Mona Yousefi

Mona Yousefi is a British actress and writer. She was born and raised in London UK to Iranian parents. She was educated at the Hall School Wimbledon in London before attending the University of Greenwich London, where she graduated with a BA Hons in Media and Communications and the University of Westminster London where she graduated with an LLM in Entertainment Law. She went on to work for criminal Law firm Joseph Hill & Co in London as a paralegal before landing her first directorial television debut with Mayhem Makers for E4. Mona wrote, directed and produced the show, which aired as part of the Funny Cuts strand in 2007. Mona got Mayhem Makers commissioned without an agent or any industry connections. She took herself down to Channel 4, tied a trailer tape of her show to a helium balloon and arrived at reception but was duly kicked out. Unperturbed, she climbed up the side of the building to the mail-room window where she paid the post room guy ten pounds to put the trailer onto the desk of the Head of Comedy... and so it began. Mona decided to focus her efforts on character comedy and developed her own style of intricately creating personas in an Andy Kauffman-esq approach to personality embodiment. Mona's style of immersing herself in a method acting approach to character development has seen three alter egos emerge: Tallah Khosravian a Middle-Eastern business woman, Wakana Fukui the Japanese Lolita girl and widow Natascha Leboushkin, a Russian social climber. Out of these characters Mona created "Going Native" where she played them pranking the UK under the unsuspicious guise of a genuine documentary. The BBC commissioned "Going Native" which launched on BBC 3 to global rave reviews, whereby she was likened to Sacha Baron Cohen with the ubiquitous headline "The Female Borat". Mona trained in method acting with teacher Sam Rumbelow and took clown training with Philippe Gaulier. In 2016 Mona completed a stunt training course at the British Action Academy with Andreas Petrides - one of the UK's leading Action Directors, Stunt Co-ordinators, Fight Arrangers and Stunt Performers. She has since played a variety of characters alongside Jolyon Rubinstein and Heydon Prowse in all three series of the BBC's BAFTA winning comedy The Revolution Will Be Televised and Ryan Sampson's hybrid ITV prank show Glitchy.