Waleed Zuaiter has the look of a Hollywood icon: salt-and-pepper hair, five o’clock shadow, beaded wooden bracelets worn in a way that projects affluence rather than crustiness, and those intense leading-man eyes. In reality, his acting career has always dangled just out of reach of superstar status. Born in California, but raised in Kuwait, he’s been acting since taking theatre at college. Now 49, he’s had chunky supporting roles in Homeland and The Spy, the Netflix mini-series about the life of Mossad agent Eli Cohen. His biggest break came in 2013, when he produced Omar, a film about love on the Palestinian border, which was nominated for an Oscar and in which Waleed also played a coercive Israeli agent. He’s shared the stage with Meryl Streep, in a New York production of Mother Courage, and the screen with George Clooney, in the film adaptation of Jon Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare at Goats. But, until now, he’s never seen his own name given top billing.

We meet at the west London home of a very rich stranger, the kind of place where every fixture looks like it should be in a design museum: Vitsoe kitchen shelves, art deco chaises longues, a 6ft sculpture of the word “poo” on the toilet wall. The house has been loaned for a photoshoot, so while Waleed is spread out on the sofa looking every inch the celebrity, shoes kicked off, posing, I wait in the kitchen with his wife Joana.

Joana is a producing partner in a film fund they are setting up and “unofficially his unpaid assistant”. I’d been told she would be at the interview. But I’m surprised how open she is. Within the time it takes to make a pot of coffee, she’s given me the outline of their high-school romance (“Waleed was very short in third grade, he only got tall by the ninth”) and told me a scandalous anecdote about a night they dined with a Hollywood A-lister and husband at a fancy hotel. It’s a story that ends with some consensual groping in the ladies’ toilet.

When we begin talking, in a café around the corner, Zuaiter is just as open as his partner, but more serious in tone, maintaining eye contact, making sure every word is heard. He begins by explaining how, in the years since Omar, his career reached a ceiling. Zuaiter, who is Palestinian, was always getting the same offers: small parts in TV shows, a Middle Eastern character that disappears after a few episodes. All too often, those roles involved playing a terrorist. On Law & Order Criminal Intent he was part of a terrorist sleeper cell planning an attack on New York. In the first season of Homeland he played a torturer. In the cartoonish thriller London has Fallen he played Kamran, a terrorist mastermind who launches a series of major attacks on the capital.

Zuaiter has a complicated relationship with these roles. He likes that he’s able to offer a realistic depiction of a person driven to violence in the name of ideology, and often insists on script changes when he finds sections offensive. On one project he refused to put on a hammy Arab accent, pointing out that many terrorists who have carried out attacks in recent years were born in America.

But he still worries that he has helped, in some way, to propagate an unsophisticated narrative about the Middle East, perhaps even to glorify terrorism. At one point he was asked by a network television show to play the head of Isis. He said no. “I just thought, look at my résumé! Look at what I’ve done! I was actually so emotional because I was watching Trump on TV at the time, saying all these things against my people. I thought I might regret the decision in a couple of months, when I had to pay the rent. But it was so offensive, it was the right thing to do.” Joana shares his unease, but she puts on a glam spin. Once, when she read that Homeland was the then US President’s favourite show, she began telling everyone: “Obama’s seen Waleed in his underwear!”

Two years ago, the lack of opportunities was getting Zuaiter down. His father, a Palestinian businessman who’d always been unsure of Waleed’s decision to become an actor, had warned that he “would never talk to him” if he played a terrorist. He didn’t follow through on the threat, but relations were sometimes strained. “His background was in business and finance,” Zuaiter says. “My two older brothers went into that world. He resisted my career as an actor, it was just so foreign to him, and he felt so impotent because he couldn’t help.”

Zuaiter went to visit his father that December, and the trip was full of tension and fighting. A few months later, his father died suddenly. “That haunted me – that somehow I may have caused this. All these things go through your head. I’d pretty much hit rock bottom.”

