She spoke so well I wondered if it was actually her speaking. Kudos to her for her effort, and for an excellent performance.

Close, who plays a CIA agent Dr. Marjan Montazemi on the second season of the thriller, said she worked with a coach three times each week to learn Farsi.

"It was very challenging. It has a different sentence structure. It's more like German, with the verb at the end. You use your mouth differently. It has certain sounds that we don't have in English," Close explained. "But I had a phenomenal coach in Anna Bayat....

Apparently the results were good enough to satisfy the native speakers in the cast.

I wish I had six months to prepare! But my goal was to speak Farsi well enough so that a Farsi speaking person would think I was fluent. I got as far as being able to pronounce all the words pretty well, my accent I think was pretty good. But I couldn’t translate it as I was saying it, so it was a series of sounds, and some sentences were more difficult than others. And then you have to make sure that you have the right intonation and emphasis on the right word, even though you have no idea what it is. (Laughs) So after studying for two months, I got there.

The characters in Tehran who are not native English speakers have very good English with an interesting mix of accents.