The Side of Me I Didn’t Have the Courage to Be
Mozhde Mohammadi on Mojdegani, the Character She Invented and Who Then Took Over — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode PP10
She was seven or eight years old, standing in front of her father’s turned-off camera, pretending to host a television show. She wanted to be a singer, then an actress. Life took her somewhere else — graphic arts, film editing, motion graphics, corporate work. And then a voice job for a podcast, meant to be anonymous, with no face and no name, turned into a character that people now follow Rakhtakan-e-Bazandeh-ha specifically to hear.
In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri — the final episode of the special Persian Podcasting series — Mozhde Mohammadi traces the full arc of that journey: from the first episode she recorded without knowing anyone was going to remember her name, to a theater stage where an audience arrived expecting Mojdegani and found Carlotta, to the complicated, genuinely interesting question of what happens to a person when a version of themselves becomes famous before they do.
A Voice That Was Supposed to Read Ads and Leave
The original brief was simple to the point of being almost invisible: a female voice with a slightly formal, airport-announcement quality, who would read the advertising segments in Rakhtakan-e-Bazandeh-ha and step out. No identity. No character development. No name.
Behzad Omrani, one of the podcast’s founders and a longtime friend who already knew Mozhde’s range, gave her the initial direction. Siavash Safarianpour came up with the name Mojdegani — a play on Mozhde’s own first name. The character design emerged not from any planning meeting but from Behzad’s instinct to let Mozhde just do her thing and see what happened.
What happened was that the first episode’s stumbles — real blunders, not performed ones — made it onto the final cut. Behzad kept the outtakes. The result was something warmer and stranger than a slick advertising voice. Listeners responded. And then they responded more.
“On paper,” Mozhde says, “Mojdegani was just supposed to come in, read the ads, and go.”
Ten Times Herself
Hossein asks the question the episode has been building toward: how much of Mojdegani is Mozhde, and how much is a constructed character? Her answer is both direct and revealing.
Mojdegani, she says, is what’s already inside her — amplified by ten. The reckless laughter that she’d always controlled so it didn’t look unladylike. The shameless jokes. The willingness to say whatever comes to mind without filtering it through what the next person might think. None of these qualities are invented. All of them exist in Mozhde. What the character gives her is a space where the dial goes up and the social self-management comes off.
“That’s the thing,” she says. “Mojdegani is the side of my personality I didn’t have the courage to be myself.”
She is careful to note what she is and isn’t: neither fully introverted nor extroverted, she describes herself as someone who genuinely wants to be admired for something she’s made — not just to be seen, but to be recognized as having done something worth seeing. Mojdegani satisfies that without requiring Mozhde to perform it as herself under her own name.
The Character Grew Along With the Feedback
The character’s evolution from ad-reader to full personality — someone who asks questions of guests, bickers with Siavash, builds her own narrative threads across episodes — happened entirely organically, driven by listener response rather than by editorial planning.
Mozhde estimates that roughly seventy percent of what Mojdegani does in any given episode is improvised. She and Behzad might have a brief conversation beforehand — Behzad sketching a direction, Siavash suggesting a cue, the guest’s subject suggesting an angle — and from there, Mojdegani does what Mojdegani does. Nothing is scripted. The mini-narratives that have accumulated around the character — job losses, a difficult father, romantic disasters — were never written in advance. They emerged from moments, and then became part of the character’s world.
Siavash’s eventual contribution to the dynamic was as deliberate as it was effective: he took on the role of the antagonist, the slightly tyrannical producer who threatens to replace Mojdegani with AI and tells her to get it right, which made Mojdegani more sympathetic to the audience and freed Mozhde to push the character further without any brakes.
The Night Nobody Laughed
Before Mojdegani existed, Mozhde was doing stand-up comedy in cafes — sporadically, on her own, without any platform behind her. She describes her fear on those evenings with unusual precision: not a fear of failure in the abstract, but a specific dread of the moment when a room doesn’t respond.
The night that crystallized it had a particular logic: she’d performed the same material a few nights earlier for a different audience — a different age range, different professional backgrounds — and the response had been strong. She went to the next venue with the same set without recalibrating. The room didn’t laugh. Not much. And the scale of the silence, against the memory of the previous room’s warmth, was devastating in a way she describes as physically registering somewhere in her body.
COVID ended her stand-up work before she had a chance to process or return from that night. And when Rakhtakan offered the anonymity of Mojdegani, she didn’t just take it because she liked the project. She took it partly because it was a way to keep performing without having to walk directly into the full exposure of a stage.
Anxiety and Excitement Are the Same Chemical
One of the episode’s most practically useful exchanges concerns the distinction — or the lack of one — between anxiety and excitement. Before her theater performance, Mozhde called Hossein, who was calm enough in the moment to say the thing she needed to hear: this isn’t stress, it’s excitement. And excitement about something you’ve wanted your whole life is a good thing.
Hossein elaborates for the camera what he told her: the physiological responses to anxiety and excitement are chemically identical. The same hormones, the same elevated heart rate, the same sweaty hands, the same narrowing of vision. What differs is only what the brain names the experience. Someone stepping off a rollercoaster feels both things at once and can’t always tell which is dominant. The key, and the skill that has to be practiced, is the ability to name what you’re actually experiencing — to remember, in the moment when everything feels like threat, that this is what it feels like to care about something.
