The simplest way to breakdown the multifaceted life of Dhafer L’Abidine is to consider his journey as a five-act play.
This would be the Table of Contents:
Act I: The Footballer
Act II: The Model
Act III: The Dishwasher
Act IV: The Actor
Act V: The Filmmaker
Although he’s still living through Act V, as with any good story, the best place to begin is at the beginning…
Act I: The Footballer
In some ways, it’s a wonder he’s made it to Act V at all. After all, when you’re a successful actor both in the Arab world and the West, crisscrossing between hugely popular TV series in Egypt and blockbuster films in Hollywood, why take the chance at pouring out your heart and soul for all the world to see?
“Let’s just lay it out there. When I decided to direct, I was at a place in my career where things were going very well. Why would I take the risk to do a film that could fail? As an actor, with a film or a TV series, if it doesn’t work, you’re usually not the one people blame. With directing, people can actually judge you, and the box office will immediately show the success of your vision. It’s brutal. To do something like that, you have to believe in something. You have to believe in yourself,” says L’Abidine having pulled his car on to the side of the road on a June afternoon in London, waiting to pick up his wife.
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The impulse to make movies first entered L’Abidine’s head when he was a young boy growing up in Tunisia, going down to the rental shop that his family owned that kindly rewound VHS tapes.
“I used to stay there watch films for hours and hours, and I was always intrigued by filmmaking, but I thought I was too shy. That’s what people told me anyways, and I believed them all. It was something I knew I would love to do. But I never tried it. I thought I was too shy to succeed,” says L’Abidine.
Lucky for him, his shyness didn’t translate to the football pitch. There, his feet did the talking.
And talk they did. For years, L’Abidine was one of Tunisian football’s brightest young stars.
At 19 he was made captain of Espérance Sportive de Tunis— the oldest and most popular club in all of Tunisia, founded in 1919.
At the time, L’Abidine thought he knew his whole story. He would capitalize on his considerable talent, grow from team to team, and become one of the biggest stars in the country, and, if Tunisia was able to make it to the World Cup, perhaps the world.
When L’Abidine was a footballer, everything else left his mind. He knew what wanted, he knew what he had, and he knew what he could achieve. He wasn’t going to let anyone push him around and get in his way. He was going to be a star.
He then moved clubs to ES Zarzis—another storied team—but, as you could already guess, this story doesn’t end in glory. What began as a hugely promising career, what had consumed him as his greatest passion, ended up falling apart.
He’s told this story before. Usually, he tells the shortened version ‘I got hurt’. There’s a longer one too, one that requires him to come to terms with his own mistakes. That’s the version he tells us.
“At this point my life, I’m a lot more chill than I was then. I can control my emotions better. I can think logically. When I was a footballer, I was a bit emotional. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t continue, because I made some mistakes, and made some choices at the time they were based on emotion rather than logic. Over the years, that’s been the big change in me,” L’Abidine says.
So, what happened, exactly?
L’Abidine had a contract with his club, and they breached his contract. L’Abidine was livid, and demanded to be transferred to a new team, vowing to never play for the club that had wronged him again. And so he ended up sitting in the stands for two years, waiting until his contract expired so he could play for another club that would treat him the way he deserved to be treated.
“Looking back now, I should have continued until the season finished. I could have resolved it at the end. They had wronged me, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. The football team was always in a strong position, because we didn’t have kind of professional contracts like nowadays.
So basically, I was so stubborn to the point that I actually harmed my career, all because they did something wrong. I said to myself, ‘unless they change, then I’m not going to play,’ and that was the wrong thing to do,” says L’Abidine.
“It was an emotional decision. It was me being upset, being angry, and not being practical. Instead I waited it out, moved to a new club two years later, and then it happened—I got hurt.”
Two years out of football is a lifetime. That time off made the prospect of coming back at an elite level nearly impossible, and so his body failed him nearly immediately.
You can see why he prefers the short version.
Act II: The Model
Now that he was out of football for good, L’Abidine had to turn to his next, most obviously marketable quality—his considerable good looks.
Yep, L’Abidine became a professional model and the story could have ended there too, but for one big problem. He hated being a model.
