Adam Bakri is sitting in a chair. He has been sitting there for the better part of 20 minutes with his eyes closed. Casual observers might mistake him for being asleep, but he is not. He is breathing, in fact, more than that, he is smelling.
It’s 2011, and Bakri is in the middle of a Sense Memory exercise being taught at the famous Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Based in New York City, it is one of the world’s most respected acting schools, known specifically for its teaching of ‘The Method’—the technique that attempts to train actors to use their physical, mental and emotional self in the creation of a character.
The daily Sense Memory exercises are designed to play a vital role in the awakening of an actor’s senses and focus, recalling what things they saw, heard and smelt to help stimulate their imagination, allowing them to be able to tap into specific sensations or moments in life. Imagine the sun on your face, what does that feel like? Visualise a hot cup of coffee, what does it taste like? Think back to your childhood home, what did it smell like? That kind of thing.
“You know what’s funny?” a present-day Bakri tells me over a Zoom call, “I can still perfectly remember the smell of my house growing up. I can even remember how the house would smell different when my father was home.”
It is morning and Bakri is sitting in his study in his home in New York. The 35-year old Palestinian actor is wearing a grey t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His hair is ungroomed but not messy. His light stubble enhancing a set of envy-worthy cheekbones on a jaw so angular it could cut glass. He’s sipping a cup of herbal tea that his wife has made him. It tastes—and smells—terrible he remarks, but she has told him that it is healthy and will
do him good. So he diligently slurps it up.
“When I was a kid, my father seemed like the most important man in the world,” Bakri continues. “He was a busy guy who used to work in the theatre in the nearby town during the week, and would come back on the weekends to spend it with us.” For context, his father, Mohammad Bakri, is that Mohammad Bakri—the widely celebrated Palestinian actor, director and producer, instantly recognisable for his tall, broad frame, striking leading-man looks and piercing blue eyes.
“He was this larger-than-life character, always away making films, and everywhere we went we would be interrupted by people wanting to get an autograph or take a picture with him.” But as big a star as he was to everyone else, at home he was quite reserved.
The Bakris grew up in the small village of Bi’ina, Israel, around two hours’ drive from the port city of Jaffa. A family of thinkers, Adam and his three brothers and sister were raised on art, and music, and exposed to all sorts of books and literature. It was a house full, but he was a solitary kid, spending a lot of time in his own company reading, writing and drawing other worlds—worlds unlike where he was.
“As a kid I was really into fantasy,” he says.
“I remember my parents brought us back an illustrated book of The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales from one of their trips, and I was obsessed with it.” He recalls nights when one of his older brothers would read to him, turning off the lights and acting out all the parts, scaring him at times, but always leaving him wanting more. “I’m pretty sure that played a huge
part in who I am today.”
While self-expression through the arts was encouraged, conversation was not to be a trivial thing. It was substantive, or it was non-existent. “My dad was not a talker,” he says. “Sometimes he would drive me to college in Jaffa, and for two hours we would sit there
in the car and not say a single word to each other. Not a word.”
To fill the silence they would listen to music instead, often listening to Lebanese star Fairuz. “There was something in Fairuz’s music that felt very new to the Arab world at the time, particularly the songs that she did with her son Ziad Rahbani; it felt more Western, more modern,” he says.
The constant exposure to an evolving of Arab art planted seeds in a maturing Bakri, who would eventually decide to follow his father’s footsteps and become an actor, leaving home to enroll at Lee Strasberg. “There was definitely a lot of pressure growing up with your dad as this revered figure in the arts world, even more so when you decide to get into acting yourself,” he says “How could I ever get up to that level?”
It’s true. When you are born into one of the most well-known acting families in the country—Adam’s two eldest brothers, Saleh and Ziad, are also well-established actors—the level of comparison is abnormally high. So what happened next seemed to either be completely off-script, or perhaps very much on-script, for the youngest of the Bakri boys.
Just a few weeks on from graduating from Lee Strasberg in 2013, Bakri landed his first role in a feature film, Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar. The film about friendship and betrayal on the West Bank was a critical and commercial success, winning the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and receiving an Oscar-nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Bakri’s performance, meanwhile, was singled out for a clutch of individual awards each praising his ability to capture the vulnerability of his character—a fragile, introverted, young Palestinian boy wanting to make something of himself. Sense memory.
