Schari Rahbari does not talk about acting first. The German actor of Persian heritage, now based in New York City, treats it as a form of inquiry, a way of asking why people behave the way they do when circumstances close in around them. That question shapes the roles he pursues and the writers he keeps returning to. It also explains why his most recent stage work, Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, in Patrick Marber’s adaptation, mattered to him beyond the credit.
“The greatest role an actor can play is helping people see themselves in someone else,” he says. The standard is harder to meet than it sounds. Recognition of that kind depends on a character being assembled with enough specificity that an audience believes the person before deciding what to think of him.
What Did Playing Jørgen Tesman Reveal About Human Behavior?
Jørgen Tesman is one of the more thankless assignments in Ibsen’s work. Hedda’s husband is an earnest academic, decent and slightly oblivious, and productions often flatten him into comic relief standing beside a far more magnetic wife. Playing him without condescension takes discipline. Schari Rahbari has described the role as a challenge that pushed him toward a fuller grasp of human relationships and psychology, which is a different project from hunting for the character’s laughs. The version he performed was Patrick Marber’s, which trades Ibsen’s period formality for spare, contemporary speech and so leaves an actor that much less to hide behind.
Ibsen published the play in 1890, and Marber’s version, first staged at London’s National Theatre in 2016, leaves its architecture intact. The pressure comes less from plot than from what the characters refuse to say to one another. Tesman’s blind spots are not stupidity. They work as a method for keeping a marriage intact by declining to look at it directly. An actor who locates that logic ends up with a man on stage rather than a punchline.
Classical theatre tends to expose shortcuts, whether the words are Ibsen’s own or a modern writer’s rendering of them. The text is fixed, the psychology is dense, and there is nowhere to hide behind naturalistic mumbling or invented stage business. Parts like Tesman ask a performer to account for every choice the text implies.
How Four Playwrights Shaped His Approach to Character Work
Rahbari’s artistic development has run parallel to his study of four writers: William Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, August Wilson, and Tony Kushner. Each one asks something different of a performer.
With Shakespeare, the verse carries the evidence. Rhythm, interruption, and the shifts between prose and meter tell an actor where a character loses composure long before the plot confirms it.
Beckett works from the opposite direction. He strips a situation down until almost nothing is left, then asks the actor to make the waiting itself hold attention. Silence becomes information, and the pauses in Waiting for Godot or Endgame carry as much weight as the lines around them. Anyone who can keep an audience inside that emptiness has learned something about presence that plot cannot teach.
August Wilson pulls elsewhere again. The ten plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle trace Black American life decade by decade across the twentieth century, and his characters speak in long, musical arias that carry inherited history inside ordinary conversation. Wilson’s writing insists that a person cannot be read apart from the generations standing behind him.
Kushner brings scale. Angels in America moves between private bedrooms and political catastrophe without treating either as backdrop for the other, which gives an actor room to play an intimate scene and a large idea in the same breath.
What Schari Rahbari takes from the four is a shared preoccupation rather than a technique. Identity, morality, ambition, and the strain relationships place on all three run through every one of them, and those are the questions he tries to bring into a rehearsal room. His portfolio and current work are collected on Rahbari’s professional acting portfolio.
Why Storytelling Still Connects People Across Cultures
Stories give strangers a common vantage point, which is why Schari Rahbari treats them as more than entertainment. A well-built narrative asks a viewer to spend two hours inside a life they would otherwise never occupy. Empathy, by his account, is less a feeling than a practice, and fiction is one of the few places most people practice it on purpose.
A German actor of Persian heritage working out of New York, Rahbari moves between several cultural reference points, and the plays that interest him tend to sit on similar seams. Wilson’s Pittsburgh, Kushner’s Reagan-era New York, and Ibsen’s provincial Norway are all highly specific places. Audiences in other countries and other decades keep finding themselves in them anyway.
That durability is the case for taking storytelling seriously. Work that holds up across generations tends to do so because it was honest about something particular, not because it aimed at everyone at once.
The Values Guiding Schari Rahbari’s Next Chapter
Transformation, resilience, and the search for purpose are the subjects Schari Rahbari says draw him in, and he is looking for projects across film, television, and theatre that take them on. Rather than chasing visibility, he describes his ambition in terms of collaborators, artists who want to make work that stays with an audience after the lights come up. His screen credits are listed among his acting credits on IMDb, and his professional history appears on his LinkedIn profile. He also maintains an Instagram account under the handle scharii_r.
The through line in how he talks about the work is patience. A craft built on emotional honesty and intellectual curiosity does not accelerate on demand, and Rahbari frames his own development as ongoing rather than settled. The training continues. So does the reading.
For an actor whose stated aim is helping audiences recognize themselves in someone unlike them, the slower path makes sense. The kind of recognition he is after cannot be manufactured on a schedule. It gets earned one character at a time.
