It’s a warm evening in Paris in 2008 and an 18-year-old Amir El-Masry is sat in the back of a Mercedes Maybach. He’s being chauffeured to the premiere of the film Hassan and Marcus. It’s the nicest car he’s ever been in, the kind of car that a leading man is driven around in—the kind of car that when it rolls up to an event, photographers jostle for position and ready their trigger fingers in order to get that shot of the star passenger arriving. El-Masry’s leg stops its incessant nervous tapping as the car comes to a halt. He takes a deep breath and opens the door and steps onto the red carpet.
A flurry of paparazzi flashes pop in anticipation of the door opening, before instantly stopping at the sight of a slightly shabby El-Masry dressed in jeans and Converse. There is audible disappointment from the crowd, as he nervously smiles and scampers his way down the carpet, hoping to disappear anonymously into a crowd of tuxes and cocktail dresses inside. Meanwhile, somewhere in the suite of a nearby hotel, Omar Sharif is sat in an armchair quietly chuckling to himself.
Since its release Hassan and Marcus has been embraced as a much-loved comedy in Arab cinema. What else would you expect from a film featuring two titans of Egyptian film—Adel Imam and Omar Sharif—as its leads. A quick scroll down the casting credits of Rami Imam’s film will tell you that the aspiring young actor Amir El-Masry’s name does not appear in the film. Which begs the question, what on earth was he doing riding in Omar Sharif’s car during the film’s premiere?
“Omar Sharif didn’t want to go to his premiere!” laughs El-Masry recalling the story. “I had met him earlier that day for the first time, and he asked me to go in his place. What was I supposed to say to that? No?!”
To this day Omar Sharif is still considered the high watermark of success for Arab actors globally. For generations of actors with an Arab background—or even those who look a certain way—he is still highly revered as the one whose path navigated the many industry pitfalls, showing that it was indeed possible to break through the glass ceiling and ‘make it in Hollywood’.
Earlier in the day El-Masry’s father had pulled some strings allowing for his son to meet with Sharif in Paris to pick his brains about life as an aspiring actor. They discussed previous theatre work—bonding over both having previously played the role of Laertes in Hamlet—El-Masry hanging onto every syllable of advice from the great man. “He told me that in order to succeed abroad, I needed to embrace my heritage. He said that it was a quality others can’t offer and it will make me stand out.” Little did El-Masry know how quickly that prophetic advice would manifest.
Immediately following the red carpet incident, El-Masry opted against sitting in Omar Sharif’s seat for the premiere. “I felt like a fraud and didn’t feel comfortable sitting there, so I took another seat, which serendipitously ended up being next to the film’s writer, Youssef Maaty.” After the screening the two got to talking. Maaty commented that El-Masry’s Arabic comes with a notable British accent (more on that later), and that he was about to start work on a new film which needed a character with a British-Egyptian slant to it. He invited him to audition, and later that year El-Masry made his film debut as the second lead role alongside Mohamed Henedi, in the big budget comedy Ramadan Mabrouk Abul-Alamein Hamouda. It would go on to be one of the most successful comedies in Egyptian cinema, and one of several pivotal moments that would shape the life and career of Amir El-Masry. Listen, adapt and evolve.
El-Masry’s success in Ramadan Mabrouk is every actor’s dream. A wildly loved debut film, that not only sees your face plastered across enormous billboards, but also gaining industry recognition thanks to winning ‘Best Young Actor’ at Egypt’s equivalent of the Oscars, and getting offered follow-up roles opposite major talents such as Yasmin Abdulaziz. But for El-Masry it was all a bit overwhelming. “I was still at university in London, and wanted to finish that,” he says, “and in the back of my mind was still something that Omar Sharif had said to me —he advised me to go get training. To take advantage of being in London and learn the tools of the trade.” So he did. Choosing to invest in his future, rather than live large in the moment, he pressed pause on a burgeoning Egyptian cinema career, and enrolled in the world-renowned drama school LAMDA.
Amir El-Masry is a Londoner. His family moved to the UK from Cairo when he was a year old, and unlike his two older brothers (five and ten years older, respectively) who spent parts of their childhood in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, most of Amir’s cultural heritage comes from his family. “It was that typical, multi-cultural upbringing,” he says, “I would speak Arabic to my parents, and English to my friends and brothers.” By his own admission, he was quite a shy kid, something which his mother identified and enrolled him in acting classes to try and build his self-confidence.
“It really helped me,” he says. “The freedom to pretend to be someone else allowed me the confidence to do what I would normally do behind closed doors, and if anyone judged me, then I could just say it was the character, not me! I was quite an introvert back then, but now I feel that I’m the opposite—I suppose that is the point of growing self-confidence.”
The London suburb of Acton is not a particularly multi-cultural one, so growing up there, there was always an undercurrent of being an outsider in a predominantly white, middle class area. El-Masry shared the story of when his school had asked the students to bring in a dish of food that they often ate at home, and while most of the kids brought in burgers, fish and chips and sponge cake, El-Masry’s mum had prepared him a stuffed zucchini dish called ‘Kousa’. “I remember feeling embarrassed for being different,” he recalls, “but now, when I look back at it, it is the other way around—I am embarrassed because I completely neglected the time, attention and cultural pride that my mum had put into making it. She was proud of where we are from and, back then, I wasn’t. It wasn’t until much later that I properly understood. Now I wear my ethnicity as a badge of honour.” Perhaps, that was why the advice from Omar Sharif hit different for El-Masry—in order for you to truly improve yourself, you must accept who you are, what makes you different, and embrace it.
