Arian Moayed, the actor Hollywood keeps casting as the man in the suit

Stewy Hosseini, the investor who circles the Roy family in Succession, is the kind of man who will tell you to your face that he likes you and is only in it for the money. Arian Moayed has a name for that man: an “honest shark.” It is close to the part Hollywood keeps handing him in one costume or another, the investor, the defense lawyer, the federal agent, the husband in the good coat, and Moayed has built a screen career on playing those men without letting the audience off the hook. The rest of his work, the part nobody casts him in, runs the other way: a New York theater company he co-founded out of college, a Hamlet spoken partly in Farsi, and films about people who never get near a boardroom.

He was a child of Tehran. His parents left Iran when he was six and settled in Glenview, a suburb north of Chicago, where his father worked as a banker. Moayed finished at Glenbrook South High School and went on to Indiana University Bloomington, and after graduating he moved straight to Manhattan.

In 2002, the year he left Bloomington, he and his college roommate, Tom Ridgely, founded Waterwell, a small company that mixes theater, teaching and film. It was never a vanity outfit. Its acting program runs the acting training at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, where Moayed still teaches, and its own projects lean toward the documentary: The Courtroom, built from a real refugee case, began on stage and became a film shown at Tribeca. His first short films came out of the same circle. Overdue played Cinequest, and Day Ten, with Omar Metwally and set in the days after September 11, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Broadway noticed him in 2011. In Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo he played Musa, an Iraqi gardener working as an interpreter for American soldiers, opposite Robin Williams as the ghost of the title animal. The role brought a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a play and a Theatre World Award. Off-Broadway kept him busy afterwards: another Joseph play, Guards at the Taj, won him an Obie in 2016, and the cast of The Humans, with Moayed as the boyfriend Richard, shared the Drama Desk award for ensemble.

The production that says most about him came in spring 2017. Waterwell staged Hamlet at the Sheen Center with Moayed in the title role and Ridgely directing, moving Elsinore to Persia around 1917 and delivering part of Shakespeare’s text in Farsi over a live score by the Iranian musician Mohsen Namjoo. The Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans called him the first Iranian actor to play the Dane in the United States. It was a classic carried in two languages by someone who had grown up inside both.

Television arrived in pieces. His early credits run through the Law & Order franchise, Elementary and The Blacklist, plus ten episodes of Madam Secretary and a part in Jon Stewart’s Rosewater. Then came Succession, where between 2018 and 2023 Stewy, Kendall Roy’s old college friend turned private-equity predator, never needed many scenes to tip a season. It earned Moayed Primetime Emmy nominations for outstanding guest actor in a drama series in 2022 and 2023, and a share of the cast’s SAG ensemble award. Netflix‘s Inventing Anna made him Todd Spodek, the lawyer defending Anna Delvey, and Marvel gave him Agent P. Cleary of the Department of Damage Control in Spider-Man: No Way Home and Ms. Marvel. Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings was a rare chance at something softer.

That résumé carries a trap, and Moayed has walked close to it. The early procedural years read as a roll call of Arab and Middle Eastern names in police and security plots. The tailored roles that replaced them are an upgrade, but they form a lane of their own: men with authority, sharp tongues and a price. His answer has been to defend the men he plays. On A Doll’s House, Jamie Lloyd’s bare-stage Broadway revival opposite Jessica Chastain in 2023, he told the director, “If you want me to play him like a monster, I’m not your guy.” He wanted men in the audience unable to say “that’s not me” about Torvald, and the performance brought his second Tony nomination. He argues the same case for Cleary, insisting in interviews that in all three appearances the agent “has always been right.” Not every critic buys it. When Wonder Man reached Disney+ in January 2026, one reviewer called it his best turn as Cleary; another found the agent flat and uninteresting.

In that series Cleary leans on Ben Kingsley‘s Trevor Slattery to spy on Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s Simon Williams, and the moral ambiguity is the point Moayed keeps pressing. On Netflix’s Nobody Wants This he played Dr. Andy, the man Morgan gets engaged to before the second season’s finale undoes it. In October 2026 he reached cinemas in Other Mommy, Rob Savage’s horror film for Universal, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, adapted from Josh Malerman’s novel, with Chastain in a double role.

Away from sets, Moayed, who turned 46 in April 2026, lives in New York City with his wife, Krissy Shields, and their two daughters, and keeps teaching at the school Waterwell partners with.

The next stretch keeps him close to Chastain. He is a series regular in Apple TV’s limited series The Off Weeks, as Angelo, the boss of Ben Stiller’s writing professor, and he has joined HBO Max’s DC comedy The People v. Gorilla Grodd. Most telling is the casting Deadline reported in October 2026: in Netflix’s The Retrievals, drawn from the investigation into drug theft at a Yale fertility clinic, he will play Amir, husband of Chastain’s Kaitlyn and her biggest champion through IVF. After Torvald, the man a wife walks out on, he gets to play the one who stays.

Tags: actors, Jessica Chastain, Robin Williams, Succession, Other Mommy, Arian Moayed, Wonder Man