Golshifteh Farahani plays a woman caring for her older husband in Atiq Rahimi's 'The Patience Stone'

NY Daily News

Golshifteh Farahani never wanted to get involved in politics. But in exile in Paris as her new movie opens Wednesday, the 30-year-old actress cannot escape her past — or its political implications.

In 2012, Farahani posed topless in pictures in France’s Le Figaro magazine. The spread caused a furor in her home country, resulting in a ban from her returning to Iran for insulting Islamic cultural sentiments.

“I knew posing nude would cause problems, but when you come from the Middle East, every act becomes super-political,” Farahani says. “As an actress living in France, I felt I could break free of some of the taboos.

“I don’t say that nudity is liberation, not at all,” she adds. “But I think symbolically, for me, after this taboo was broken, and once it is broken, it is broken forever in Iran. I think little by little we should push the limits even culturally.”

Farahani is perhaps best known in the U.S. for playing Leonardo DiCaprio’s love interest in Ridley Scott’s 2008 CIA saga “Body of Lies.” And now she’s in Afghan director Atiq Rahimi’s “The Patience Stone,” where she plays a woman caring for her comatose husband while militias ravage the country around them.

“I think we should leave politics to politicians,” she says from Amman, Jordan, where she is currently acting in “Rosewater,” the directorial debut of “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart. “We artists have no idea what is happening. But I come from Iran and because of the repression there, I have become a symbol of freedom and of women’s rights.”

She explains: “All I am is an actress who wants to bring beauty to this world by acting in cinema.”

The chaos in “The Patience Stone” is supposedly set in Afghanistan during the civil war. But that’s not specifically identified in the film, which is based on Rahimi’s best-selling novel.

In several tough scenes, Farahani’s character speaks to her unresponsive husband about the physical and sexual abuse she has suffered in her life.

“It was a difficult role to play,” Farahani says. “When you don’t have a partner or he is not moving, then the camera becomes your partner.”

A censored version of “The Patience Stone” played in an art-house theater in Kabul, and Farahani knows that subtitled DVDs of the film have been watched and appreciated by people in Iran.

“I like that, because in my subconscious I was sending the film and its message to the people — especially the women — in Iran,” she says.

Farahani’s involvement in “Body of Lies” had earlier earned her the wrath of Iranian authorities. They believed the film had an anti-Iran message. Five years ago, Farahani migrated to Paris with her husband, who is half-French, she says.

Then last year, as part of the celebration for the French César Awards, Farahani appeared nude in that magazine layout and bared her right breast for a companion video.

“I have always pushed the limits,” she says. “I shaved my head when I was 16, in order to be able to go out without the veil.“

Still, in Paris, she says she sometimes misses things about her life in Iran.

“I miss its smell, the seasons, the tastes,” she says. “I cannot go anywhere that looks like Iran.”

But Farahani is eager for the challenges — and freedoms — that come outside her homeland.

“Of course there will movies now and later on that have a love scene or a shower scene, and I would be fine with that,” she says. “Because now I consider myself an international actress.”