You really expose yourself when you try and go to up the volume and up the size of your performance.

There's enough of a willingness in the West to do sympathetic movies about Arab roles.

I'm one of the luckiest Arab actors on the planet, because I've done, I think, two of the finest Arab roles that have been out in mainstream cinema for a very long time.

The future of Arab films is absolutely up to Arabs and no one else. They've got the equipment, they've got the will, they've got the talent, now they just need a little bit of history behind them and a bit of cultural relaxation.

I think if you're good and you can persuade people you're going to be able to do that role and ultimately the audience buys it, then it doesn't matter whether you were really a chimpanzee in disguise! You've done it.

You know, I find people with great honesty, bodily, physical honesty, who sit just the way they like to sit, and walk the way they like to walk, and don't come into a room all pumped up, I find them elegant.

I wish everybody was just ethnically ambiguous. It would make life a lot easier.