ever considered acting as a career.
Career
Maadi’s path into film started behind the camera. He wrote his first produced screenplay, Swan Song, in 2000, then spent most of the decade writing for other Iranian directors on films including Thirst and Coma. Acting wasn’t part of the plan until Asghar Farhadi saw one of Maadi’s short films and got in touch. In that same Stockholm interview, Maadi recalled that Farhadi called him a couple of weeks later to say he was writing a new screenplay and had named one of the lead characters after him, telling Maadi the character reminded him of Maadi himself and asking him to play the part. That film was About Elly, released in 2009, and casting him changed the direction of his career entirely.
Two years later, Farhadi cast him again in A Separation as Nader, a father caught in a custody dispute and a moral crisis involving his household’s caregiver. The performance won Maadi the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 2011 Berlin International Film Festival, and the film itself went on to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It remains the role most audiences outside Iran associate with him.
Writing in Iran comes with its own constraints, and Maadi has been candid about how he handles them. He told Vulture that after more than a decade as a screenwriter, he had learned to write stories that don’t conflict with the system without writing to please anyone, treating censorship as a limitation to work around rather than a wall to fight, one that sometimes pushes a scene toward a more inventive solution instead of cutting it outright.
Maadi didn’t stay in front of the camera only. He wrote and directed The Snow on the Pines in 2012, then returned to directing with Bomb: A Love Story in 2018, a film that won him the Special Jury Prize at the Fajr Film Festival and Best International Director honors at the Bosphorus Film Festival in Istanbul.
His Hollywood work built up steadily through the 2010s. He appeared in Peter Sattler’s Camp X-Ray opposite Kristen Stewart in 2014, joined the ensemble cast of Last Knights the following year, and played a CIA translator in Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi in 2016. That same year, he took a lead role in HBO’s The Night Of, an eight-episode miniseries built around a wrongful murder case that earned wide critical attention. He told Vulture that series creator Steven Zaillian had seen A Separation and pursued him directly for the part with no audition required, and that production stalled for nearly two years after James Gandolfini, originally attached to a lead role, died before filming got underway. To prepare, Maadi and co-star Riz Ahmed spent time in New York’s Pakistani community, visiting shops and talking with taxi drivers to pick up accents and speech patterns for their characters.
Maadi has been selective about the American roles he takes. He told Vulture that he turns down scripts reducing Middle Eastern characters to villains, saying he refuses to play what he called “bad-guy Arab terrorists or Iranian saboteurs,” and that he has walked away from projects he considered poorly written or insulting to Iranians and Muslims broadly. He has also had to explain on set, more than once, that Iranians and Arabs are different peoples who don’t share a language, a distinction he said some American crews still don’t grasp.
Maadi kept working on both sides of the industry through the years that followed. He starred opposite Navid Mohammadzadeh in Saeed Roustaee’s drug-trade drama Just 6.5 in 2019, winning a Hafez Award for Best Actor. He told Your Living City that Roustaee cast real recovering addicts alongside the professional actors, without makeup and in their own clothes, to capture Tehran’s drug crisis as authentically as possible. The shoot stretched across roughly five months, around 150 days total, and Maadi said the close, sustained contact with that world made several members of the cast and crew physically ill, including a sound engineer who was ordered by a doctor to rest for seventeen weeks. Maadi reunited with Michael Bay for 6 Underground later that same year. He picked up a Crystal Simorgh and a second Hafez Award for Walnut Tree in 2020, the same year he joined HBO’s Westworld for a three-episode arc.
Roustaee brought Maadi back for Leila’s Brothers in 2022, a sprawling family drama that competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Maadi returned to writing in 2024 with Viper of Tehran, a 14-episode series he also starred in, before playing the male lead opposite Parinaz Izadyar in Roustaee’s Woman and Child, which premiered in Cannes’ main competition in May 2025 to strong reviews. In February 2026, he joined the ensemble of Bart Layton’s Crime 101, playing diamond merchant Sammy Kassem alongside Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, and Halle Berry in a heist thriller that grossed close to $73 million worldwide.
Maadi’s standing in the industry extends beyond acting credits. Sundance picked him for its US Dramatic Competition jury in 2022, sitting alongside director Marielle Heller, and the Gotham Awards asked him to help judge its Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director award that same year. In 2025, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited him to join its Actors Branch, adding him to the voting body behind the Oscars.
