PAUL CHAHIDI: I GOT MY CHEST WAXED WITH EDDIE REDMAYNE. HE WAS BRAVER

Born in Tehran in 1969, to an Iranian diplomat father and British mother, Paul Chahidi moved to the UK aged two. Educated at the Dragon School, Oxford, and then Trinity College in Cambridge, he trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and has since appeared regularly for the Royal Shakespeare Company. On TV, he’s appeared in The Night Manager, This Country, Wicked Little Letters and The Witness while his movie credits include The Death of Stalin, Notting Hill and The Libertine.

He lives in North London with his wife Kate and their 15-year-old son George. Here, he looks back on the moments that changed his perspective on work, love, family, money and health.

I’m an introverted extrovert or an introverted show-off. I have two very opposite sides to me. I was in a very bicultural, mixed heritage household with strong Iranian culture, with food, music, friends. We would often have a lot of visitors coming to our house, and they would entertain a lot. I used to hide away. If I was in the room, I would be grabbed, pulled up, and I’d just start having to do my own arm movements to the music, which was mainly 70s Iranian disco. I didn’t come to drama until quite late on, at about 13, acting out scenes from Shakespeare in school.

My parents saved enough money to send me to an all boys boarding school in Oxford. I did well there but wasn’t happy. People might look at Cambridge and go, it’s very elitist and privileged, but compared to where I’d been at school there were people from so many different backgrounds, from working-class backgrounds, from different cultures. I found it incredibly liberating meeting all these people, and not being forced to be friends with people in order to just survive, as I had at school.

I studied Arabic and Persian at Cambridge. I only dipped my toe in the Footlights, really. I edited a satirical political magazine and spent a year of my degree in Cairo. In my kind of peer group, there were a lot of very talented people; Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins, Stephen Mangan, Nicola Walker, the late brilliant Paul Ritter, who was in Friday Night Dinner, Jez Butterworth, Ben Miller, and Alexander Armstrong. Richard Osman and Sacha Baron Cohen were just after me. It didn’t feel like a hot house but there was a lot of creativity, and these people were just my mates. We just mucked around and put on plays.

If you told me I would be working as an actor at this age, after I left drama school, I would have laughed in your face. I didn’t fit in and people didn’t know how to cast me. I was a funny, prematurely balding guy with a round face. I worried what my parents thought about my career choice, particularly as the child of an immigrant who has come through a very difficult period to be there and sacrifice things. I sat my parents down in a rather overdramatic way to tell them I wanted to be an actor, but I’d built up the moment to such a degree they probably thought I was about to tell them I’d killed someone. They were admirably calm and just said, “That’s fine”.

Daisy May Cooper, who I worked with on This Country, is a force of nature. The term is overused but Daisy and Armando Iannucci, who I’ve worked with a couple of times, are both geniuses. I spent most of This Country as the vicar trying not to laugh.

I once got my chest waxed with Eddie Redmayne. I did this all-male production of Twelfth Night with the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Company. The first performance was at Middle Temple Hall, and Eddie, who was still finishing university, came with me to this backstreet low-budget waxer in Southwark. We were very blithe when we went in, but you could hear the screams across the River Thames. I used to have to have my chest and hands waxed and wear full white makeup. Who was bravest? I think Eddie was. I’m half Iranian; I have a lot more hair than him.

About 20 years ago, I had a terrible accident on the Globe stage. There was water on the stage. I slipped, and my foot dislocated and turned 180 degrees the wrong way, and my bones snapped. I was in a wheelchair for six weeks and then on crutches for two weeks. It was the final dress rehearsal of The Tempest with Vanessa Redgrave; my last memory from that was being waved off in the ambulance by her in full costume. It was an utterly surreal.

Any actor that says they are not petrified they will never get another job is lying. I will have that for the rest of my life as long as I work. My imposter syndrome has been off the charts so many times. But you have to control it because otherwise you’ll spin out of control. It’s taken me 30 years to even be able to say I might be a good actor.

Paul stars in ‘The Misanthrope’ at the National Theatre until 1st August, and it will be broadcast in cinemas from 22nd September. He is an ambassador for Actors’ Trust

2026-07-22T05:19:04Z