On her draw to the film, star Medalion Rahimi said, “For me, it being this ensemble piece was really exciting. I thought that it was so heartfelt, and it was beautiful that it was showing these Middle Eastern girls just being chaotic and crazy and fun and messy and making mistakes. I think that’s what really drew me to the script, and obviously, I’m a big fan of Dalia’s writing and her work, and we sort of had that relationship before.”
Her co-star Layla Mohammadi shared, “Medalion sent me this script, and I immediately read it and was so happy that it was a story about three Iranian girls that had nothing to do with oppression. It was just about three girls living their lives. It’s messy, it’s chaotic, and I liked that at the end, sometimes it’s OK to not have it all figured out. It’s what it’s like in real life in your 20s: You don’t sometimes have an answer. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the end, but you find yourself figuring it out.”
On takeaways from the film, writer-producer-star Dalia Rooni said, “Persian girls are just like us. Very rarely do we get to see three Middle Eastern girls being sexy and flawed and funny and relatable, and [Medalion, Layla and I] are often in the same audition rooms, auditioning for the same roles. Very rarely do three of us get to be sharing a screen together. So hopefully audiences leave just with a sense of oh, what you see is not always what you get. Don’t judge a book by its cover, and it sounds cheesy, but it’s true.”
From Movie Maker Magazine: In Same Same But Different, a Green-Card Wedding Proposal Changes Three Women’s Lives
Lauren Noll: Dalia and I wanted to work on our first feature together, and when she told me this story, I knew it was the one. Within days, we were brainstorming in a coffee shop over Dalia’s first draft. That was two years ago now. Dalia calls Nadia the version of herself she was when she and I first met. Many of Nadia’s wildest moments in the script are pulled from real-life stories that I was in the room for, including the moment when she realized she was in love with her best friend, “Ryan.” I’d been third-wheeling the real Nadia and Ryan for years, so I was incredibly invested in these characters before they even hit the page.
Dalia Rooni: You know, I wrote this film around the time the Woman, Life, Freedom movement began in Iran. That moment was very much the emotional backdrop for what Rana was going through, and for the push and pull so many Iranian immigrants were feeling — the tension between where you come from and where you are, and the helplessness of watching history unfold from afar.
So it’s surreal and honestly heartbreaking that the themes of the film feel even more urgent right now.
There’s a statistic I think about a lot: 80% of the roles portrayed by Middle Eastern actors on television fall into negative or threatening stereotypes. That reality makes it even more important to tell stories about Middle Eastern characters that are joyful, complicated, and deeply relatable.
It’s not enough to “humanize” our characters only in stories that tie MENA people to grief, war, oppression, or trauma. We also have to liberate them on screen! To let them be funny and messy and flawed and free. To let them live full lives that look a lot more like everyone else’s.
MovieMaker: I’m a big fan of your line producer, Alecia Orsini Lebeda, who I see all the time at festivals and Massachusetts film events. Can you talk about working with her and the rest of the team to find all these great Cape Cod locations? And why Cape Cod?
Lauren Noll: Who doesn’t love Alecia?! We just wouldn’t have been able to execute production without her. The rest of us are based in L.A. and South Carolina. We needed boots on the ground. I went to Woods Hole Film Festival with my short “The Heart of Texas” in 2024, and I was on a mission to find my line producer for this project while I was there, and in walked Alecia to deliver a killer panel about filmmaking in Massachusetts. I cornered her and the rest is history.
I not only found us a line producer in Massachusetts, I found us the line producer in Massachusetts. The crew that arrived to work on this film are a testament to her and the kind of leader she is. They all flocked to work on an Alecia Orsini Lebeda project, and we were so grateful to show up Day 1 to an incredible team who love the work they do as much as they love Alecia’s lunch time announcements.
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SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT
An Iranian woman agrees to marry her boss's wealthy son for a green card. The arrangement grows complicated when her friends and their partners arrive, bringing cultural complexities to the surface.
Director: Lauren Noll
Screenwriter: Dalia Rooni
Logline: An Iranian immigrant (Medalion Rahimi) agrees to marry her boss’s son (Logan Miller) to stay in the U.S., but their simple green card wedding on Cape Cod gets complicated when her two Iranian best friends (Dalia Rooni & Layla Mohammadi) arrive with their own American boyfriends and cross-cultural baggage in tow.
