When you see Roxie Mohebbi in new Australian TV drama, Critical Incident, it’s hard to believe that just a few years ago her job was very different. Mohebbi was working long hours as a nurse in a New Zealand hospital’s neonatal department in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it was time for a change.
“I needed to leave nursing because I was working in a hospital that was so understaffed. I was in neonates working with sick babies, and I just got sick. I got so burnt out as a nurse, and I always wanted to be a performer since I was a child,” Mohebbi tells Missing Perspectives.
“I had one of those rock bottom moments where I lost a lot of my hair, I got alopecia… and just it was literally like an overnight kind of movie moment where I woke up and I was like, ‘I feel like I'm at rock bottom. I just need to live my dreams and try’. So I did.”
With no prior acting training or experience, Mohebbi sent a string of cold emails, got an agent, and eventually landed auditions and roles for various projects such as long-running NZ soap, Shortland Street, and Netflix's New Legend of Monkey. But nothing’s quite like her latest gig, playing policewoman Sandra Ali in Critical Incident.
“Sandra's just like, excuse my language, but she's just like, a hard bitch, that's what I would honestly say,” Mohebbi laughs. “She's super tough, really street smart and also she's stoic.”
Roxie Mohebbi in Critical Incident. Photo: Stan
Inspired by creator Sarah Bassiuoni’s real life experiences working as a lawyer in Western Sydney’s juvenile justice system, the six-part psychological drama was filmed in Western Sydney’s Blacktown, Granville, Parramatta and Greenacre, exploring the “complex world of policing and the consequences on those most vulnerable”.
Conflicted by the actions of those around her, particularly the cops she works with, Mohebbi’s character grapples with varied experiences linked to relationships, identity and navigating a workplace dominated by white men.
“She just is who she is, and she doesn't apologise for it, which I really like,” Mohebbi reflects on her on-screen character. “The only thing she does, which I think is a dangerous thing, is when you're surrounded by men, and especially a lot of white men, you have to always start acting like them to get to where you want to be.
“She just is so cutthroat with it, because she's acting like all these men around her to get ahead and to be taken seriously and be respected… because she has to work 10 times as hard, although she's 10 times better,” adds Mohebbi, “which is so true and frustrating to watch”.
One of Critical Incident’s greatest strengths is its multicultural cast, and the nuanced approach to depicting people of colour multidimensionally. Born in Iran before she and her family arrived as refugees in NZ in the late 90s, Mohebbi recalls growing up seeing very few women who looked like her on television. As a child, she remembers seeing actor Nisha Madhan, playing a nurse, Shanti on Shortland Street – a show her parents watched to learn English slang words in particular. Madhan was the first Indian character to be a core cast member on the soap, and the “full circle” moment for Mohebbi was being cast as a doctor on Shortland Street many years later.
What’s special about Sandra in Critical Incident is that she’s not merely defined by her race or cultural stereotypes typically seen in entertainment for decades. Nor is Senior Constable Zilficar ' Zil' Ahmed, the male lead opposite Sandra who’s portrayed by Police Society star, Akshay Khanna.
“It’s important to see ourselves on screen, obviously, but also in complicated, nuanced ways,” says Mohebbi. “I think that sometimes I get sick of watching things where there's just another diversity hire who's the quirky best friend or the love interest because they needed a brown person in the show.
“This one is like, oh, this is a brown person making some bad decisions. And then here's a brown person suffering in ways that I've suffered. So you kind of have like all ends of the spectrum there.”
Roxie Mohebbi. Photo: Supplied/Nick Wilson
While it’s a personal career highlight, Mohebbi hopes Critical Incident has as great of an impact on viewers who can take away the message of how powerful “empathy and love” can be, particularly in the most trying situations.
“I think with where we are in the world, there's just no truer truth,” she says. “I just hope people watch the show and in their hearts are able to see it and feel something… the empathy for life circumstances and how out of your hands [the life that you're given]can be sometimes. And how that can impact everything in such a domino effect, and also how the consequences to our actions.
“It's political, it's empathetic, it's human. I just hope that it makes ripples, because that's what art does, right? Art is political.”
The Stan Original Series Critical Incident premieres August 12, all episodes at once and only on Stan. Watch the trailer below.