“It wasn’t satisfying. Because I am an introvert, it was not the right thing to do. I think when you act, you do something, you play someone else, and you forget about yourself. Maybe that’s how I should have approached modeling, too, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t. Maybe I didn’t know myself well enough yet,” says L’Abidine.
And so ended the shortest act in L’Abidine’s story.
(Well, if you don’t count modeling for the cover of the world’s most beloved men’s magazine, which we hope was a bit more satisfying for him.)
Act III: The Dishwasher
Dhafer L’Abidine had pushed the idea of being an actor out of his head long ago. He was too shy, everyone told him. He couldn’t do it. But, hell, during his time as a model he was in front of the camera anyways, why not give it a shot?
He booked a commercial in Tunisia, and it went extremely well. He got on a roll, started being supported by all the right people, and then landed his first movie role in an Italian film. Suddenly, everything seemed possible.
But L’Abidine didn’t want to make it easy. He wanted to do it properly. He wanted to be with the best, to learn from the best. He had to go to the UK.
Easier said than done. L’Abidine, now in his mid-20s, arrived at the airport in London only to find the owner of the room he’d already paid a month’s rent in advance for had changed his mind, leaving him with nowhere to go.
He felt the barely-frozen ice start to crack beneath his feet. What was he doing? Why had he thrown away the life he had built for himself, eschewed opportunities in his home of Tunisia, where he was already well-known and had a support system, had his mother and father who had always stood by him through it all?
Why, in God’s name, did he think he could make it in the UK as an actor, a place where he knew no one, had nothing, and didn’t even know the language?
“It was really, really tough. I questioned myself a lot. I wasn’t getting any younger. I was 27, and starting from scratch. Learning a new language. And that’s hard enough on its own, not to mention trying to act or go to drama school, and the expenses that come with both,” recalls L’Abidine.
Back home, his friends were getting married, finishing university, becoming doctors or training for World Cup, which Tunisia had qualified for.
“And there I was, starting again from zero, not knowing anyone. My self-esteem was really low. It was constant fight in my head just to keep going,” he continues.
To make ends meet, L’Abidine—once Dhafer L’Abidine the football star, and Dhafer L’Abidine the professional model—became Dhafer L’Abidine the dishwasher in a foreign land, collecting pint glasses and bussing tables.
“That was the job. But to do that when you’re almost 28 and when you’re ready for something else is really hard. I used to be in Premier League in Tunisia and then I was washing dishes! But I said to myself, that’s the way forward. If I want to make something with my life, I just have to find a way of doing it. I have to continue.”
Back home in Tunisia, his mum and dad were eager for updates, expecting each call to be the news that he’d landed a huge role and was finally going to be the movie star that he seemed destined to be. He knew he couldn’t share his doubts, and so each call was full only of the good news.
“I had to make sure they feel secure about me being here, even though I was going through a tough time. I was trying to protect them. When you are away, you know your parents will worry about you. Even though it wasn’t easy, I had to be sure they were comfortable, but at the same time, this is your mummy and daddy, your brother and sister. You want to be able to open up to them, but I couldn’t tell them everything. It was so hard to find that balance,” says L’Abidine.
When L’Abidine hit 30, with some luck, things started to change. Bussing tables at night enabled him to attend drama school in Birmingham, and he slowly started booking roles one after another, eventually landing a regular role in the hit BBC soap Dream Team in 2002. He followed that up with roles in big ticket films The Da Vinci Code and Children of Men.
“That was a big turning point for me. For the first time, I didn’t have to work in a pub. Finally it felt like something I could make a living from,” he says.
Finally, he could throw the apron away.
Dhafer L’Abidine the bus boy was now Dhafer L’Abidine the actor.
Act IV: The Actor
In Children of Men, perhaps Alfonso Cuarón’s most enduring masterpiece, L’Abidine had his first major film role. He soaked up the experience, learning everything he could from Michael Caine and Clive Owen, as well as keeping a keen eye on Cuarón, as in the back of his mind he wondered if he could someday do the same.
“I just loved seeing the actors work, the preparation before the scenes, the insane levels of focus. It was a huge scale and effort for things that would play out in maybe 10 or 20 seconds on screen. There was so much preparation that goes into all of that, so much discipline. Every detail is important. That was really eye opening for me,” says L’Abidine.
