Immersed in 'The Kite Runner'

At his audition for the lead role in the movie version of "The Kite Runner," Khalid Abdalla spoke Farsi.

Well, kind of.

The 26-year-old British actor, of Egyptian descent, didn't actually know the language but did his best to sound it out.

Knowing, he says, "that if I were to get the part I would give everything that I have to make it as accurate and truthful as possible."

He got the part, and "everything possible" turned out to be a month in Afghanistan before filming began, his days spent learning the language and -- maybe more important -- learning about the people and the country. (The film was shot in China and California.)

"I voraciously went everywhere referenced in the book . . . I ate everything I could find," he says, and met people and made friends and listened to stories. "It was a crucial period for me because that's where I built my sense of familiarity and love and nostalgia."

As readers of the bestseller know, Abdalla's character, Amir, carries the weight of his family's history, and that of his war-torn country, on his conscience as he makes his way into an American adulthood, after fleeing Afghanistan with his father as a child. (See review on Page 33.)

Abdalla's own history is far more charmed. During his teenage years in London, a favorite teacher urged him to try out for a school play, and he "was hooked from the first rehearsal. Completely hooked," he says. With the support of his physician parents, he went on to study acting in college and then for a year in Paris, with famed teacher Philippe Gaulier, who also trained Emma Thompson and Roberto Benigni.

Just as that was wrapping up, Abdalla's agent called, with an inquiry from the folks behind last year's "United 93."

" 'Oh, it's for a film about 9/11, and they'd like you to play a terrorist,' " he recalls his agent explaining. "At which point, I was like, 'Ummm, no, thank you.' "

But conversations with the filmmakers changed his mind, and he was cast as the leader of the hijackers. And just as work on that movie wrapped up, he was called about "The Kite Runner."

"I'm so proud to be part of this film. . . . As well as being a beautiful story, which is the most important thing, it's a beautiful cultural project as well," he says, explaining that the movie's cast and crew consisted of people from 26 countries speaking 46 languages among them.

Including, once he learned it, Abdalla's Farsi. The language, he says, "was the parting gift" from the film and his time in Afghanistan.