CHLOE MAGAZINE
And Vand is the leading lady of it all. She might
not carry the weight of a household name, but
she’s been featured in a slew of trendy fashion
magazines, and in 2012’s political thriller Argo (directed by and starring Ben Affleck), in a small but
powerful role. With a performance so subtle yet
so striking in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,
Vand tears the walls down playing her character,
who is simply known through the film as “the
girl.” Judging by her ease of presence, things make
a lot more sense when you discover that Amirpour,
who happens to be one of Vand’s personal friends,
specifically wrote the character with her in mind.
Things also start leaning towards the cool when we
find that Vand plays a Farsi-speaking lone vampire,
cursed inside the body of a young woman, with a
full-fledged backstory not seen within the film.
Besides already having a “cooler than thou” premise, designed to bring the hipsters and film elite
on board (maybe, they’re one and the same…),
Elijah Wood came on set multiple times just to
see how the film’s production progressed. “He’s
so cool. He’s such a warm-hearted, open person,”
Vand explains. “He was fully supportive, from the
get go. [He] believed in this crazy-ass thing. You’ve
got to respect someone who’s like ‘black and white,
Iranian vampire Western? I’ll get in on that!’”
On the other side of the coin, Vand also plays
within the realm of modern art. Some actors
also sing, some actors also write books, but Vand
enjoys putting her creative time into art. “The
art really came about because I have an obsession
with the abstract,” she says. “I love the surreal, I
love dreams, I love anything that exists out of our
normal, common perception.”
One of Vand’s most notable art performances was in collaboration
with Alexa Meade, an artist known for painting on objects and
people, whom she met online. Called “MILK: what will you make of
me?,” Meade and Vand wanted to play within the ideas of fluidity of
form. Meade paints on Vand’s body before she lies in a pool of milk;
an photograph is taken, and then more paint is applied. As the paint
and the milk coalesce together, the single image morphs and change
drastically and rapidly. Each image is different, and as the milk
decays, different textures come popping through the photos. Vand
says that they both wanted to explore the idea of time-specific work.
A live performance of “MILK” was presented on August 30th and
September 1st 2012, at Galerie Ivo Kamm in Zurich, Switzerland.
It may have been a while back, but it seems that film and television is
taking much of Vand’s time nowadays. Currently, Vand plays Maureen James in the NBC espionage thriller State of Affairs. Maureen
James is a CIA briefer and also the best friend of Charlie Tucker, a
top CIA analyst played by Katherine Heigl. A huge star to be working with, and Vand definitely considers the show to be one of the
bigger projects she’s been involved in. But for a big project like State
of Affairs, Vand stresses that it is all about the collective effo