These are strange times for Ramy Youssef. On the one hand, he is about to appear in his first big movie role, in the delightfully surreal and sexed-up fantasia Poor Things. After his hit comedy drama series Ramy, it looks like the beginning of a new phase in his career. On the other hand, the Israel-Gaza war is dominating the news, and as one of the most prominent Muslim entertainers out there, Egyptian American Youssef is very much in the spotlight.
These two worlds are colliding the day we meet in December. Youssef is tangentially in the headlines as a result of Taylor Swift having attended his standup show in New York a few days previously, with celebrity friends Selena Gomez and Cara Delevingne. Youssef is donating all the proceeds from the remainder of his standup tour to the Palestinian NGO American Near East Refugee Aid. This was too much for the rightwing presenter Megyn Kelly, who declared that Swift “owes Israelis and Jewish Americans an apology”, and urged people to “boycott her events until she issues one”, telling Swift “when it comes to talking about those issues again, you clearly know nothing”.
Never mind that it was actually Youssef doing the talking, not Swift – it’s an illustration of how difficult it is for him to simply enjoy his rising stardom. As we talk at a London hotel, saccharine Christmas music playing in the background, the conversation often lurches between lighthearted and deadly serious, although anyone who has watched Ramy will know that Youssef is well accustomed to this mode.
“I don’t pay much attention to it,” he says of the Megyn Kelly stuff, leaning in close on the sofa. “I’m not interested in the act of helping innocent people getting politicised, and then it turning into this whole other thing, so I don’t really give it much time.” He describes Swift as “a new friend” – “she’s really funny, actually, and really cool.”
It’s easy to assume that Youssef is just like Ramy, the character he plays on TV, but five years and three seasons on, the two identities are diverging ever further. “Ramy” is an aimless but likable New Jersey millennial, still living with his immigrant parents and working for his gem-trader uncle, forever trying to reconcile Muslim and western values, but usually too weak to transcend his shallow desires (those puppy-dog eyes make him quite the hit with the ladies). “The show is really just about higher self and lower self,” Youssef says. “It’s about who we want to be and who we actually are.”
In real life, 32-year-old Youssef is now a writer, producer and director (as well as episodes of his own show, he has directed an episode of The Bear), as well as an actor and a comic. He has won awards and critical adulation, he’s hanging with the likes of Swift and the model Bella Hadid (who had a guest role on Ramy), and now he’s on the big screen punching Mark Ruffalo and having his ear licked by Emma Stone.
Any apprehension Youssef might have had about stepping on to a movie set was dispelled during three weeks of “crazy theatre games” that Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos arranged before shooting. “The rehearsal for all of us knocked out any impostor syndrome we might have had,” he says. “By the time we got to shoot, it almost felt like you had embarrassed yourself so much over the last three weeks that there was nothing to be afraid of.” What kind of games? “You know, physical stuff. Rolling around on the floor, doing an interpretive dance on cue, things that you would be a little shy to do in front of your improv group, and now you’re doing them in front of Willem Dafoe.”
He describes making Poor Things as “a surreal dream”, which is a fair description of the movie itself. Adapted from Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, and set in a parallel 1880s Europe, the film is a singular mix of gothic horror and absurdist comedy, with an avowedly feminist stance. Stone’s shameless heroine, Bella, is an experiment of Dafoe’s mad scientist, who sets off on her own journey of intellectual and sexual self-discovery. Youssef plays the essentially sweet-natured Max, who is assigned by Dafoe to first study Bella, then marry her – though things don’t go at all to plan. “There’s a really fine line between him being sincere and him being creepy,” says Youssef of his character. “And I felt, OK, I think I know how to handle this.”
Despite being largely set in Britain, Poor Things’ main stars are all American. “We had this great moment on set where Christopher Abbott [who plays Alfie] was like, ‘Dude, it’s always the Brits playing the Americans. And now we’re doing it!’. He was so happy. It was like, finally, we got one on the board.” Youssef nails the English accent impressively. One of his best buddies is a British Cypriot from Barnet, north-west London, he explains: “I realised when I started working on the accent, ‘Oh, I’m copying him.’”
Acting beyond Ramy was always part of the plan. “I’ve been really fortunate how well the show’s been received, but I think in the back of my head I also knew, yeah, my name is Ramy and I’m playing Ramy,” he says. “And that there’s this whole other realm of acting where you really just step into a character.”
When he was 20, Youssef dropped out of university to enrol in acting school in New York, but his early career failed to launch. “When I was auditioning before, no one ever really knew what to do with me,” he says. “It would be like, ‘You’re not quite ethnic enough to do the ethnic thing.’ And then also, ‘We’re not sure if you’re the friend or if you’re the lead.’ There was always this ambiguity about what I could do.”
This was in the US in the noughties, when largely the only roles available to vaguely “Arab” actors were terrorists. Youssef was 10 years old when 9/11 happened, and as a Muslim American, life changed overnight. He later incorporated his childhood memories into a flashback episode of Ramy, including nightmares about Osama bin Laden, and the concurrent emergence of his adolescent sexuality. “9/11 and me jerking off for the first time happened in the same year,” he once said.
