British actor left Hollywood to fight ISIS – now he’s marooned in Belize
SAN IGNACIO, Belize — It sounded like death made airborne in those brutal days in Raqqa.
Bullets screamed across the ruined streets in swarms thicker than flies on roadkill. Machine guns rattled.
And the rocket-propelled grenades. Those were the worst. They hammered down with awful concussive thuds, smashing cinder block into choking clouds of powder
For days in that sweltering October of 2017, Michael Enright crouched in an apartment building turned battle station, staring into the maw of the last Islamic State stronghold in Syria. Enright was the most unlikely of soldiers, pinned down there alongside his Kurdish and expat militia brothers, dodging bullets, blasting away with his Kalashnikov rifle, wondering whether these might be his last moments on earth.
“It felt like the devil himself was breathing fire on me,” Enright says.
Less than two years earlier, Enright – a Hollywood actor by way of Britain – had been tooling around Los Angeles in an aging black Porsche 911 and hobnobbing with movie stars at awards ceremony after-parties. Enright, who bears a passing resemblance to actor Russell Crowe, had appeared with Tom Cruise in the movie “Knight and Day.” He was guest starring as a bad guy on the television series “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Since the 1980s he had been living the working actor’s dream life in the entertainment capital of the world.
Yet, one day in 2015, in defiance of common sense and the tearful urgings of his friends, he decided to leave all that behind. Never having fired a gun at another human being, he embarked on an odyssey at the age of 51 that could have sprung straight from the imagination of a Hollywood scriptwriter.
His strange, sinuous meanderings have taken him on two harrowing tours of battle in Syria as a volunteer with the formerly U.S.-backed Kurdish militia. They also have thrust him into the byzantine pathways and switchbacks of the U.S. immigration system and, by his account, the wilds of international spy networks. His decision to overstay a U.S. tourist visa three decades ago and start a new life as an American has now made him unwelcome to come back to the only nation he considers home. So far, it hasn’t mattered that he risked his life fighting an American enemy.
Because he fears returning to the United Kingdom, where some British volunteers with the Kurdish militia have been arrested and accused of consorting with terrorists, he finds himself, essentially, a man without a country. Unable to work, his money dwindling, he wanders, flopping for the past two years in slum apartments or couch-surfing in Belize and elsewhere in Latin America in the homes of people he meets in the streets or online. He hauls a thin pad to sleep on, a backpack, a handful of tank tops and shorts, and a clunky old laptop, hoping against hope that someone, anyone, will help him get back to Los Angeles.
Through more than two dozen interviews with his friends, fellow soldiers and others, as well as video and other documentation of Enright’s battlefield exploits, The Washington Post has been able to confirm nearly every aspect of the actor’s account. His saga has now captured the attention of Washington power players and veterans advocates who have been agitating to end Enright’s exile and bring him home.
The details of his trajectory offer an unusually intimate glimpse into the forces that motivate men and women from around the world to throw themselves into conflicts not their own. Unlike mercenaries who flood into war zones for profit, Enright joined the fight for no pay, a throwback to the storied dramas of yore when the famed British writer George Orwell and others fought in the Spanish Civil War.
As Enright tells it, his war experiences were all about balancing an account. The ledger he holds in his head is particular to that of some successful immigrants – he says he wanted to repay America by helping to vanquish one of its terrorist enemies.
On screen, he’d often played the bad guy, leveraging his ability to shoot a menacing stare at the camera. In real-life, he yearned to be a good guy.
Enright envisions a final scene yet to be shot, one in which this master of small character roles steals the show by unlocking the secrets of a murderous, fanatical cabal: He’s gathered intelligence about the Islamic State on the battlefields of Syria – computer memory cards, IDs, letters – that he hopes will unlock clues about the movements of the group in the Middle East and in the United States, he says. The improbable warrior/spy just needs the U.S. government to validate and value what he’s found – enough to look past his immigration-law transgressions.
Despite his frustration, Enright, now 56, his hair cropped short and graying, has repeated the same phrase over and over in hours of interviews with The Post: “I don’t regret a thing, mate. I’d do it all over again.”
He’d grown up hard in a hard section of Manchester, where he says his father, a roughneck with a temper, committed suicide while battling cancer. Enright was 18.
He scraped together a living driving a taxi, he says, and a Pakistani immigrant taxi man named Mustafa became a kind of surrogate father. Mustafa – he’d never forget that man or that man’s name.
All Enright wanted to do was go to America. He wanted to make American money. He wanted to kiss American girls. He wanted to be an American, for it was here that he thought he could not just reinvent himself – but also invent himself.