Since graduating, El-Masry has rarely struggled for work as an actor—choosing to keep busy and build up a profile for himself in the UK film and TV scene. There have been notable parts including one in Jon Stewart’s directorial debut Rosewater (2014); Star Wars: Episode IX—The Rise of Skywalker (2019); and spy drama The Night Manager (2016) with Tom Hiddleston and Oscar-winner Olivia Coleman. However, it wasn’t until El-Masry starred in the Cannes-anointed film Limbo (2020), that he finally regained that lauded leading man status that he had previously opted out of when he left Egypt a decade earlier.
With patience and persistence, Limbo offered him a role where finally he could merged the two worlds that he knew he could play better than anyone else. El-Masry portrayed a Syrian oud player named Omar who fled the deadly conflict at home with hopes to settle in the U.K. but would find himself placed on a remote Scottish island with fellow asylum seekers waiting for their applications to be processed. Not only did he have to learn how to play the oud for the role, but his performance was singled out by BAFTA, and the film won the top prize at that year’s Cairo Film Festival, reigniting El-Masry’s star in Egypt. Since then, he has rather skillfully waltzed between the both British and Arab film industries—for every #Gawwezni (2022) and Crazy About You (2022), there has been roles in The Crown (as Young Mohammed Al Fayed in Season 5) and Kenneth Branagh’s A Haunting in Venice (2023), it’s been a conscious balancing act—one worthy of the late Omar Sharif himself.
The mid-afternoon sun is beating down on El-Masry’s face. It is tilted upwards, eyes closed as he takes a minute to enjoy the sensation as the Esquire team apply touch ups to his grooming and finesse the look he’s wearing from Dior’s upcoming Ramadan capsule collection.
We’re halfway through the day’s cover shoot in the desert oasis of Abu Dhabi’s Al Wathba resort. It’s the actors first time in the UAE capital, but he feels very much at home on a set on location in the Middle East. After the shoot wraps he plans on going to visit the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (“It is stunning, and I’ve always wanted to visit it”), he’s already enlisted a couple of the crew to join him.
His trip to is a fleeting one, and, right now in his life, it is the way he likes it. He is mid-filming a 15-episode TV show in Cairo called Maleeha—which will air daily during the first half of the Holy Month of Ramadan.
The story is based in Egypt, but poignantly it centres around a series of events that happened in Palestine 12 years ago. El-Masry plays, Ali, a relatable architype Egyptian middle-class male who is focused on dealing with situations his personal life, while his brother is in the army working at the Palestinian border helping people flee Gaza. “I took on the role because of its association with the horrors that are going on right now. It was something that I not only wanted, but needed to do,” he says.
Across the Arab world, TV shows that air during prime time in Ramadan draw massive viewing figures with families sitting down to watch the stories unfold nightly. Because of that, the competition between networks to hook people in to the sagas is fierce, and securing a talent like El-Masry is quite the coup. El-Masry is no novice to the importance of a Ramadan TV show—even if the speed of which they are developed mean they often come out resembling a Telenovela.
“I am proud of what we are creating,” explains El-Masry, “Sure, the show is based on events from a decade ago, but the themes are so poignant at the moment I wanted to be involved.” He reveals that when he was first offered the role, he was also in conversation to play the role of a villain in a major Apple TV show opposite Gary Oldman—a role that would have been a great for his global profile, but at the cost of portraying another ‘evil Arab’ role. He stood firm, choosing his heart over his head; his reach over his race; his culture over his career.
“I’ve made mistakes in the past where I’ve taken roles based on ethnical stereotyping for the sake of getting work, but it has felt like a betrayal of sorts. I have seen firsthand the impact that it can have,” El-Masry says. “No one can tell me that the way things are portrayed on screen doesn’t affect how society views things. I’ve been doing this for nearly 15 years, and I am more careful now. I have seen the pendulum swing, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. I have no problem playing a villain, but the character has to have meaning and justification—if the role is simply to compound a stereotype then, it’s not worth my time.”
Thankfully, there are plenty of roles that are worth El-Masry’s time—and considerable talents. He not only recently played the role of a whip-smart MI5 intelligence officer in Season Two of Vigil, alongside Rose Leslie and Suranne Jones, but followed it up by fronting the comedy-drama, Faithless, about an Irish-Egyptian family, in which his character gives up life as aspiring actor in L.A. to go back to Ireland to help his brother raise three daughters after a tragic incident.
Whether it is actualising the advice from his serendipitous meeting with Omar Sharif, to learning how to play the oud, to fine-tuning his instincts when it comes to selecting his work, El-Masry’s career—in fact, his entire life—has been built on a desire to improve who he is.
Currently, as he finishes filming Maleeha, he is prepping for another musical role, which requires him to be “an exceptional pianist,” or, as he follows up with a laugh, “if I can get to a quarter of that, then I would be delighted!” In order to get to the level to pass himself off as a virtuoso he has been reunited with industry guru Polly Bennett who not only helped him to master the mannerisms of Mohammed Al Fayed in The Crown, but she also worked with Austin Butler for his performance as ‘The King’ in Elvis, and fellow Egyptian Rami Malek for his Oscar-winning portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody—kings, crowns and conquerors of the film industry. If anyone will take the lessons from the advice he’s been given, it’s Amir El-Masry. Listen, adapt and evolve.
