“I always say that acting chose me; I didn’t choose it,” Ahmed Malek explains over a video call. In the distance, the sound of a train underscores the vibrant urban backdrop of Cairo, Egypt, from which he hails and where he currently resides.

It was there, during his childhood, that the actor began impromptu performances for friends and family, putting on puppet shows during intimate gatherings. “My uncle saw one and said, ‘Oh, I see potential there.’ He took me to a casting director, and I started getting roles.” After being a “child actor” and, as he points out, not a “child star,” Malek’s small parts blossomed into a full-fledged career when he landed a major role in a popular Egyptian TV show, El-Gamaah [The Brotherhood], during his teenage years. At least in his own country, Malek had become a household name.

He was a fixture of the recent Egyptian cinematic wave, eventually taking him to an international level when he starred in The Furnace, an Australian historical drama about the 1890s gold rush, as well as The Swimmers, which tells the story of two Syrian refugees crossing the Aegean Sea, and a standout performance in BBC’s Boiling Point—a fictionalized look inside the high-pressure dynamics of the modern culinary world.

In his 29 years of life, Malek has only occasionally doubted acting as his purpose. “At one point, I was really into politics and even thought about switching to it,” he says. “I also considered studying philosophy, but ultimately acting was the constant.” That said, he has found ways to infuse his acting career with politics, finding it particularly important to use his newfound platform to tell geopolitically charged stories from an Egyptian perspective, rather than those from the West. Therein, Malek’s career has become one of the most pivotal and captivating in a polarized world where most Westerners see Middle Eastern stories told by, well, Westerners.

“I used to want to make it completely in Western cinema,” he says. To an extent, he’s already accomplished this. “I took it for granted, my career here in the Middle East, and now, with what’s going on in the world, I want to make it even bigger here…as Middle Eastern actors, and as Arab actors, we’re facing a huge amount of Islamophobia, just a huge backlash against our culture. We just want to present who we are and to say that we’re human.”

To further paint the picture, actor Mena Massoud [also of Egyptian heritage] told The Daily Beast in 2019 that he hadn’t received a single audition after starring in Disney’s incredibly successful Aladdin. “In a room of Caucasian guys, a director might be like, okay, let’s see, like, two guys who aren’t caucasian,” he told the publication. “And maybe they’ll be the wildcard choice. Massoud competed against 2,000 actors for the titular role in a film that grossed over $1 billion at the box office. That he would struggle at all in Hollywood thereafter feels impossible, and yet he did.

For Malek, one of the life-changing periods that allowed him to combat this type of pigeon-holing came from his two years at RADA [England’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts]. “The whole course was actors creating their own work,” he recalls. “I had the chance to do three plays in London, two of which I wrote and directed. That gave me this urge to generate my own work. I don’t need to sit and wait for auditions, even though, of course, I do auditions. So I came back here and developed a whole film from scratch.”

Now, Malek spends a great deal of his time telling his own stories or focusing on subjects from perspectives Western audiences are rarely privy to. For example, he is working on a film about a Deliveroo driver in London, England. “People don’t really hear about economic refugees,” he says. “You always hear about war refugees because it’s dramatic and you can gain more sympathy with war, or with a natural disaster.” He was inspired in part by his own time in London, notably while at RADA, during which deliveries were a big part of his daily life. “There are these shopping sites and everyone is just going crazy buying things because they’re so cheap, but you don’t see the other end, and no one wants to see it, where workers are like, dead tired on the floor. No one wants to see children packing shoes. You just want to wear your new hoodie and get it in two days.”

Beyond the desire to represent his heritage in cinema, Malek’s drive comes from a much more human place. “I’ll be a bit personal—I had a bit of an inferiority issue when I was a child, and I’ve been very insecure. It benefited me as an artist because being an actor, it’s the complete opposite of that,” he says. “You get all the attention, and so it humbled me a bit. But then, at the same time, I was still insecure because I thought, ‘I’m not doing enough. I have to do more, I have to do a lot more.’ So this hunger is actually kind of a fuel for me.”

He was also inspired by other Egyptian actors paving the way toward Egyptian visibility in the West, like Rami Malek. “He’s taking the whole community with him,” Ahmed says. “I feel he is more of a movement than someone who is just looking out for himself as an individual. He’s a great example of a fellow Egyptian actor and a multi-dimensional artist.”

To borrow Massoud’s phrasing, he too is “a wild card,” forging his own path rather than following Hollywood’s lead or the expectations of the global film industry. Instead, he draws on his unique perspective, storytelling abilities, and immediate surroundings. With his proven talent and wealth of narratives that feel both refreshing to Western audiences and authentic to his roots, Malek’s career is becoming one of artistic excellence embedded in profound anthropological significance.

This cover story appears in the pages of VMAN 54: now available for purchase!

Photography Alvaro Beamud Cortes

Fashion Anna Trevelyan

Creative Director / Editor-in-Chief Stephen Gan

Grooming Ben Talbot (The Wall Group)

Prop stylist Josh Stovell

Digitech Sacha Phillips

Production The Production Factory

1st Photo assistant Simone Triacca

2nd Photo assistant Oran Eggerton

Stylist assistants Leonie Dennett, Keisha Adams, Nkechi Managwu, Timmy Taiwo

Prop stylist assistant Dan Wilson

Retouching Camillo Bernardi Studio