Shereen Khan always wanted to be an actor—in the late ’90s, she even got a small gig on the TV version of Clueless—but somewhere along the way she got roped into other things, like being a movie-studio executive and performing with the “kiddie rock band” Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang.
A few years ago she finally decided to pursue acting full-time, and one of the first things to come her way was The Promised Land—a comedy series, of all things, about Moses leading the Israelites in the wilderness. Khan got one of the lead roles—as Moses’ ambitious but frustrated sister Miriam—and when series creator Mitch Hudson showed the pilot episode to The Chosen’s Dallas Jenkins, Jenkins promptly cast Khan as the scheming queen Herodias in Season 4 of his series.
The two performances are very, very different, but they showed Khan’s range, and the public got to see them just a few months apart in 2024. The Chosen came first—in theatres and then on streaming—and The Promised Land followed, with its pilot going straight to YouTube. That episode was a big-enough hit that Khan and her colleagues got to film the rest of Season 1 late last year, and now it’s on YouTube too.
I had a chance to speak to Khan while the season was rolling out, and she had a lot of fun things to say about teasing out aspects of Miriam’s character from the few references to her in the Bible, about Miriam’s relationship with her brothers and the women in the camp (including Moses’ wife Zipporah, whose bubbly personality gets on Miriam’s nerves sometimes), and about how the shooting technique on The Promised Land—and her previous experience as a studio executive—prepared her for her guest stint on the Emmy-winning Apple TV show The Studio.
You can watch or listen to our interview above, or if you’d rather read the auto-generated transcript, there’s a button for that, too.
Some of the main points we covered include:
Khan’s career before she committed to acting full-time (1:00).
How the idea of a biblical comedy series made sense to her (2:34).
How she “mines the text” for clues to her character Miriam (4:01).
Giving Miriam—and other women—a “voice” in the biblical story (7:46).
Miriam’s status as a single woman (10:40).
Miriam’s odd-couple relationship with her sister-in-law Zipporah (13:04).
Playing Herodias in The Chosen (14:09).
How acting gigs lead to other acting gigs (17:10).
How being a former studio executive informed her work on The Studio (19:07).
How working on The Promised Land prepared her for The Studio (20:19).
For further reference re: The Promised Land:
I interviewed series creator Mitch Hudson last year.
I’ve done deep-dive analyses of episodes one and two; more are coming.
You can watch the entire first season of The Promised Land on YouTube. Here is the trailer:
You can also see Khan as Herodias in this clip from The Chosen:
You can see her as a woman who questions the artistic merit of movies these days in this clip from The Studio:
And you can see her sing and dance with Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang in this clip from Live in Grandma’s Living Room! (circa 2005):
