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CairoScene
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Nicolas Mouawad Lives for the Role Not the Rerun
Despite a résumé that includes prophets, kings, and the burdened overthinker, Nicolas Mouawad insists his acting career was an accident. When Lebanese actor Nicolas Mouawad isn't toggling between an alarming range of linen shirts as the perennially anguished Karam in Al Thaman - a melodrama known to cause emotional vertigo and the spontaneous drafting of 3am texts you'll later deny - he's singing in Turkish. In a tuxedo. Beside, naturally, Turkish singer Aylin Yeliz. For a brief but magical moment, he was also exceptionally easy to find - just follow the faint aroma of Earl Grey along the Australian coastline. There, in what was possibly the last functioning civilisation on Earth in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mouawad was seen in animated conversation with Mad Max director George Miller, Idris Elba, and Tilda Swinton. Whether they were dissecting the nuances of cinematic apocalypse or debating which edition of Stanislavski's 'An Actor Prepares' offers the most existential bite remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that Three Thousand Years of Longing - a harrowing supernatural tale film starring all three - debuted shortly thereafter. Interpret that as you will. Nicolas certainly would. He's very reachable - available on WhatsApp with the ease of a friend abroad who texts back promptly, punctuates liberally with red heart emojis, and deploys exclamation marks with the unapologetic gusto of someone unburdened by irony. Correspondence definitely doesn't feel like liaising with a screen actor. And it's all intentional. Despite a résumé that includes prophets, kings, narcissists, and the occasional romantically burdened overthinker, Nicolas Mouawad insists his acting career began more or less by accident. 'I never wanted to be in front of the camera,' he explains. 'I was shy. I loved math. I watched Spartacus with my dad on Sundays. That was the gateway drug.' It tracks. A child quietly obsessed with physics, but emotionally destabilised by 1960s gladiator cinema, grows up to master four languages and cry convincingly on cue. The acting epiphany arrived, predictably, via Shakespeare. Mouawad found himself performing Richard III at university and walked off stage a changed person. 'It was the first time I felt that kind of electricity,' he says. 'A beautiful, terrifying kind of joy.' He didn't run off to L.A. or start referring to himself in third person. Instead, he did what any dutiful Lebanese son with theatrical leanings and anxious parents would do: he double-majored in civil engineering and theatre. Because in the Arab world, emotional expression is important - but so is concrete income. What separates Mouawad from the method crowd is in part his growing international resume but predominantly his refusal to treat any character, no matter how ethically bankrupt, as a cautionary tale. 'I never judge them,' he says. 'Even if they're manipulative or monstrous - I have to believe them. I have to understand them. Otherwise, no one else will.' It sounds noble, and it is, but it also involves the kind of emotional mining that would make your therapist visibly sweat. This intensity comes with a cost. When playing Karam, a man diagnosed with cancer in Al Thaman, Mouawad drew from his own life: both of his parents died of the same illness. 'It was brutal,' he says. 'I had to go back there emotionally.' Later, in one of the many side conversations this question then prompted, he added quietly, 'Being an actor, sometimes, is not healthy.' The comment was tossed off like a fact - like calling a double espresso strong - but it stuck. The truth is, the body doesn't always know the difference between grief remembered and grief rehearsed. Some roles linger like old bruises. His portrayal of Abraham in His Only Son stayed long after the cameras stopped. 'I wanted him to feel human,' Mouawad explains. 'Not untouchable. Not mythic. Just a man doing what he believes is right - and barely holding it together while doing it.' Grief isn't the only thing that sticks. Fame does too - trailing him with the persistence of an overdue utility bill. He swears he doesn't enjoy recognition. 'I like the work. Not the noise,' he shrugs. He splits his time between Lebanon, Egypt, Istanbul, and whichever city has most recently asked him to learn an entirely new alphabet. He acted in Russian, sung in Turkish, and delivered lines in Arabic, English, and what can only be described as the universal dialect of beautifully managed despair. 'I'm not doing this to impress anyone,' he says. 'I just get bored easily. Learning keeps me awake.' Mouawad claims to have little interest in being 'known,' which is a curious position for someone regularly recognised in public and aggressively complimented in grocery stores. 'I never feel established,' he admits. 'Even when people say it, I don't believe it. My mind's always in rehearsal for something else. I can't afford to stand still. I'm afraid if I stop, I'll start believing my own bio.' Still, he's learned the art of pressing pause. After three projects back-to-back, he's taken a self-imposed sabbatical. 'No scripts. No shoots. Nothing for four or five months,' he tells me. 'I want to be home.' By 'home,' he means with his wife and young daughter, who recently joined him for a six-month shoot in Istanbul. Fatherhood has recalibrated him. The provocateur is still there - 'If everyone says they love white, I'll say I love black' - but so is the softness that comes with realising you are now the person someone else will remember as their childhood. 'She won't be little forever,' he says. 'And I don't want to be the guy who sends a teddy bear from set and calls it parenting.' When I ask what he'd say if, twenty years from now, she told him she wanted to act, he doesn't flinch. 'I'd be her biggest supporter. Because I know exactly what it feels like to not have one.' Of course, all of this - fatherhood, fame, the Turkish ballads - sits in tension with how the public imagines him. 'People think they know me because they've seen me cry on TV,' he says. 'But they don't know who I am at 2 AM, when everyone's asleep and it's just me and the noise inside my head.' So who is that person, we ask. He pauses, then offers a half-smile. 'A dreamer. With insomnia.'
