Bio
Maz Jobrani has played many characters in film and television. Most recently, he played Gourishankar P.V. Subramaniam, an Indian lawyer turned NY cab driver who took part in the plot to rob Mick Jagger in the ABC sitcom “The Knights of Prosperity.” Prior to that he was best known for his big screen role as “Moly” in Ice Cube’s “Friday After Next.” He also played Secret Service Agent “Mo” in the Sydney Pollack thriller “The Interpreter,” opposite Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman as well as Jennifer Garner’s colleague, Glenn, in “13 Going on 30.”
Maz recently sold a TV show to CBS based on his life in the U.S. as an Iranian-American. He is also preparing to shoot a film titled “Jimmy Vestvood: Amerikan Hero” – a cross between a Middle Eastern “Pink Panther” and “Bend it Like Beckham.” (Jimmy can be seen at www.jimmyvestvood.com).
Maz has done standup on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson,” “The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn,“ Comedy Central’s “Premium Blend,” and England’s Paramount 2 Network. His sketch comedy performances at the ACME Theater in Los Angeles were hailed as “devilishly funny” and “extraordinary” by LA Weekly.
Additionally Jobrani is a founding member of the Axis of Evil Comedy Tour, which features some of the top Middle Eastern-American comics in the world. The Axis of Evil Comedy Central Special premiered in 2007 as the first all Middle Eastern show on American TV. The DVD was also released in 2007. The tour went to the Middle East in the Fall of 2007, selling out 27 shows in Dubai, Beirut, Cairo, Kuwait and Amman.
Jobrani was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he caught the acting bug after portraying the lead in his eighth grade production of “Li’l Abner.” He studied theater throughout high school, then went on to earn a BA in Political Science and Italian at UC Berkeley. In the fall of 1994, while beginning a Ph.D. program in Political Science at UCLA, he visited the university’s prestigious theater program – and was immediately hooked back on acting. This led to him dropping out of the Ph.D. program to pursue his childhood passion.