“That one thing you said changed everything for me,” she says. “That it’s excitement, not anxiety. And I let the excitement go into the performance. And it worked.”
The Theater, and the Problem of Playing Carlotta While Mojdegani Is in the Room
The play Mozhde performed in, called Nimeh-ye Tark-e Mah (The Dark Side of the Moon), cast her not as Mojdegani but as Carlotta — a fully scripted role, in a theatrical company with professional actors, directed by someone who didn’t initially know Rakhtakan well and selected her partly on the recommendation of Behzad and Siavash.
The challenge she describes is one of the most specifically theatrical problems in the conversation: the audience that came had arrived expecting to be surprised by Mojdegani. They knew the voice. They’d sent flowers and handmade chocolates and gathered outside the venue. And Mozhde was not going to give them Mojdegani — she was going to give them Carlotta, a character headed for dramatic collapse by the final scenes.
The working solution she and Behzad developed the night before the war disrupted everything was to consciously transfer some of Mozhde’s own qualities into Carlotta — not to play herself, which a director would correct in any trained actor, but to build enough of a bridge between herself and the role that she could stay connected to it under pressure. It worked well enough that audience members later told her they found it strange that her voice didn’t sound like Mojdegani’s, and couldn’t quite explain the disconnect between the character they’d come for and the character they’d seen.
Being Made Visible — What It Actually Does to a Person
The episode’s most candid section is a paired account from Mozhde and Hossein about the personal effects of becoming recognizable through creative work — and how those effects differ from what either of them expected.
For Mozhde, being seen through Mojdegani has made her gentler with herself. Before, she habitually discounted feedback about her own talent — the people telling her she was good at something were, she’d always reasoned, just being kind because they liked her. Now, with thousands of strangers who have no reason to flatter her telling her consistently that Mojdegani is something they genuinely want to hear, the internal argument she used to run against herself has less room.
The complication is trust. She knows the people approaching her are approaching the character. She can see, without being able to prove, when someone’s interest in her is instrumental — a path to Behzad, to Siavash, to the podcast’s backstage. She’s developed a filter: she withdraws the back-door access and watches whether the person keeps showing up anyway. Some do. Those she trusts.
Hossein’s experience has run in the opposite direction. Since Cozy Corner began, he has become more isolated, more careful, less able to trust easily. People who hadn’t been in contact for years have returned. Friends who knew him before the show have told him he’s changed — and he is certain he hasn’t, which makes the feedback disorienting. He describes the psychological weight of building something that still isn’t what it’s heading toward, and of having people around him begin to relate to what that thing might become rather than to who he already is.
“I put myself in the line of fire,” he says. “Because of that I’m more careful. I speak more hesitantly. I’m more guarded in places I used to go freely.”
Why She Has No Plans to Take Mojdegani Anywhere Else
Hossein asks a version of the question that’s been implicit throughout the episode: given how much visibility Mojdegani has created, has Mozhde thought about building a broader independent presence around the character — her own separate platform, her own projects?
Her answer is specific and unambiguous: no. Not because she couldn’t, but because Mojdegani works precisely because she exists inside the world of Rakhtakan, in dynamic relationship with Behzad and Siavash and the guests, within a container that gives the character its shape. Moving Mojdegani outside that context would require rebuilding everything that currently makes her work. And more than that: Mozhde has already found that what she wanted from being seen — to be admired for something she actually made — is available through the podcast. She doesn’t need to expand it to get what she was looking for.
Unemployment and the Redundancy That Wasn’t Really a Redundancy
One of the episode’s most unexpectedly funny passages concerns the real basis of some of Mojdegani’s backstory: the part where the character complains about losing her job is not entirely fictional. Mozhde was laid off during the events of late 2022 — made redundant from an advertising agency in a wave of cuts that affected roughly two hundred employees. The character’s story about workplace difficulties has a real root.
“The things I say in the podcast about that,” she says, laughing, “are real. I was genuinely let go.”
She describes this as the consistent pattern of her professional life: something difficult happens — a job loss, a disruption — and it turns out to have redirected her toward something she needed to do anyway. She says she’s used to it now. She’s okay, currently, in whatever the current version of that situation is. She believes she’s doing something important, and that’s why the path keeps changing.
The Cozy Corner — A Particular Mode of Being Left Alone
Asked where her own cozy corner is, Mozhde’s answer is more atmospheric than locational. It’s a condition: alone, with the specific quality of solitude she gets when she’s genuinely inside a creative problem. She works best when the outer world is muted enough that the inner one has room — whether that’s late at night or early in the morning or in the middle of a workday when the office around her has cleared out. The physical space matters less than the quality of the quiet inside it.
A Dedication
Asked who she’d like to dedicate the conversation to, Mozhde’s answer arrives without hesitation: Behzad Omrani and Siavash Safarianpour. The people who gave her the space to be Mojdegani, who kept the blunders from the first episode on the tape, who designed the dynamic that let her get bolder over time, and who — in the specific and deliberate way that good collaborators sometimes do — protected her from the full exposure she wasn’t ready for while making the thing that eventually made her ready for it.
“They saw something in me,” she says, “before I saw it in myself.”