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Waited for death': Ex-detainees recount horrors of Sudan's RSF prisons
For almost two years, Emad Mouawad had been repeatedly shuttled from one Sudanese paramilitary-run detention centre to another, terrified each day would be his last. The 44-year-old Egyptian merchant spent years selling home appliances in neighbouring Sudan before fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed his Khartoum home in June 2023, taking him and six others into custody. "They accused us of being Egyptian spies," he told AFP, back home in Kafr Abu Shanab, a quiet village in Egypt's Fayoum governorate southwest of Cairo. The RSF has accused Egypt of involvement in the war, which Cairo has denied. "We were just traders, but to them, every Egyptian was a suspect," said Mouawad, recalling how his captors searched their phones and home. They found nothing, but that did not spare the group, who were blindfolded, crammed into a truck and driven to one of the RSF's many detention sites in Khartoum. It was two months into the RSF's war with the army, and hundreds of thousands of people had already fled to the Egyptian border, seeking safety. "We couldn't just go and leave our things to be looted," said Mouawad. "We had debts to pay, we had to guard our cargo at any cost." - 'Nothing but skeletons' - In a university building-turned-prison in the Sudanese capital's Riyadh district, Mouawad was confined with eight other Egyptians in a three-by-three-metre (10-by-10-feet) cell without any windows. Other cells held anywhere between 20 and 50 detainees, he said, including children as young as six and elderly men, some of them in their 90s. Food, when it came, "wasn't food," said Ahmed Aziz, another Egyptian trader detained with Mouawad. "They would bring us hot water mixed with wheat flour. Just sticky, tasteless paste," Aziz told AFP. Water was either brackish and polluted from a well, or silt-filled from the Nile. Disease spread unchecked, and many did not survive. "If you were sick, you just waited for death," Aziz said. According to Mouawad, "people started losing their immunity, they became nothing but skeletons." "Five -- sometimes more, sometimes fewer -- died every day." Their bodies were often left to rot in the cells for days, their fellow detainees laying beside them. And "they didn't wash the bodies", Mouawad said, an important Muslim custom before a dignified burial. Instead, he heard that the paramilitaries just "dumped them in the desert". - Stripped of humanity - Mouawad and Aziz were among tens of thousands vanished into prisons run by both the RSF and the rival Sudanese army, according to a UN report issued earlier this month. Since the war began in April 2023, activists have documented the detention and torture of frontline aid workers, human rights defenders and random civilians. The UN report said the RSF has turned residential buildings, police stations and schools into secret prisons. Often snatched off the streets, detainees were beaten, flogged, electrocuted or forced into backbreaking labour. The army has also been accused of torture, including severe beatings and electric shocks. Neither the army nor the RSF responded to AFP requests for comment. Soba, an infamous RSF prison in southern Khartoum, may have held more than 6,000 detainees by mid-2024, the UN said. Aziz, who was held there for a month, described a living nightmare. "There were no toilets, just buckets inside the cell that would sit there all day," he said. "You couldn't go two weeks without falling sick," Aziz added, with rampant fevers spreading fear of cholera and malaria. At night, swarms of insects crawled over the prisoners. "There was nothing that made you feel human," said Aziz. Mohamed Shaaban, another Egyptian trader, said RSF guards at Soba routinely insulted and beat them with hoses, sticks and whips. "They stripped us naked as the day we were born," Shabaan, 43, told AFP. "Then they beat us, insulted and degraded us." - 'Complete impunity' - Both the RSF and the army have been accused of war crimes, including torturing civilians. Mohamed Osman, a Sudanese researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that while "the army at least has a legal framework in place", the RSF "operates with complete impunity". The paramilitary force "runs secret facilities where people are taken and often never seen again", Osman told AFP. Despite their ordeals, Mouawad, Aziz and Shaaban were among the luckier ones, being released after 20 months in what they believe was a joint intelligence operation between Egypt and Sudan's army-aligned authorities. Finally back home in Egypt, they are struggling to recover, both physically and mentally, "but we have to try to turn the page and move on", said Shaaban. "We have to try and forget." maf/bha/ami/lb