When he was 19, he says, he boarded a plane and went to New York, entering the country on the first of several tourist visas that he would overstay for his entire adult life.
Arriving in New York, he got a job as a busboy at a restaurant near the World Trade Center. The actor Kirk Douglas came in once, and one of the famed actor’s companions gave Enright a $5 tip.
He’d gotten the acting bug as a teenager in England, and perhaps it was inevitable that he would find his way to Hollywood. His Manchester accent had marked him as a member of the lower classes in Britain, cutting off possibilities, but in Los Angeles it was the opposite. It opened doors, especially in auditions.
While trying to get himself established, he ran a youth hostel in Venice Beach. Carefree tourist girls came and went, looking for fun. There were plenty of girls to kiss.
“I was living this very hedonistic life,” Enright says during an interview in the remote town of San Ignacio in Belize, where he’s lived for months.
His first break as an actor came when he auditioned for the role of a boxer in a soft drink commercial. His competition couldn’t punch; Enright, who had been pounding a speed bag at a boxing gym in Watts, got the part. The residuals paid his rent for months.
Television roles trickled in. He played an Irish Republican Army soldier on the television series “JAG.” He picked up more commercials.
Enright always has been impulsive, his friends say. In the 1990s, he flew to Rwanda after the genocide there, volunteering at an orphanage. The work appealed to his Christian notion of obligation, that human beings are commanded to alleviate suffering. He slipped back into the United States, once again, on a tourist visa.
A few years later, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, set him on a course that eventually took him to Syria. For days, Enright and his friends say, he couldn’t stop watching the news.
“I cried every day,” Enright says.
He told his friends that he wanted to join the U.S. Army and fight terrorists in Afghanistan. Here, he reasoned, was a chance to make a payment toward the debt he felt he owed to the United States. His friends talked him out of it.
It became the biggest regret of his life.
In Hollywood, Enright wasn’t getting rich, but made a modest living. He got a gig as a Russian mobster on the television series “Kitchen Confidential.” He played a deckhand in the film, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” appearing in a scene with Orlando Bloom.
“On ‘Law & Order,’ I was once dissolved in a vat of acid!” he says, his eyes twinkling.
For Russian roles, his résumé said he was Mikael Enrightski. For French roles, he was Michel Henright. His accents were so convincing that casting directors wouldn’t figure out he wasn’t French or Russian or German until his scenes were already in the can.
“Well,” Enright deadpans, “I speak 32 languages. Only a few words in most of them. But 32 nonetheless.”
He lived in a part of West Los Angeles known for gang violence. He had his own brush with the law in 2003 when he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon after the car he was driving struck and injured a man who Enright says threatened him during a traffic incident. Enright was acquitted and exonerated, according to court records.
People have a tendency to want to adopt Enright. Mike Chapman, who met him while working with a spirituality group for Hollywood professionals, started taking him home to spend time with his family.
“He was kind of like an uncle to our small children,” Chapman says in a recent interview.
Orna Cohen, one of Enright’s workout clients, folded Enright into her family, as well. At a Passover dinner at her house one year, she looked up and saw Enright, whom friends describe as a non-demoninational spiritual seeker, in tears. She walked outside with him.
“He was sobbing like a baby,” Cohen recalls. “He looked at me and said, ‘Orna, I feel God.’”
In August 2014, Islamic State troops swept into the Sinjar district in northern Iraq, an area that was home to the Yazidi, an ethnic Kurdish minority. Hundreds of men were killed in a genocidal massacre. Women were taken captive and subjected to rape and forced marriages.
Half a world away, Enright once again found himself obsessed with news: “I sort of became an ISIS junkie.”
That same month an Islamic State terrorist beheaded the American freelance journalist James Foley, boasting of the killing in a gruesome video. The killer was later identified as a British man of Arab descent who became known as “Jihadi John.”
Enright sought out a British friend in Los Angeles, a dashing, globe-trotting sort who goes by the professional name Rob Lancaster, who has worked as operative in the shadows of international conflicts and danger zones.
At a Santa Monica bar where their favorite football team, Manchester City, was playing, Enright told Lancaster that he couldn’t stop thinking about the atrocities at Sinjar and the beheading of Foley.
“I’m going to right that wrong,” Enright declared.
Lancaster had heard this sort of thing from Enright before, but he’d always dismissed it as a transitory emotional reaction. He’d tell him, “Don’t go, you silly sot.”
But Enright was insistent, and Lancaster concluded there was nothing he could do – except help.
Soon thereafter, Lancaster pointed his friend to a Facebook page.