Changing the story: Waleed Zuaiter and July Namir in Baghdad Central. Photograph: Sife Elamine/Channel 4

So when the script for a British TV show about Iraq came in, Zuaiter didn’t even want to audition for it. Another accented role, he thought. “It took my manager, my agent and my wife to collaborate behind the scenes to get me to do it,” he says. But once Zuaiter had been convinced to look at the script, he realised that the role was more than just another Middle Eastern bit-part. Based on the novel by Elliott Colla, Baghdad Central is a big budget new drama for Channel 4 and Hulu. It tells the story of corruption and power struggles in post-invasion Iraq from the perspective of Iraqi citizens. Zuaiter plays the lead, Muhsin al-Khafaji, a liberal patriotic ex-policeman who is offered medical treatment for his daughter in return for collaboration with British and American forces in their apparent bid to rebuild law and order in Iraq. Al-Khafaji is constantly conflicted, a noirish antihero who drinks and hustles to get through his situation. It’s a role Zuaiter felt powerfully connected to. Often it’s al-Khafaji’s sick daughter who ends up caring for him – a co-dependent relationship Zuaiter connected with.

“There’s this sense of a father taking care of his ill daughter, yet it’s one of those relationships where the child is taking care of the parent,” he says. “As an actor who is going from job to job – and often times there are these big gaps without work, when you’re not sure if you can pay the rent – you have a responsibility to be their beacon of strength because they look up to you [Waleed and Joana have two grown-up children, Laith and Nour]. That’s tough. I’ve given up a couple of times. My wife has been an incredible rock for me. It’s not easy for me, but it’s not easy for her when she has to put up with my depressions.”

The script is rich with complex political dialogue in both English and Iraqi, which Zuaiter found incredibly challenging. Twice he missed filming because learning the lines had induced a panic attack. But getting into the role had been made easier because he had first-hand experience of life under Saddam Hussein.

He was born in Sacramento, where he lived until the age of five. But his family then moved to Kuwait, where his father had grown up, and where he had many business interests. Kuwait in the 80s was a land of opportunity, particularly for Palestinians who’d fled their homeland and helped build the infrastructure: water, electricity, the oil rigs that allowed prosperity to flow.

Zuaiter would return to America for summer camps, and he loved his upbringing in two worlds and with two languages, English and Arabic. He met Joana, who also travelled between the US and the Middle East, in elementary school, and once they were teenagers they began an on-and-off romance that would last a lifetime. “She was my real high-school sweetheart,” he says. “I took her to prom.”

His family weren’t especially political, but they largely considered Saddam a good thing. “He was saying a lot of things that supported the Palestinian cause,” Zuaiter says. “He said he was going to get Israel out of Palestine. The sentiment was: ‘Let’s get behind him. He’s got the fourth largest army in the world, he could make a difference.’ Unfortunately, when anyone wants to gain support in the Middle East, they’ll use the Palestinian cause as a way. At the time we were blinded by that. We thought he could affect some change.”

In 1990, things changed rapidly. Saddam invaded Kuwait, and Zuaiter, who had both an American and a Jordanian passport, had to flee. He hid his US documentation under his bed, concerned that Saddam’s forces – who were sympathetic to Jordanians – would discover his American background.

“I was trying to be as Jordanian as possible when they would stop us at checkpoints,” he says, “because American citizens were most at risk. You switch into survival instinct. Everything becomes heightened; you’re very aware. You see things that you haven’t really seen before – Iraqi tanks towing extravagant Kuwaiti yachts through the street. People were in such panic that they didn’t have time to bury their dead. They just had to keep going. You saw death, you saw endless lines at the gas station, but you had to get gas because if you ran out of fuel on the road, nobody’s going to stop for you.”

After he left, his focus then became on getting Joana out of the country. He continually pestered the British embassy, calling every day to tell them they needed to help get Joana out (Joana had a Fijian passport; Fiji had only recently become independent of the UK).

But Saddam was keen to hold Britons in the country as human hostages, as a way of preventing foreign strikes. In the end he agreed to the release of a small number, including Joana and her mother, but not before they posed in a bizarre press opportunity with him in front of members of the foreign press.

