‘No one knew what to do with me’: Ramy Youssef on privilege, fear and his friend Taylor Swift
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 selfdiscovery. 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, northwest 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