HEN the creators of "24" first approached the Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, whose Oscar-nominated performance in "House of Sand and Fog" in 2003 reignited a film career that had been dormant for nearly 30 years, she turned them away.
She had never seen the show and knew nothing of the counterterrorist agent Jack Bauer and his save-the-world-on-deadline exploits. All she knew was that the creators of the Fox television show, Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow, wanted her to play a terrorist. As a highly regarded actress of Middle Eastern descent who had spent years as an advocate for women's rights, left Iran in 1978 to escape the ayatollahs and fought against the stereotyping of Muslim-Americans, it was exactly the kind of role she tried to avoid.
"Terrorists and battered women from the Middle East," she said of the parts she was often offered. "And they were never real characters. They were just stereotypes."
But two weeks after she turned them down, the creators sent her a tape of "24" episodes and asked if she would at least meet with them.
"They told me about this woman, where she is heading and how many faces she had," Ms. Aghdashloo, 52, said. "And while they were talking, I realized this is the most compelling and challenging role of my career. She's a very strong woman. She's complex. She's the kind of person when you talk to her, you're not quite sure whom you're talking to. I realized it was, as they say, something I can put my teeth in."
As Dina Araz, the matriarch of a seemingly average middle-class Muslim-American family that is also at the center of a terrorist sleeper cell, Ms. Aghdashloo is a chilling combination of loving mother, devoted wife and cold-blooded killer. She makes sure that her family eats a good breakfast and that her son is doing his homework, but when his non-Muslim girlfriend accidentally stumbles onto the location of the family business, she poisons the girl's tea.
The storyline has generated protests from some Muslim-American groups, which have said that it aggravates the stereotype that all Muslims are secret terrorist sympathizers. Fox is addressing the issue by offering its affiliates public service announcements that can be broadcast before, after or during the show.
Ms. Aghdashloo anticipated such complaints when she took the role. But she urges protesters to wait and see how the story plays out and to remember that "24" is a work of fiction.
"I was aware of the problem this was going to create for me, an Iranian actress," said Ms. Aghdashloo, who was a star of Iranian cinema before fleeing Tehran for London and then moving in 1987 to Los Angeles. There she and her husband, the playwright Houshang Touzie, created a traveling theater troupe, performing mostly in Farsi for Iranian-American audiences.
"I knew exactly what was going to happen, and it happened," she said. "This is pure fiction, sometimes even cartoonish. It's inspired by events in society, just as James Bond was inspired by the cold war. Did we have Russians demonstrating in the streets saying James Bond is giving us a bad name?"
Ms. Aghdashloo was speaking by telephone from Vancouver, British Columbia, where she has a small part in "The Exorcism of Emily Ross," a thriller starring Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson. And she is planning to star in a film version of the best-selling book "Reading Lolita in Tehran," which she expects to start shooting by the end of 2005.
Ms. Aghdashloo has taken to watching "24" with her 16-year-old daughter, Tara Jane, and a group of her daughter's friends.
"I love cooking for her friends, especially her American friends," she said, adding with a laugh that, no, she did not serve the teenagers any tea: "My only concern when I was playing this role was, God forbid if they do not feel comfortable in my home anymore and won't eat my food. But they can tell the difference between real life and fiction. They are smart kids."
