Introducing Lebanese actor Lee Majdoub, Esquire Middle East’s May cover star
Representation matters. This is a story about why.
In the middle of March 2022, Lebanese actor Lee Majdoub saw before his eyes the first concrete proof that he had made it. It was a poster for his latest movie, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and he was the only one on it, with his name above the title.
It was an honour he had earned. Before the poster’s debut, fans had rallied behind Majdoub and his character in the franchise, Agent Stone, after his intended bit-part morphed into a scene stealer, all due to the magic that he and Jim Carrey found together on set through pure improvisation. Majdoub’s face was now plastered across train stations, billboards and movie theaters across Hollywood and the world—a Lebanese face.
It wasn’t just the poster that caused Majdoub to break down that day. It was the calls he started to get. “When that poster was released, people came up to me and told me about their kids seeing that poster. They told me that their kids said, ‘oh my gosh, like, that guy looks like me’. I realised that growing up I never had that. I never looked at a poster and saw someone that looked like me. I never watched a movie and saw someone that looked like me,” says Majdoub.
He wasn’t just thinking about what he could inspire in those kids, he was thinking about what seeing a face like theirs could help them avoid—the years of pain he’s had to work through.
“Because the way others treated me, I felt a lot of resentment towards being Middle Eastern growing up. I hated being Middle Eastern. I hated being brown, I hated all of it. There was a lot of turmoil in me”
Lee Majdoub
Let’s flash back. Around 15 years ago, Majdoub decided to become an actor for all the wrong reasons. He had the talent, that much was obvious, but what was driving him deep down was not what drives him now.
“I think I initially wanted to be a star because of all the material elements, rather than just feeling connected to acting. I had this resentment towards people that had picked on me as a kid, and this was my way of showing them that everything they picked on me for was now going to be what the world rewarded me for,” says Majdoub.
Majdoub grew up different from the other kids. He was full of verve and had the type of personality that makes you stand out just enough to make the wrong kind of kid want to smack you into place.
“I was hyperactive, super-energetic, and quote-unquote weird,” he says. In university, as he studied mechanical engineering, his sister suggested he take some acting classes on the side—you’ve always been an actor, but you never thought it was possible, she told him. He thought she was being hyperbolic, until the first day he entered the class.
“The moment I sat in class for the first time, I was like, oh, everything I’ve been judged for growing up are all the things that make someone beautiful. Everything I got picked on for, here I was being complimented for. That was the first time where I thought, I click with this. This is what I want to do. I want to do this forever,” says Majdoub.
Still—even though he knew his path, he was following it for them. And while he (rather naively) expected instantaneous stardom, it didn’t come.
“I thought, one year and I’ll have my own TV show and all this stuff. You quickly realise it’s not that easy. It’s a lot of work. And I’m very happy that it didn’t go the way I imagined it going, because I had a lot of growing up to do. I had a lot of things to work through personally, with anxieties and insecurities,” says Majdoub.
“The person I was then was just very desperate, very attention seeking. If that guy had gotten everything he wanted, I don’t think he would have done very well with it.”
There’s more to it too—something Majdoub has a harder time talking about, even now. It wasn’t just his personality he was treated differently for growing up, it was his identity.
“Growing up, we moved around a lot. I never really thought about my identity when I was a kid, because there was there was no real reason to. I was born in Lebanon and then I grew up in Europe, and there I never got picked on for what I looked like. That started once I moved to Canada, when I was nine and a half,” says Majdoub.
“That was when it really started to be like, ‘oh, you talk different, you look different. You’re tinier. All those were reasons to get picked on and bullied.”
Majdoub, like most kids, didn’t know how to process it. Rather than reject their abuse and embrace who he was, he turned his criticism inward. “As I got older, started to feel a lot of resentment towards being Middle Eastern,” says Majdoub.
“There was a lot of self-deprecation, self-dislike. Then we moved to Los Angeles in 2000, and 9/11 happened, and that’s when I think I really thought explicitly for the first time, ‘oh, I hate being Middle Eastern. I hate being brown, I hate all of this.” That’s when he started finding ways to obfuscate his true identity.
