Cas Anvar – The Operative

By: Kelly Kearney

Q) You play Farhad in the new psychological drama The Operative. Talk a little bit about your role and how he fits into this complex spy gone rogue story.

Cas: Yeah, that’s a great way to frame the film. I was really proud to accept the role and thrilled to be able to work with Diane Kruger and Martin Freeman, who I immensely respect, both in their work and in their careers.  I was also really thrilled about the story of this film, which is kind of an unusual take on the traditional spy thriller. It’s not all about gun fights and car chases. It really explores the human cost of being a spy and the cost on the person who is the spy and has to lie their whole lives and the cost on the people around them; what the collateral damage is. That’s where my character comes in. The really wonderful thing about this role is that a few years ago if you played any Persian/Iranian engineer that’s affiliated with the government and the nuclear arms program they’re deemed a terrorist and in this film he’s actually the victim. He’s probably the most sympathetic character in the film. He’s the one being deceived and he’s the one grabbed out of his comfortable life and has the rug pulled out from under him. I think that’s a really interesting kind of turning of the tables.

Q) Like you’ve mentioned, you play an Iranian tech engineer who works closely with the country’s nuclear program, and he just happens to get involved with the very agent sent to infiltrate that nuclear program. Did you do any preparation for this role?

Cas: No, I am a huge science nerd and I am very comfortable in that world, so it didn’t require a lot for me to be able to absorb and make it my own. I did do a lot of prep on my own because I did have to speak Farsi in the film. So, I had to work on that even though it’s one of my languages that I speak. To actually play a character living in Iran, that’s where I put a lot of my energy into my preparation.

Q) You are starring alongside you is Diane Kruger, who plays Mossad spy, Rachel. What was it like working with Diane? The interactions between your two characters are intense. 

Cas: It was wonderful actually. Diane is a terrific person, a great woman. She’s a very organic actress. She worked differently than me and that was kind of fun for me. She very much wants to do everything on set. She really likes to explore everything in the moment, whereas I am a theater actor. I come from the classical Shakespearean training, so I’m very comfortable to kind of talk about things ahead of time and rehearse. It was kind of a nice challenge for me because I got to do all my stuff on my own and then together, we would discover stuff while the camera was rolling. So, a lot of the things that ended up in the film were things that just spontaneously happened between the two of us because of what was going on in the scene while we were shooting. That was a fun little in moment acting course for me.

Q) There’s been talk about this film putting Mossad agents in a bad light. Was this something that was of concern when making the film?

Cas: That’s a good question for the director. I don’t know and I don’t see that because in this film, in my humble opinion, it’s not about any particular Secret Service or any particular country or any particular conflict. This could have been set in any setting. It could have been the U.S. and Russia. It could’ve been Israel and Palestine. It could have been any country that has tensions between it and their Secret Services. It’s not specific to the Mossad and Iran and to the CIA. It’s really all the Secret Services around the world. MI6 is like this, the KGB, the CIA, Mossad…They all operate like this. One thing that we were told, and things that came up in the research, that the worldwide intelligence community has these types of things going on, which I guess isn’t any more comforting. [laughs] It certainly doesn’t make me feel good, but there was no targeting any specific agencies. In my opinion, this is not a story about the Mossad or about the Israeli/Iranian conflict. It’s about the world of being a spy and the cost of being one.

Q) The Operative was filmed on location in Israel, Germany and Bulgaria. Talk a little but about filming on location and some of the challenges of turning a Germany and Bulgaria into Tehran.

Cas: [laughing] Yeah, that’s a great question! I was fascinated by it because they (the location managers, directors and production crew) did so much research looking for little places that resembled Tehran and in some scenes they would have one angle from Israel, one angle from Bulgaria and one angle from Germany. And they would put some footage from Iran in there and blend all of this together in the scene seamlessly and you don’t ever realize it. You feel like you’re in the streets of Iran, where in reality you have three or four different countries all blended together into once scene. So, it was a fascinating quilt work that these brilliant filmmakers put together in a very authentic way.

Q) The film is based on a book written by a former Israeli intelligence officer Yiftach Reicher Atir. Did his first-person account of his life bring an authenticity to the story?

Cas: Yes, there was a lot of facts in the film. It was written by someone who had a lot of experience in this world and I think it compiles a bunch of his truth and along with the director, Yuval Adler (who also wrote the screenplay), took some creative licensing to modify some of these stories while mostly keeping them authentic and still basing them in reality. Obviously, the creative license was taken to make the story more dramatic and to have a story to tell about this one individual spy.

Q) When getting into your character, did you find anything about Farhad that you related to?

Cas: There was. I mean, we don’t show a lot but living in Iran, growing up in Iran, was a very different experience than me being born and bred in Canada. The one thing I will say, there were some family scenes that took place where I brought Diane’s character to my family’s social events. I was bringing her and there was some tension there because she is American – like a foreigner and I’m bringing her into the family. The kind of attention she would get and the unusual kind of exotic nature of what goes on in a Persian family at a gathering, that was all very familiar to me. The having her as my guest, that was very familiar to me. Kind of welcoming her into the family and teaching them about her and that was all stuff that happened in the movie and stuff that I did relate to. The parties and the events and bringing the girlfriend to these things.

Q) You’re also starring in the Amazon show “The Expanse” where you play Alex Kamal, a Martian Navy pilot.  The show just got picked up for a fifth season! Congrats! What can you tease about Season Four?

Cas: I know, that is so exciting! Thanks for mentioning that! Season Four of “The Expanse” is going to drop on December 13^th on Amazon Prime and even before that, months before that happens, we got a Season Five pickup and that has never happened before! So, that’s super exciting. It’s a real vote of confidence from our distributor Amazon. That’s just an incredibly huge and luxurious pat on the back from them. Now we get to go back and do Season Five, even before we premiere Season Four, knowing we’ve got another season coming out. Season Four is going to be… the reactions I’ve been getting… it’s a whole other chapter for “The Expanse” team. We’re going to be landing on a planet and it’s kind of like an outer space Western. Discovering new territory and new territory that has not been claimed and the conflicts that arise out of that. It’s kind of fitting that this happened in this season as A: it’s a whole new chapter this season and B: we are on a whole new platform. So, it’s kind of a rebirth for the show after being canceled and then picked up by Amazon.