Adam Bakri likes to paint. Over his shoulder, in the background of the Zoom call, hangs a painting. It’s one of his—a painting of his wife, the Lebanese actor Cynthia Samuel.
The couple met while filming the Sci-Fi series Hell’s Gate (2021). Bakri had had further success post-Omar, initially in the Australian drama, Slam (2018), and then opposite
Ralph Fiennes and Keira Knightley in 2019’s Official Secrets, while Samuel had managed the skilful transition from being Miss Lebanon to a burgeoning film career of significant merit. The two hit it off almost instantly, and were wed last year in Cyprus.
“We found it crazy how many similarities we had,” Cynthia recently told Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. Not only are they both actors (who help each other in preparing for auditions), but they both find solace in literature, art and spirituality. “I always heard people tell me that opposites attract but, to be honest, I never got along with my opposite. Adam and I don’t so much as balance each other out, as we move at the same pace.”
The couple live together in New York City, navigating the rather curious double life of being recognisable celebrities in the Arab world, while still holding a sense of anonymity in the US—it’s a mix that suits them just fine. “My wife is my muse,” says Bakri. It’s not the first time he’s said that line, but it still brings a coy, embarrassed smile to his face. To be clear, he’s not embarrassed about admitting it, it’s more an embarrassment of saying something that sounds cliché. For someone as passionate about words as he is, you can tell that reverting to cliché is not up to his standards.
The painting over his shoulder is not the only one of Cynthia—he paints her often. “I would describe my art as ‘overly romantic’,” he says with a laugh. “It is romantic, and spiritual, and not very modern at all.” As committed to painting as he is, Bakri doesn’t have plans to be a full-time artist. He doesn’t paint for commercial success, or artistic recognition, he paints purely as a means of self-expression.
“I believe that artists tend to feel things more intensely than others. Like, they have an urge to express themselves more than say a carpenter or taxi driver,” he explains. “I paint and write as a way to express all the feelings that I have going on inside me. It’s something I’ve found that always helps. That, and my spirituality.”
Alongside his creative outlets, Bakri discovered Sufism in his early 20s. As a spiritual branch of Islam, he delved hard into meditation and mindfulness as a way to better help him deal with his spirituality and a way to help him reason with life’s harder questions. Some of those questions Bakri faced in the aftermath of the success of Omar.
A film poster of Omar hangs in the hallway of their home. He often thinks of replacing it with some artwork from Studio Ghibli—the famed Japanese animation studio that Bakri is also “obsessed with”. It’s no surprise. It totally fits with his love for fantasy and the empathetic nature of its storytelling, but what is a surprise is that his memories of Omar are not all good ones.
“I think it’s a very special film that holds a special place in my heart,” he says, “but, sometimes, I wish I was a different person when I did the film.” Following its critical and commercial success—including Bakri attending the Oscars and the film being screened at the United Nations—Bakri fell into a depression that took him years to recover from.
“I have no explanation of what happened to me after the film, but I became really miserable,” he reveals. “I was struck with this immense fear of failure of never being able to do better. It really did weigh on me for years and years.” He credits his spirituality, meditation, therapy and artistic outlets for his recovery. Daring to shine a light inward to search for solutions to the darkest of problems.
They say that to make true art you must first know your true self, and that is very much where Adam Bakri is today—a person with a successful, growing career, who now
feels loved and respected, not just by others, but by himself. However, ultimately his is still someone who wants to be better. “I’m not interested in doing work for the sake of
work anymore,” he says. “I believe that when you do really good art, art that speaks to you, you become a better human being. That’s what I want to do, anything less than that and I’m not satisfied.”
Again, it is an abnormally high level to live by, but Adam Bakri will be just fine. He has learnt to trust his instincts, he has learnt to trust his senses.
The article was originally published in the September 2023 issue of Esquire Middle East.
Editor in Chief: Matthew Priest / Photography by Jeremy Choh / Styling by Matthew Marden / Grooming by Angel Gabriel / Digi Tech: Joe Holtricher / Assistants: Sangwoo Suh and AnnAnn Puttithanasorn / Producers: Sarah Radin and Steff Hawker