Jano Rassoul: An Actor Redefining Identity in Every Role

USA Today

14 hours ago

In an industry where actors spend years crafting a singular "brand," Jano Rassoul has built his career on the impossibility of being pinned down. The 24-year-old Portuguese-German actor moves naturally between cultures, languages, and identities, drawing on experiences that began in childhood.
"I can unsettle easily and love moving around," Rassoul says while calling New York home after a lifetime of geographic restlessness. "The excitement of new people and new adventures keeps me going." It's not wanderlust driving him, but something deeper: a fundamental understanding that identity itself is a performance, refined through repetition across borders.
His journey began conventionally—as a nine-year-old landing a role on the Portuguese sitcom A Família Mata. But between that early success and his current work developing vertical content for TikTok-addicted audiences, Rassoul lived what amounts to several lifetimes: four countries in six years. South Africa, Switzerland, the UAE, Portugal—a list that reads less like biography than diplomatic itinerary.
"I learned how to understand people and myself well," he reflects, transforming what could have been instability into artistic advantage. Where others might see displacement, Rassoul found a masterclass in human observation.
The stories that shaped him predate his own journey. His father, a German-born Kurd who was raised in Syria, came of age during a period of national unrest—a situation that eventually led his family to seek a new home. His Angolan mother shares stories shaped by the country's complex history. "These are stories I want to explore," Rassoul said. "My grandfather eventually moved the entire family from Syria to Germany. My mother's tales would also be something I'd like to explore."
This multigenerational saga informs every role, from A Família Mata to recent projects like Final Turn, Feel, and even an appearance on Querida Júlia talk show in his youth. "I've worked on projects that touched on immigration stories from Portugal's Salazar era," he explains. "It brought me close to the pain my parents have faced because they very much have had to run from their homes."
The transition to New York's competitive landscape might have overwhelmed a less adaptable performer. But Rassoul approached the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute with characteristic openness. Under George Loros and through a masterclass with Vincent D'Onofrio, he dove into method acting—a practice demanding actors mine their own experiences for emotional truth.
"When working on deeply personal material, it touches on family dynamics and reminds me a lot of my relationship with my father," he admits. "It always hurts to explore those themes." Yet he resists self-indulgence: "I release the emotion fully and then try breathing exercises I learned in Tai Chi to center myself."
This flexibility serves him well in an entertainment landscape undergoing its own identity crisis. While pursuing film and television opportunities, he's exploring new narrative forms: comedy designed for vertical viewing. "A lot of these projects have shallow writing," he acknowledges. "I try to focus on relatable, believable circumstances—something with a creative layer but not so much that you instantly want to scroll away."
His recent Babbel work offered another hybrid form—part performance, part education, part marketing. The challenge of creating meaning within constraints might seem antithetical to Strasberg's deep character work, but Rassoul sees continuity: both require understanding your audience, adapting to constraints, finding truth within artificial structures.
"People try to put you in boxes, of course," he says, addressing the industry's perpetual challenge for actors who don't fit neat categories. His mixed heritage—Kurdish, German, Portuguese, Angolan—defies Hollywood's reductive casting logic. "Different people look at me differently, and I embrace all aspects of myself."
This embrace of multiplicity extends beyond a survival strategy. In an era when authenticity has become a marketing buzzword, Rassoul offers something more complex: the understanding that all identity is performed, that authenticity itself might be the most elaborate performance of all.
"If I had to say, it would be Cape Town," he offers when asked about home, before immediately qualifying: "I've never felt so welcomed and at home. Portugal can come in as a close second." But even this comes with implicit understanding that home might be less a place than a quality of connection.
As Hollywood grapples with representation and authentic storytelling, Rassoul embodies a different possibility: identity as active construction rather than passive inheritance. He uses his family's immigrant roots without letting it limit his dramatic range.
"I don't feel tied to anything or anywhere," he says, and in his voice, it sounds like freedom rather than loss. In an industry that often demands actors choose a lane, Rassoul has made a career of changing lanes—bringing to each role the accumulated wisdom of someone who understands that identity, like acting itself, is an ongoing negotiation between what is and what might be.