Glenn Close relished the challenge of speaking Farsi for her latest role.

The 75-year-old actress has earned eight Academy Award nominations during her illustrious career – but her role in the spy drama series ‘Tehran’ took her totally out of her comfort zone.

Glenn – who learned to speak the modern Persian language for the show – shared: “It was a real brain exercise – it was a brain twister.

“As much as you kind of hone in on some of the sounds and how to make them and the construction of the sentences, it still boils down to – until you get to the point where you can think in a language – it’s basically just memorising one sound after another, then learning what the intonation has to be and then doing it in a tempo that’s believable.

“And so that was hugely challenging and one of the thrills of doing it … it was really fun and a really good workout.”

The series focuses on espionage between Israel and Iran.

But Glenn believes it can help audiences to develop a better understanding of global politics.

The American actress – who stars alongside Niv Sultan and Shaun Toub – told the ‘Backstage’ podcast: “I think what drama can do with great writing is to give eloquence to some of the thorniest problems that are going on in the world.

“I personally feel that we lack eloquence and you think, ‘oh, that’s just how people talk’, but no – through history the great leaders are people who had eloquence, and that means they knew what order to put words in that would actually communicate right to the heart of both sides of whatever it is, and that’s what we are in sore need of in the world today.

“And I think it’s through writing and through the creation of characters that people can relate to, that they actually maybe even subconsciously, get a perception of things that they didn’t have before.”