He began doing standup when he was in high school, with friends including Steve Way, who plays one of his best friends in Ramy and has muscular dystrophy. “I actually sometimes don’t know how funny I was as a kid,” he muses. “I was maybe a bit more in my feelings than funny. I think the humour came by surprise to me when I started making things. I loved videotaping things and editing them, making music videos and writing little sketches with my friends. And little by little, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I should be in them.’ And then I started to kind of find this other side of myself, but I’m probably the least funny person in my family. My mom is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. She can joke between Arabic and English and French and cut up the whole room.” His parents were both born in Cairo but met in New York, where his grandfather was a UN interpreter for 30 years, before settling in New Jersey.
The adversity of his upbringing at least gave him a trove of material. In his first appearance on network TV, on Stephen Colbert’s show in 2017, he began by saying: “Hi, I’m Ramy Youssef. I’m Muslim … like, from the news,” before joking that when he turned 30 he expected to get “a Hogwarts letter from Isis”.
But one of the strengths of Ramy the show is how it avoids such easy laughs in favour of depth and authenticity. For non-Muslim viewers, it’s a window into a reality and a point of view that had never really been represented in mainstream media – the complexities of family, integration, prejudices, sex, sexuality, gender, guilt and shame. Some have accused the show of stereotyping, but Youssef says he never sought to speak for an entire culture or religion: “It’s almost impossible to do that. There’s too many things to represent. It’s too diverse. I probably could only say I’m representing the act of being really messy while seeking.”
For all its specificity, though, there is much that is universal about Ramy. “The amount of people I’ve had come up to me who go, ‘Dude, your family’s just like my family in Ohio, or in Jamaica,’ or, ‘Your uncle [Naseem, who is a rabid antisemite] is just like my uncle, except he’s Jewish and hates Muslims,’” says Youssef.
“That stuff is everywhere. America is so diverse in its thinking, its liberalism and conservatism, and it’s not really sectioned off to any area. Go 30 minutes out of any city, and you’re gonna find what you think is really far from you.” Still, he says, that doesn’t stop anyone from “sectioning off” groups of people on every scale, from supposedly crime-ridden neighbourhoods to Israel and Palestine.
Many of Youssef’s co-stars and crew have Palestinian roots, including Mohammed Amer (who was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents), who plays one of his friends, and the Succession star Hiam Abbass, who plays his mother, who is French Palestinian. Or, indeed, Hadid, who has Palestinian Dutch heritage. “I think a lot of people feel incredibly unsafe,” he says. “A lot of people have lost family, between our cast members and American friends who have family in Gaza.”
Youssef made an episode of Ramy’s third season in Israel and Palestine in mid-2022, working with Palestinian actors and crew members. It was a politically tense time even then, he recalls. The Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh was shot and killed by Israeli forces while they were there – the entire production attended her funeral.
In the resultant episode, though, the geopolitics are just a backdrop to Ramy’s selfish mission to cross into East Jerusalem to hook up with a Tinder date, brandishing his American passport at border security to try to jump the queue. “The Palestinians are pissed at him, the Israelis are pissed at him, and the other thing I really wanted to highlight was just his privilege as an American,” says Youssef. “I wanted to put a spotlight on dynamics that … obviously they pain me and I see something skewed, but at the same time, how do I link that to my own complicity with it? Because I think that’s always the most interesting way to look at a problem: like, how do I shift this dynamic?”
This is what he’s always seeking to do, he says: “I always think about, how do we personalise these large, global things that feel like they’re out of our hands? What government dynamics exist in my friendships and in my family?”
On a personal level, at least, everything seems to be going in the right direction for Youssef. When he was 17, he was taping flyers to lamp-posts to get people to come to his gigs; now he’s the A-listers’ hot ticket. His cultural reach is still expanding. As well as acting, he is shooting a second standup special for HBO, which is due out next year. Mo, the sitcom he co-created with Amer, has been renewed for a second season. He is also excited about an animated series he is making for Amazon with the South Park writer Pam Brady. It is called #1 Happy Family USA, and again, it is a comic take on a Muslim American family desperately trying to fit in in the early 00s. “When we started making this show, I thought that I was examining the past; in the last couple of months, I’ve started to feel like I’m examining now.”
Reality comes crashing back into the conversation. After the horrific Hamas attacks last October, Islamophobia is almost worse than it was post-9/11, Youssef says. He finds it shocking “the way that people are so quick to dehumanise and vilify and think the worst of Arab men – what they think they can do to other people and what they think they do to Arab women. And the way that people can look at people who, especially in societies like London or America, are your neighbours, they’re your doctors, they’re serving you food, they’ve been next to you, side by side. But you’re ready to believe almost anything about them. I’m surprised and I’m not surprised.”
But he refuses to give in to despair. “I’m such an optimist,” he says. “I know that there has been this kind of reaction right now: everyone’s feeling really hurt, horrible things have happened to innocent people and it has created this shocked nervous-system response. I trust that we’re still going to be able to look each other in the eye and have real, grounded conversations that are not fully rooted in fear. And I think that’s where art comes in, because it helps cut through fear.”
• Poor Things is released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from Friday 12 January
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