Amir Arison

Amir Arison is an American actor who has secured one of the most coveted prizes an actor can hope for: a leading role in a long-running, critically favoured series. He has played FBI cyber expert Aram Mojtabai in all nine seasons of NBC crime drama The Blacklist, being part of the main cast from the second season onward. The show’s tenth season airs in early 2023. This role, along with his many others, has made Arison a popular presence on social media — he has over 240,000 Instagram followers. In 2022, he achieved another acting height when starred on Broadway, playing his namesake role in The Kite Runner, an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s multi-million-selling novel. The production ran for four months. Also in 2022, at the New York Sephardi Jewish Film Festival, he was honoured with a Career Achievement Award.

Arison hails from St Louis, Missouri, and he has a long history with acting — he appeared in a television commercial for Sonic the Hedgehog as a teenager in the early 1990s. He subsequently trained in acting and improv and made his “proper” acting debut in 2004 episodes of The Jury and Law & Order. He spent much of the next decade carving out a niche for himself as a character actor in similar dramas — as well as many Law & Order episodes, he appeared in Homeland, NCIS, True Justice, and many others. He got his first recurring role playing Dr Gurveer in a 2011 dystopian webseries called H+.

In 2013, Arison got the break he’d worked so hard for when he was cast in The Blacklist, a show that has now run successfully for a decade. The show is based around a hardened criminal who begins helping the FBI locate a “blacklist” of global criminals. During his time on the show, however, Arison, has played many other roles, including directing and starring in the comedy indie film Fortress, which won many awards at film festivals in 2016.