“There’s this famous news footage of the British citizens,” Zuaiter says. “Saddam Hussein with this little British kid sitting on his lap. Saddam was trying to show the world how friendly he was, but the kid was terrified.” Joana was in that group; you can see her in the footage. They were the last people who left Iraq and got into the UK before Operation Desert Shield began in August 1990.

“I consider my childhood up until that point very innocent,” Zuaiter says. “That was a loss of innocence. I had all this stuff in my room and then when we left my dad gave me a small bag and said, ‘This is all you can take.’ All that made it easier for me as an entry point to getting into the character – to understand what loss meant.”

Although there’s already hope of a second season of Baghdad Central, Zuaiter says he has felt “liberated” by opportunities he’s recently been given to play characters that are clean-shaven and speak in an American accent. He hopes that if he’s to play another leading role, it’s a character who is a bit more like him.

I wonder if he ever feels the limited roles that he has offered are more than just an issue of typecasting? There’s a stereotype that everyone in Hollywood shares similar liberal views, but one area in which there is serious divergence is the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 2014, when Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem criticised the Israeli state for strikes on Palestine that killed thousands of civilians, Jon Voight published an open letter in the Hollywood Reporter chastising the pair, saying they could “incite antisemitism all over the world” and were “oblivious to the damage they have caused.”

‘I’ve given up a couple of times. My wife has been a rock for me’: Waleed Zuaiter on the pressures of being an actor. Photograph: Emma Hardy/The Observer

In 2018, the Jewish film producer Jason Blum was booed off stage at the Israeli Film Festival in Beverly Hills for saying that he didn’t like Trump – shortly after the president had moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

I ask Zuaiter whether he’s ever found that the film industry is actively hostile to a Palestinian actor playing American roles, and he says that while he’s never knowingly been discriminated against, throughout his career people have said to him he should say that he’s Jordanian or Lebanese rather than Palestinian.

“Perhaps Americans are not as educated as people in Europe – about the conflict, its history and complexity,” he says. “I had one manager who I met with early in my career. I said I was Palestinian and she said, ‘Oh,’ and gave me a look. So I said to her, ‘With all due respect, I’ve seen that reaction before, when I say I’m Palestinian – can you tell me what that is?’ She said: ‘Do you want me to be honest with you? Everything I know about Palestine is from what I hear on the news. It’s all about terrorism. When you say you’re Palestinian, it’s like you’re trying to claim something that’s not yours.’ I was grateful for her honesty. It gave me an insight into what the general public thinks.”

For my family, I want people to know I’m Palestinian

The mood has changed since then, he points out. “Even when I did The Men Who Stare at Goats, and I told George Clooney I was Palestinian, he joked, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that in the industry.’ But he totally got it, and said something to the effect of, it’s actually cool now to say you’re Palestinian. I’m very proud of being Palestinian. My father’s cousin, Wael Zwaiter, a poet, was assassinated for being a Palestinian [he is depicted in the Stephen Spielberg film Munich]. He was the only other artist in my family. I’ve had family members who were killed as a result of the conflict. Just after Omar finished wrapping, one of our relatives, a judge, was killed at the Jordanian border. For my family, I want people to know I’m Palestinian.”

That loyalty to his identity and his family has been repaid, although he never fully got to make amends with his father. Shortly before he passed away, he told Zuaiter: “You know, you’re a fighter.” “That meant the world to me. It was the most validation I ever really had from him. It gave me strength when we were filming, because I carried my father’s spirit throughout. So many of the characteristics of Khafaji I could directly relate to my father.”

Baghdad Central is gripping and complex, with an impressive supporting cast including Bertie Carvel and Corey Stoll. It may well be Zuaiter’s moment to break into TV’s top tier. But the more astonishing story is his own: escaping Kuwait by switching passports and identities, rescuing his childhood love from a dictatorship, attempting to follow his passion amidst family strife. If Waleed wants his next project to be a character a bit more like him, he shouldn’t rule out his own biopic, it would be well worth a watch.

Baghad Central is out now on Channel 4