Omid Djalili, 'Britain's only Iranian stand-up comedian and actor' is currently filming with Heath Ledger as Casanova's sidekick Lupo. He talks to Steve Pratt about his struggle to be taken seriously.

Many people forget, says Omid Djalili, that he was trained as an actor and fell into stand-up by mistake.

Funnily enough, both sides of "Britain's only Iranian stand-up comedian and actor" are on view at present. He's currently touring his No Agenda show to 35 venues across the country and will be seen on the big screen assisting the legendary lover in the new Hollywood film, Casanova.

Clearly, both his acting and his comedy are going well. Co-starring with Whoopi Goldberg in the US TV series Whoopi has certainly done nothing to harm his profile on the other side of the Atlantic.

And he reports that he's finally getting away from being typecast as an ethnic stereotype in movies. Yet, initially, he resisted the role of Lupo, Casanova's right hand man, in the movie starring Oscar-nominated Brokeback Mountain actor Heath Ledger as the amorous chap

"I usually get killed off halfway through so this is a first for me to go all the way through the film," says Djalili, whose previous screen credits include The Mummy, Gladiator, and Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow.

"I'd just finished working on Whoopi and they kept sending me the script for Casanova but I wasn't interested because the character has nothing to say.

"Then they approached me again. They'd seen 60 people and didn't like anyone. He's supposed to be a tall, thin French ponce. I said I'd do it if they let me do whatever I wanted. I thought I'd play him like an English butler but he looks weird."

A deciding factor was the chance to work with Swedish director Lasse Halstrom, whose award-winning film, My Life As A Dog, he much admired.

Making a US film proved a different experience from being in a British movie. "I suppose the stakes are higher, so you focus more," he says. "What you don't see on the screen are that there are hundreds of people working on the other side of the camera. There must be 200 people. On a British film there's a couple of tea ladies. For me, it was a very liberating experience because Lasse said, 'do what you like'."

He wasn't enamoured of Venice, where location filming took place. Apart from St Mark's Square, he rates the city as awful, adding, "the sooner that place sinks the better".

Most of his scenes were with Heath Ledger, although the Australian actor had no idea who he was before filming began. "He'd never seen me before. This always happens to me on film. People are always very suspicious and if I say something funny they don't know I'm a comedian.

"I think he avoided me for a couple of days, thinking 'who's this short, fat, twat?'. But I bonded with Heath very quickly because he likes cricket. We'd get together and play around with the scenes. Lasse was very enthusiastic with the improvisation."

Djalili is particularly pleased with another recent film, Modigliani, not least because his role as the artist Picasso was far removed from "kebab shop owner stuff". He thinks his last role in that mode may be in Ant and Dec's forthcoming movie, Alien Autospy.

He still faces prejudice from directors. He went up for the forthcoming London West End production of Monty Python's Spamalot but director Mike Nichols wouldn't even see him because, Djalili was told, he wasn't what the director had in mind for the role. That's the sort of preconception that he feels he's fighting against.

Whoopi raised his comedy profile in the US with the possibility of his own sit-com mooted. But he's not about to desert this country for the States. "I'm British and love living in England and have children here," he says.

"Because I'm a comedian, things happen in America before they happen here. To hit there before I make it here in my own right has always felt wrong to me.

"They talk of me doing my own sit-com there but I don't want to do it. I have this great sit-com idea written by two guys who were on Cheers for nine years and it's ready to go. But I have something here at the BBC, something that's very much my own."

For the moment, he's continuing to balance the acting and the comedy. "You have a bit more control in stand-up. I'm very much focusing on the BBC show which I'm writing myself," he says.

* Omid Djalili appears at Newcastle Tyne Theatre on February 18 (tickets 0870 1451200). Casanova (12A) opens in cinemas on February 17.

Published: 09/02/2006