Arab News
31-03-2025
- Arab News
'Waited for death': Ex-detainees recount horrors of Sudan's RSF prisons
KAFR ABU SHANAB, Egypt: For almost two years, Emad Mouawad had been repeatedly shuttled from one Sudanese paramilitary-run detention center to another, terrified each day would be his last. The 44-year-old Egyptian merchant spent years selling home appliances in neighboring Sudan before fighters from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed his Khartoum home in June 2023, taking him and six others into custody. 'They accused us of being Egyptian spies,' he told AFP, back home in Kafr Abu Shanab, a quiet village in Egypt's Fayoum governorate southwest of Cairo. The RSF has accused Egypt of involvement in the war, which Cairo has denied. 'We were just traders, but to them, every Egyptian was a suspect,' said Mouawad, recalling how his captors searched their phones and home. They found nothing, but that did not spare the group, who were blindfolded, crammed into a truck and driven to one of the RSF's many detention sites in Khartoum. It was two months into the RSF's war with the army, and hundreds of thousands of people had already fled to the Egyptian border, seeking safety. 'We couldn't just go and leave our things to be looted,' said Mouawad. 'We had debts to pay, we had to guard our cargo at any cost.' Cell without windows In a university building-turned-prison in the Sudanese capital's Riyadh district, Mouawad was confined with eight other Egyptians in a three-by-three-meter (10-by-10-feet) cell without any windows. Other cells held anywhere between 20 and 50 detainees, he said, including children as young as six and elderly men, some of them in their 90s. Food, when it came, 'wasn't food,' said Ahmed Aziz, another Egyptian trader detained with Mouawad. 'They would bring us hot water mixed with wheat flour. Just sticky, tasteless paste,' Aziz told AFP. Water was either brackish and polluted from a well, or silt-filled from the Nile. Disease spread unchecked, and many did not survive. 'If you were sick, you just waited for death,' Aziz said. According to Mouawad, 'people started losing their immunity, they became nothing but skeletons.' 'Five — sometimes more, sometimes fewer — died every day.' Their bodies were often left to rot in the cells for days, their fellow detainees laying beside them. And 'they didn't wash the bodies,' Mouawad said, an important Muslim custom before a dignified burial. Instead, he heard that the paramilitaries just 'dumped them in the desert.' Living nightmare Mouawad and Aziz were among tens of thousands vanished into prisons run by both the RSF and the rival Sudanese army, according to a UN report issued earlier this month. Since the war began in April 2023, activists have documented the detention and torture of frontline aid workers, human rights defenders and random civilians. The UN report said the RSF has turned residential buildings, police stations and schools into secret prisons. Often snatched off the streets, detainees were beaten, flogged, electrocuted or forced into backbreaking labor. The army has also been accused of torture, including severe beatings and electric shocks. Neither the army nor the RSF responded to AFP requests for comment. Soba, an infamous RSF prison in southern Khartoum, may have held more than 6,000 detainees by mid-2024, the UN said. Aziz, who was held there for a month, described a living nightmare. 'There were no toilets, just buckets inside the cell that would sit there all day,' he said. 'You couldn't go two weeks without falling sick,' Aziz added, with rampant fevers spreading fear of cholera and malaria. At night, swarms of insects crawled over the prisoners. 'There was nothing that made you feel human,' said Aziz. Mohamed Shaaban, another Egyptian trader, said RSF guards at Soba routinely insulted and beat them with hoses, sticks and whips. 'They stripped us naked as the day we were born,' Shabaan, 43, told AFP. 'Then they beat us, insulted and degraded us.' RSF war crimes Both the RSF and the army have been accused of war crimes, including torturing civilians. Mohamed Osman, a Sudanese researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that while 'the army at least has a legal framework in place,' the RSF 'operates with complete impunity.' The paramilitary force 'runs secret facilities where people are taken and often never seen again,' Osman told AFP. Despite their ordeals, Mouawad, Aziz and Shaaban were among the luckier ones, being released after 20 months in what they believe was a joint intelligence operation between Egypt and Sudan's army-aligned authorities. Finally back home in Egypt, they are struggling to recover, both physically and mentally, 'but we have to try to turn the page and move on,' said Shaaban. 'We have to try and forget.'
