When Disney's live-action Aladdin sailed past a billion dollars at the box office, the obvious assumption was that its leading man would be swept along on the same wave. Mena Massoud tells a more complicated story. Far from flinging open doors, he says, the role's success has in some respects made the work harder rather than easier, the anticipated flood of opportunities never quite arriving.
That candour shapes everything he has to say about Hollywood. His first union role, back in 2011, was as "Al Qaeda #2", and while he believes such parts are written less frequently now, he is clear-eyed about the legacy that lingers. Ever since 9/11, he argues, there has been a persistent narrative that anyone who looks like him has something to overcome before he can simply be cast as himself. He does sense a shift in how North African and Middle Eastern actors are perceived, but he frames it as the beginning of a change rather than its conclusion.
Rather than wait for the industry to reform itself, Massoud has founded the Ethnically Diverse Artists Foundation, which aims to support performers directly. Many artists of colour, he points out, come from immigrant families who do not encourage their children to pursue the arts, and that hesitation stalls careers before they begin. The Foundation offers the practical scaffolding such artists rarely have: headshots, studio space, networking, master classes and equipment, provided a performer can articulate precisely what they need.
Born in Cairo and raised in Ontario from the age of three, he describes himself simply as Egyptian-Canadian, unwilling to choose between the two. The difficulty of being an immigrant, he reflects, lies exactly in that refusal to be one thing or the other. Touring for Aladdin through Europe, Jordan and Mexico only deepened a conviction that humanity is fundamentally alike; what differs, he insists, is the unequal opportunity to learn, create and prosper. The Egyptian household of his childhood, once a source of teenage exasperation, now reads to him as a gift, never more so than when he found himself speaking Arabic with everyone he met in Jordan.
His discipline, he says, rests on a line he repeated to himself in theatre school and still does daily: even if it takes his whole life, he is going to make it as an actor. His advice to ambitious performers of colour is bracingly plain. Do not give up, and be prepared to work harder and longer than the person beside you, because art and business are two things that do not naturally belong together. His veganism is bound up with the same sense of purpose: through Evolving Vegan he encourages plant-based eating as, in his view, the single most effective everyday choice an individual can make for a dying planet, more so even than cycling to work or fitting solar panels.
His next chapter is Reprisal, a neo-noir Hulu thriller in which he plays Ethan Hart, the man chosen by the character Doris to help her seek revenge. Hart, he suggests, may hold the most power of anyone in the story while having little idea how to wield it, making his arc very much a journey. The series, he promises, sets out to break convention at every turn, in its style, its music and its casting, a fresh take that feels of a piece with the actor describing it.