“Because we lived in Italy, I started telling people, ‘Oh, I’m only half Lebanese. I’m Italian-Lebanese. I’m Mexican-Lebanese. I would inject what I liked to dissipate my Middle Eastern-ness,” he says.
“It’s such a joy to be working so closely with Jim (Carrey)
and to be able to vibe and play off him”
Lee Majdoub
That self-hate, coupled with the anti-Arab sentiment in post 9/11 America and the complete lack of positive representation of Arabs and other Middle Easterners in the media, caused Majdoub to go off the deep end, even justifying to himself the racism that existed, attempting in his own mind to separate himself from the aspects of himself that he could barely stand to live with. It was one of the darkest points in Majdoub’s life.
“There was a lot of turmoil within me. It took me quite some time to learn to love that part of me, to make amends with my family, and to myself about the anger I felt towards being Middle Eastern. I’ve learned through a lot of healing and a lot of work that we were shown in a very unfair light. I had to learn that Middle Eastern culture is not just one thing—it’s sprawling and it’s beautiful and it’s mixed, just like me,” says Majdoub.
Part of that journey has been ensuring that every role he takes, and every performance he gives, is full of the empathy that he never saw on screen growing up. “I always try to inject love in some way, shape or form, whether they’re a super flawed individual or not as flawed. There always has to be this love, this humanity that I try to inject,” he says.
“For me, the fear has always been that my skin tone is already working against me. So I ask myself, what can I do to counteract that? What preconceived notions are going to be there about my character, or the person you see on screen? I want it to be represented right, to be seen in a three-dimensional light.”
Majdoub has not just been fighting to create loveable characters, he’s been learning to love himself.
“There’s a lot of positive self-talk. I still sometimes have difficulty looking in the mirror, but it’s not as bad anymore. I can look and respect the person I see in the mirror and love the skin colour, love the bushy eyebrows, love the dark hair, love the dark features. It’s a lot of fake it till you make it. The positive affirmations are something I had to learn,” says Majdoub.
“The negative self-talk, the moment you hear it in your head, or you say it, you’ve got to write out the opposite positive affirmation like 10 times to counteract that. If you do that long enough, those negative voices start to dissipate, and then you’ll start to hear more of the positives. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s more movement forward,” he continues.
The journey, of course is far from over. Self-love is a constant battle.
“I’m still very hard on myself. There’s still that thing in the back of my head that says I can’t afford not to be perfect. I can’t afford not to look great. I can’t afford not to be 150 per cent prepared. Because I don’t want to give them a reason to say no. To me, because of the way that I look, that’s already a check mark against me.”
Growing up, one of Majdoub’s heroes was Jim Carrey, and it’s easy to see why. For kids with an over-abundance of personality and nowhere to put it without attracting abuse, Carrey was a beacon – himself a kid who overcame bullying to become one of the biggest stars of his generation. For decades, Carrey was pure indefatigable light.
While Majdoub couldn’t find a face like his, here at least was a personality like his—and that representation matters, too. Without that, it’s hard to say Majdoub would have ever had the courage to be himself. That’s why, on the first day of filming the first Sonic the Hedgehog, after being hired to star opposite Carrey in nearly every scene, Majdoub completely disassociated.
“The first scene we shot was we first arrive into the movie. We were filming on the baseball diamond, and Carrey started going, and, my gosh, to to see those little flashes of what I grew up with coming through that performance gave me this surreal out of body experience!” Majdoub recalls with a laugh.
“I think everything came at once. Seeing him do that, I had all these realisations of like, ‘oh, I’m in this. I’m in a movie with Jim Carrey. And Jim’s doing some of the things that I grew up witnessing and watching and loving. Oh, I’m in a video game movie of a video game I grew up with and loved, and oh my gosh, I’m working on a Paramount Pictures production!”
Luckily, the time that Majdoub had spent spinning in his own mind was nearly instantaneous back in reality. “That three seconds was like an eternity. It was a deer in headlights moment,” says Majdoub.
Carrey, thankfully, was just as warm as he’d hoped he would be.
“He gave me a hug right away, and welcomed me to the team.”
