Her fascination with a broad slice of humanity has always guided her work. Before acting, Mohebbi was a neonatal nurse in a COVID-stricken ward, an experience that accelerated her desire to pursue her first love — storytelling — full-time. Since then, she has appeared on screen in police thrillers and character-driven dramas, but her latest evolution takes her behind the camera — adapting Shadi Salehpour’s short story “On Sundays” into her film Maysa. Mohebbi reflects, “I think it changed everything for me and where I want to go. It gave me the chance to hire as many Middle Eastern women as I could, and show that we won’t always be at the bottom of the list.”

She has carried that principle throughout her career, even as she pushes against the reductive narratives projected onto her. “There are so many narratives about certain groups of people which are untrue and have harmed millions,” Mohebbi says. “It’s important to tell cultural stories — earnest cultural stories — but it’s also really, really important to just exist as a Middle Eastern person in these spaces.” That visibility comes with boundaries. “I don’t want to just tell trauma stories,” she explains but, in the same breath, laughs admitting some casting clichés persist. “Honestly, the typecast I get is the sassy best friend or angry lesbian.”

Maysa was conceived in a moment of industry uncertainty. The writers’ strike had ended, but productions remained frozen, and funding cuts pushed studios toward safer, high-grossing bets. Mohebbi had finished Critical Incident, moved to Sydney, and expected to dive into a second season which never came. “So I started thinking about writing a show,” she says. But it was Shadi Salehpour’s short story “On Sundays”, which she’d narrated for Radio New Zealand, that pierced the creative fog. “I just couldn’t get through [a take of it] without crying,” she recalls.

Even with permission secured to adapt it, the work proved emotionally taxing. She wrestled with writer’s block and the vulnerability of capturing something so intimate. “Short films are a hard medium,” she says. “You’re telling complicated stories in ten minutes. To honour the characters, you have to be really good at storytelling.”

Funded by a first-time filmmakers grant in New Zealand, Maysa took shape across months of travel between the country she grew up in and the one she had just moved to. The set became its own haven. “I cast Middle Eastern women. Every generation. We all cried a lot on set,” she says. “People felt seen for the first time.” The experience crystallised a lesson she now repeats often. “And what I learned was: you just have to do stuff. You can’t just talk about it.”

Soon after Maysa, she was in Perth filming Run, the upcoming Binge drama about Australia’s “Postcard Bandit” Brenden Abbott, who notoriously broke out of prison several times, and was rumoured to send photos of himself to police on the run. It delivered her first chance to play a real person on screen. “Nineties makeup, tattoos, a baby,” she says, amused. “It comes with so much responsibility. But I like that, it motivates me. It gives you a foundation to build off.”

One particular on-set moment left her shaken, while recording pick-ups in production. “I was onscreen, holding the baby and I burst out crying because I looked just like my mum. It was like watching my mum holding me.” Mohebbi’s love for her parents sits close to the surface, shaped by the warmth they maintained through the challenges of migration. “We were refugees and faced a lot of racism, but my parents always maintained this sense of playfulness and creativity,” she says. “That’s the reason I am who I am.”

Mohebbi moved from Iran to a small New Zealand town at age five, growing up surrounded by eccentric artists and itinerant musicians; adults who carved out “a different kind of life.” Only recently, she says, has she understood the bedrock they built for her. “I realise now that my family means everything to me. So much of what I did was for them. I’m learning I need to do it for me too.”