Rawan Mahdi and Mona Hussain had always dreamed of a project like The Exchange. Kuwait, of course, has always been the Gulf’s home of great drama, with its series and stars dominating the conversation each Ramadan, but never has there been a Kuwaiti project that was able to capture the world’s attention—a project that showed not only who the Kuwaiti people are, but what they could do. As the two spent years building their careers separately, they each quietly wondered if their moment—and Kuwait’s—would ever come.
When the call from Netflix finally came, it all came together fast. Mahdi was contacted first. It would be a show like the region had never seen before, a female-centric drama based on the real-life story of two cousins who took on the boy’s club of the Kuwaiti stock exchange in the late 1980s and won. Mahdi, enchanted by the work of writers Nadia Ahmad, Ane Peterson and Adam Sobel, jumped on board instantly.
“Quite honestly this is what I’d always been hoping for. I’d dreamed that we would one day have a script that was this valuable and different, that had the potential to not only show everyone what we already have in Kuwait, but also to push us forward,” Mahdi tells Esquire Middle East.
Mahdi, who had previously starred in the Netflix original The Cage, was told she was suitable for either of the two lead roles, Munira or Farida. Farida was a single mom struggling to support her family, who turned to her cousin for a job in an unlikely place. Mahdi saw she was driven by love into the unknown, and that’s heart is what Mahdi was drawn to.
Munira, on the other hand, is a different sort of person, driven by the same good but without the same naivete, a strong personality who knows when to assert herself, and when to finesse a deal behind the scenes. To play her, Netflix approached Hussain, who instantly connected with a project that understood how strong the women of Kuwait truly were—and always had been.
“Long before the 80s, Kuwaiti women have always been leaders. Across the Gulf, it has always been known for its strong women—the first women in the region to study abroad since they were kids, that went to summer camps across Europe and were deeply open minded, dating back to the 1950s,” says Hussain.
“It wasn’t difficult to imagine a strong woman in Kuwait because I’ve seen them all my life. Strong Arab women—strong women across the world—have existed for centuries, but their stories have rarely been told. I’ve always been drawn to women like this, and it was easy to get into that character myself,” she continues.
The process zipped along quickly, with Mahdi and Hussain first meeting about a month before filming as they were dropped into full bootcamp for the period piece, given a show bible that broke down not only the characters, but the entire world they existed in, complete with a crash course in the world of finance, as well as the intricacies of life in Kuwait in 1987.
“We went to the Exchange building together and met with as many people as we could, getting a story and learning about their lives. Then the director gave us videos of the time—videos of women in the late 80s and videos of the exchange itself, teaching us the way they moved, the signals they gave each other, and more,” says Hussain.
The two put a heavy focus on physicality, with Mahdi charting the ways that Farida’s movements would evolve over the show’s six episodes as she slowly gained confidence, while Hussain dove headfirst into the always-brash, always-ready Munira.
“I figured out how her shoulders should be straightened, how she lifted her chin when she walked, how she crossed her legs—every little detail—and then for three weeks I lived as Munira, figuring her out minute by minute, even taking on aspects of her personality without realizing it, my family told me later. By the time I arrived to set, I was Munira,” says Hussain.
While Hussain and Mahdi were ready to go from day one, filming was anything but easy, dressed for winter in intricate 80s costuming and heavy make-up, while filming in the temperatures that could reach 60 degrees Celsius at their peak.
“It was boiling. Every day, it was difficult,” says Hussain.
But every day, it was worth it. For both Mahdi and Hussain, who each chose acting having no idea if they could succeed, the experience, and the reaction thus far, with rave reviews coming from across the globe, including a ringing endorsement from the New York Times, have exceeded all they could have hoped for, silencing the doubts they had about pursuing acting in Kuwait and showing them that the future they always wished for may finally be here, both on a personal level and for the Kuwaiti creative arts on a whole.
“This project did not teach me about myself as much as it told me, ‘you were right,’” says Mahdi. “I now know that I was going on the right track, I was just stumbling before I found the right place to do it. Knowing that I finally found it, knowing that we all did, is the most precious feeling to me now.”
“I have a fire in me, and now I know that it will never die. There is a path now. There is a path forward for all of us.”