Yasmine Al Massri: I was born a Palestinian refugee – I didn't use any acting here

Star speaks to The National about drawing on heritage and hustle for Syrian refugee film The Strangers' Case

Amira (played by Yasmine Al Massri) with her daughter Rasha (Massa Daoud) in The Strangers' Case. Photo: The Reel Foundation

“I am too dramatic for Hollywood,” laughs Yasmine Al Massri, the American-Lebanese actress.

She's sitting in a small room in Valletta, the capital of Malta, during the recent second edition of the Mediterrane Film Festival. A couple of days later at the closing ceremony, Al Massri won the Golden Bee prize for acting for her performance in the Syrian refugee drama The Strangers’ Case. Too dramatic for Hollywood? Well, the studios would be advised to sit up and take notice.

Already, Al Massri, 45, estimates she is the first Arab actress to twice become a regular series star on American network television – featuring in the shows Crossbones, with John Malkovich as the pirate Blackbeard, and FBI drama Quantico.

“No Arab actors have done this before,” she says. “Crossbones showed America a princess who was John Malkovich’s right hand. How many Arab women got to play that?”

Born in Beirut to a Palestinian refugee father and Egyptian mother, Al Massri was raised during the Lebanese Civil War but considers herself fortunate to have been educated in France before she moved to the US.

“I’m lucky and I’m a hustler,” she says. “That’s the refugee in me. It teaches me not to take anything for granted, and also I don’t buy into the [nonsense] of the industry. I don’t care about who’s who. I care about the art, the craft.”

She tapped into her refugee background to play Amira in The Strangers’ Case, a paediatric surgeon working in Aleppo who, together with her daughter, becomes a central figure in this harrowing ensemble story set around the refugee crisis.

“I’m always saying to myself: ‘Don’t brag about what you did,’” she says. “You were born a refugee. You know that civil war. You didn’t use any acting skills here.”

Co-starring France’s Omar Sy, the film is written and directed by American-born Brandt Andersen, who expanded his 2020 short Refugee, starring Al Massri, into this feature-length opus.

“Seeing the Syrian revolution starting in the streets with young kids, holding flowers in their hands, and seeing that beautiful dream become a nightmare, for me and for many people around the world, this is a shocking human tragedy,” she says.

A committed activist off camera, Al Massri’s attention has naturally been focused on the Israel-Gaza conflict of late.

“My Instagram is like a grave,” she sighs. “It’s like death news because most of the people I follow are journalists, human rights advocates and even those who don’t do any politics, they are today only talking about that, because how can you talk about anything else? How can you talk about your face cream? How can you talk about your vacation on a yacht or on an island? How can you talk about your yoga class?”

Palestinian representation has been uppermost in her mind for years. After completing Lebanese director Nadine Labaki’s 2007 breakout movie Caramel, in which she played one of the beauty salon workers at the heart of the story, her big break came in famed artist Julian Schnabel’s Miral (2010), which starred Frieda Pinto as an orphaned Palestinian during the Arab-Israeli conflict. "I was actually heartbroken because the movie didn’t go anywhere,” she says. “Julian was treated as a traitor. The Jewish New Yorker who's telling the Palestinian girl’s story.”

She remembers seeing a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press, the group that traditionally voted on the Golden Globe awards, berating the writer Rula Jebreal and telling her she’d “fight” the movie. “Nobody showed up to the premiere," she says. "Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz were the only two stars who came to the premiere in LA. Bono ... he gave us his music but he wanted out. Angelina Jolie apologised about not being able to attend the premiere. The things I saw with Miral broke my heart.”

Thankfully, it didn’t derail her career – and she’s remained deeply connected to making films in the Mena region. Al Massri recently completed the untitled film by Caroline Labaki, sister to Caramel’s Nadine, about a group trying to make the "first erotic film in an Arab country", she reveals. Then there’s Thank You for Banking With Us, – “a Palestinian Thelma and Louise” – and the last film to be shot in the West Bank before the outbreak of war in Gaza. She’s also working with Annemarie Jacir on “the biggest Palestinian movie ever produced”, which she’s predicting for Cannes next year.

With ambitions to direct, Al Massri is now aiming to get her voice heard even more, producing two features and a TV show.

“I asked myself: 'How can I monetise my Hollywood stardom and bring that to Egypt and bring the two together … like a bridge between the two markets?'" she says. One of the movies is about an Egyptian belly dancer from the 1940s, the golden age of Egypt, whose identity remains under wraps for now.

Just maybe Al Massri isn’t too dramatic for Hollywood, after all.