From there, Carrey and Majdoub began creating something that was not in the original script. Carrey plays Dr. Robotnik, the villain of the piece, who throughout the film slowly descends into the wild-mustachioed madman seen in decades of video games.
Agent Stone, Majdoub’s role, was originally written as the straight man that Carrey throws one-liners at, himself not intended to make much of an impression, rather just fulfill a function. Carrey, however, saw something in Majdoub, and as they began to play back and forth. Agent Stone began to grow.
“Jim gets to do a lot of the creative and writing for his character. They kind of leave that open to him. It’s like, ‘here’s the scenario, and go’. He’ll figure it out and write some stuff out and everything. A lot of the stuff that he and I get to do are from his amazing mind,” says Majdoub.
“Sometimes as quick as something comes, it can go. I’ve learned to enjoy the journey a little more.”
Lee Majdoub
“They had just wanted to give Jim someone to talk to, someone to have some dialogue with. The more it got fleshed out, the more Jim came up ideas. We started feeding off each other, and the energy we created,” says Majdoub.
After the first film became an unexpected commercial success, with positive word of mouth from both diehard fans and casual movie-goers, a second film became an inevitability—with Majdoub’s Agent Stone now core part of that journey.
“Carrey loves this character. Robotnik is continually evolving. I think that’s something Jim really enjoys. He’s not stagnant,” Majdoub explains, “it’s such a joy to be part of that, and to play off of him.”
Majdoub, however, still has a hard time admitting to himself that he, too, has brought huge value to the franchise – something that the filmmakers approached him to discuss.
“Jeff Fowler, the director, told me, ‘these moments of magic between you and Jim are something none of us expected.’ I definitely think there’s truth to that. I think it comes with accepting I have something to offer, that maybe someone else would have brought something different to it. And it might have popped in a different way. But the way it did? I don’t know. I think I’ve definitely brought something to it for sure,” says Majdoub.
“That’s amazing to me. I came with experience, and I don’t think it would have worked had it not been 13 years into my career, learning what I’ve learned, learning to love the person that I am.”
When Majdoub started out, he wanted to do this forever. That goal hasn’t changed. The difference is it’s now a journey he’s built to handle. While he’s ecstatic about the success he’s now feeling, he knows that that doesn’t mean the journey will be easy from here.
“I want longevity to my career. Sometimes as quick as something comes, it can go. I’ve learned to enjoy the journey a little bit more. It’s easy to sit there and ask yourself, ‘when’s the next thing coming’? I’m learning to talk to myself and tell myself, ‘Okay, take a beat, take in what you’ve experienced so far. There’s no rush, breathe it in’,” says Majdoub.
“I do think that the longer something takes to get there, and the more time you take to work on yourself and heal, the more equipped you are to sustain that. If you’ve done that, longevity is possible. If I’m not healing, not working through my trauma, then no matter how much money I have, no matter how much success I have, it’s never going to be enough.”
For now, Majdoub is taking stock in the things he’s most proud of, from the children his poster inspired to the people who reached out to him after his role in Dirk Gently to tell them that his character gave them the courage to talk to their parents about the parts of themselves they’d kept hidden.
“They told me, watching the show with my parents, my parents loved your character. That gave me the confidence. I didn’t feel like I was going to be judged, because now they had some sort of representation in a positive way, all through a man with dark features like theirs,” he says.
Majdoub has a long road ahead, but as he learns to love the journey, he knows where he wants to get by the end.
“My hope is that, when the happily ever after comes, I’m lying in bed at whatever age and thinking I lived a good life. I affected people in a positive light. I gave them hope. I gave them light. I gave them joy. Then I can say, ‘I’m good to go now.’
Representation matters. This story is far from over.
See more of Lee Majdoub in the Esquire Middle East May issue.
Photography by Jeff Lipsky
Styling by Nico Amarca
Production by Jesse Vora
Grooming by Andrea Pezzillo
Photo Assistance by Jeff Gros
Digital Technician: Jason Michelson
Styling Assistance by Manuel Gutierrez
Jeff Lipsky represented by FourEleven Agency