Personal Life
Maadi married Faranak Qavanlou in 2005, and the couple have two children, a daughter named Baran and a son named Ryan. He mostly keeps details of his home life private, though he marked Ryan’s 14th birthday on Instagram in August 2025, writing, “Happy 14th, Ryan! So proud of the young man you’re becoming.”
Maadi divides his time between Los Angeles and Tehran, where he owns and runs a watch gallery that operates as an authorized dealer for brands including Omega. He identifies as Muslim and has spoken in past interviews about the difficulty of balancing acting careers in two very different film industries with two very different sets of expectations.
Maadi has kept a few personal habits consistent over the years. He told Your Living City that sushi is his favorite food, that he’d rather spend a day off with his children than do almost anything else, and that interviews rank among his least favorite parts of the job, an admission he made partway through this one.
Maadi hasn’t stayed entirely out of Iranian politics. In June 2025, during the twelve-day conflict between Israel and Iran, he signed an open letter alongside Asghar Farhadi and other prominent Iranian artists. Published in Iran’s Etemad Daily and addressed to UNESCO, the letter condemned the Israeli and US strikes on Iran and expressed solidarity with the country during what it called a dangerous and turbulent period.
He’s addressed the tension between working in both countries before. Speaking to Vulture in 2016, not long after actress Golshifteh Farahani had been barred from returning to Iran over her work abroad, Maadi said he wasn’t worried about facing something similar, describing his choices as governed by his own boundaries rather than fear. He added that if restrictions ever closed off certain projects, he would simply redirect his energy toward acting elsewhere, or into directing and writing, work he already had in mind at the time.
Net Worth
Payman Maadi’s more grounded net worth estimate has to work backward from what’s actually known: decades of screenwriting and directing fees in Iran, supporting roles in Hollywood studio productions, lead roles on high-paying Iranian streaming platforms, and an operating business on the side.
His American film and television credits alone span nearly fifteen years, including studio productions for Michael Bay, an eight-episode HBO miniseries, a three-episode arc on Westworld, and a supporting role in the 2026 ensemble thriller Crime 101. Even mid-tier supporting parts in productions of that scale typically pay in the low-to-mid six figures per project. On the Iranian side, his lead roles in Just 6.5, Walnut Tree, Leila’s Brothers, and Woman and Child, plus writing and starring in a 14-episode platform series like Viper of Tehran, represent a separate and often lucrative income stream, since Iran’s home-video and streaming platforms pay established stars well above what theatrical releases alone would generate.
Add to that his ownership stake in a Tehran watch gallery, an established retail business rather than a side hustle, and a net worth estimated between $3 million and $6 million looks like a reasonable, if still imprecise, range for an actor with Maadi’s mix of credits across two industries.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Payman Maadi married? Yes. He has been married to Faranak Qavanlou since 2005, and the couple has two children together.
Who is Payman Maadi’s wife? His wife is Faranak Qavanlou. The couple married in 2005 and have two children, a daughter named Baran and a son named Ryan.
How old is Payman Maadi? Maadi was born on June 30, 1970, making him 56 years old as of 2026.
How tall is Payman Maadi? He stands 5′ 7″ (1.70 m) tall.
What is Payman Maadi’s real name? His full name is Peyman Maadi, sometimes transliterated as Payman Maadi or Peyman Moadi in English-language media.
Is Payman Maadi Arab or Persian? He’s Persian, not Arab. Maadi has spoken about being mistaken for Arab on American film sets, and has pointed out that Iranians and Arabs are different peoples who don’t even share a language.
Who does Payman Maadi play in Crime 101? He plays Sammy Kassem, a diamond merchant caught up in the fallout of a jewel heist, in Bart Layton’s 2026 thriller Crime 101.
Is Payman Maadi in The Odyssey? No confirmed casting has been reported. Persian-language outlets linked him to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in 2025, but the film’s released cast list, credited on IMDb and in trade press coverage after its July 2026 release, does not include him.
What is Payman Maadi’s net worth? Estimates place his net worth between $3 million and $6 million, built from decades of acting, writing, and directing work across Iranian and Hollywood productions plus a watch retail business in Tehran.
