Many struggle their whole lives trying to catch a glimpse of success, while others just happen to be at the right place at the right time. The Worthy actor Mahmoud Al Atrash falls in the second category.
The post-apocalyptic thriller is directed by Emirati filmmaker Ali Mustafa, in which a small group of survivors are put to gruelling survival tests.
We met a slightly less battered and war-torn Al Atrash, who plays the character of Eissa, at the 13th Dubai International Film Festival.
“You know, when I saw myself on the screen for the first time, I was saying to myself, ‘the dream came true’, because this is my first time acting in the cinema. This is my dream since I was young, but I never thought that I would be on screen at a festival like Diff, in an amazing film with amazing crew and director,” said Al Atrash.
The club wielding hero got his part in an unusual manner, too. On his way back home from the mosque one day, he gets a call from a Jordanian director. Mistaking him for an actor, he calls him to an audition. A confused Al Atrash explains to the director that he has never acted in his life and asked the director how he got his number. Only to hear, “I don’t know either, I just had your number on my phone”.
After reading the script and delving deeper into the role of Eissa, Al Atrash found that he surprisingly connected with the unlikely hero.
“The producer Rami Yassin called me, saying you are taking this role. I asked him, ‘okay, what role?’. He said Eissa. I went through the script and when I read it, I felt that this man is inside me as Mahmoud. I felt that he is in there somewhere,” said Al Atrash.
Nerves, of course, got the better of him at the start of filming.
“I entered the set, I was really nervous and everyone is looking at me like, ‘this is the hero of the movie?’. He should be professional or something like that, and I’m nothing like that,” he said. “Ali [Mustafa] was like a big brother to me, I never felt he was supervising or a boss.”
So, is Al Atrash’s newfound fame a coincidence? Luck? A simple mix-up or maybe nothing short of divine intervention. Whatever it may be, after the on-screen performance we witnessed during The Worthy premier, the rising star is clearly ‘worthy’.