L’Abidine started noticing something about himself, too. Without him even knowing it, that shyness he thought he would never get rid of was disappearing. He was becoming comfortable with himself in a way he didn’t think might ever come.
“Acting allowed me to be carried away and express myself. I could be confident. I was still an introvert at first, but progressively I learnt what I was capable of doing. I thought I knew who I was when I was playing football, but I wasn’t fully comfortable in my own skin then. I am now confident as an actor,” says L’Abidine.
Something else happened, too. Something he hadn’t planned on when he left the Arab world behind. He found himself going back to the Middle East, booking roles across the region, and in the process became one of the biggest stars of Arab film, headlining the most popular films and television shows of Egypt and beyond.
He wasn’t just an actor. He was a superstar. But even then, he wasn’t fully satisfied.
Deep down, as he grew more comfortable with who he was, he started to come up with some stories of his own. He wrote a screenplay in his late 30s, and when that didn’t pan out, he put it in the top drawer of his desk and moved on. Again, the story could have ended there.
Act V: The Filmmaker
The more time went on, the harder it was to shake the feeling that he wasn’t doing enough. He couldn’t sit back and coast off his success—he had to push himself further, because he knew that there were stories that other people weren’t telling. He had to tell them himself.
He’d spent years playing very different types of roles in both the West and the East, and the experiences gave him the feeling that there was something missing from both. There were stories in the middle, stories that Arabs could tell about their experiences in the West, often universal stories, that were not being told.
“I’m aiming to use my experience in both places to do that. I wanted to go back down that path and tell the stories I would like to tell, about Arabs in the West. Stories that need to be told. In the West, we are a minority. We are not well represented and the stories you do see of us are not representative of who we are. I want to tell stories in which you’ve got Western characters and Arab characters all living together, stories that an international audience could watch, without it just being about identity,” says L’Abidine.
“It doesn’t matter where the story is, or what language or accent, we all have human stories. I believe that it’s possible to mix those together, and to have interest from both the West and the Middle East rather than live only with their own.”
The idea became Ghodwa—a film heavily tied to Tunisia—that he directed and co-wrote. As he speaks to Esquire Middle East, he’s in the final stages of post-production, and is buzzing with excitement. In his mind, he’s not focused on how it will be received. What matters to him most is that he finally threw himself into his art.
Dhafer L’Abidine, through his five acts, finally knows who he is, and he can see that man in his art reflected back most vividly.
“It took wisdom and experience to understand this. I’m not thinking about the result. I don’t know if it will be successful or not. Honestly, that’s not for me to decide. But what I can decide is to be truthful as much as I can to that story, to give it the best I have,” says L’Abidine.
“Failure has never been a problem for me. The problem is not pushing further to see where you can go. Failure is a part of life. If you don’t fail at one thing, you will fail in something else. That’s where you learn. That’s where you find what your limits are. I have a story and a vision that I wanted to tell, if I don’t tell it no one else will because it’s my story. And really, I had to do it. Whatever the result, I had to stop talking and just get on with it.”
L’Abidine may still struggle, but at this point he never loses hope. He knows who he is, where he’s going, and how he’ll get there.
The hardest part of this act, however, is not what it was back in his dishwashing days—he doesn’t have to call home and lie to his parents any more. The hardest thing in his life now is that, whether he has a good day or bad, he can’t pick up the phone and call his mum or dad, as both are now no longer with us.
“My mother passed away when I was preparing for the film. It’s been quite an intense time, but through all of that, her spirit has been something I’ve been thinking about,” says L’Abidine.
In tribute he called his production company Double A Productions after his parents Ahmed and Aziza. “This is all for them in a way, because without them I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. I hope they’re looking down on me. That is really what’s important to me now.”
His first film is dedicated to his mother, but his career is dedicated to both of them. As he prepares for his next film after Ghodwa (which he will also write and direct) Dhafer L’Abidine is finding comfort in the newfound struggles that directing is bringing him. He’s proud of the man he’s become. And we think his parents would be proud of him too. He’s found himself, and after everything he’s been through, he’s not shy to say it.
Photography by Charlie Gray
Styling by Grace Gilfeather
Grooming by Rebecca Lafford
Production by Jesse Vora
Special thanks to Duke of London
