The 9th edition of El Gouna Film Festival (Oct. 15-23) may be celebrating Mona Zaki’s past, but the Egyptian film star is far more interested in what she’s yet to do.
Honored with the festival’s Career Achievement Award at the opening ceremony, Zaki, who has already built a career spanning more than three decades, hasn’t even turned 50. Sitting down with Variety on the shores of the Red Sea, she speaks about that prolific career less as a completed body of work than a continuous process of reinvention. That ongoing transformation has required her to repeatedly shed audiences’ expectations of who Mona Zaki should be. “I get bored easily with myself,” she shares.
Looking back, Zaki says two lessons in particular stand out: learning the power of saying “no” and finding the confidence and willingness to express herself, both personally and emotionally. The latter, she confides, was something acting itself helped teach her.
“You just have to open up,” she reflects. “Your emotions are important to be heard, and it’s okay. Part of your healing is saying what you feel.”
Zaki entered the industry young, first in theater, before moving into television and, ultimately, the silver screen. Early on, she became closely associated with the “girl next door,” an image that increasingly felt at odds with both the woman she was becoming and the kinds of characters she wanted to explore.
“I started to kind of feel like I’m going there doing the same thing in every different project,” she recalls. “How boring is that? I needed to shift.”
That turning point came with Yousry Nasrallah’s 2009 drama “Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story” (Ehky Ya Shahrazad), written by the late Wahid Hamed, which saw Zaki take on the role of a television host whose program examines the experiences of women navigating romance, health, everyday life, and the expectations placed upon them by Egyptian society.
The departure from Zaki’s familiar screen persona drew intense backlash, with audiences questioning what had happened to the “girl next door” they had come to know. The response shook her enough that she turned to Hamed with concerns about facing the film’s promotional tour. He encouraged her to stand behind a choice she had made out of love for the work, advice that helped Zaki confront the resistance to seeing her move beyond the roles that had defined her early career.
For Zaki, the experience marked the beginning of a struggle that has followed her throughout her career, that of finding roles that allow women to address subjects Egyptian cinema has historically treated as difficult or off-limits. “Censorship, talking about taboos, things that are not okay most of the time, especially for women to talk about,” remain among the challenges she continues to face. “I’m still living in that struggle even now. It can be very difficult to find a meaningful script.”
While she believes the landscape has advanced over more than 30 years, Zaki remains deeply frustrated by the gap between the talent of Egypt’s actresses and the opportunities afforded them. “It breaks my heart that most of them are not taking the chances they deserve and the topics they would love to talk about and the rights they want to stand for.”
Her own connection with audiences is something she has learned to negotiate over time. “It’s a relationship. You work on it like any other relationship in your life,” she explains. Part of that relationship, she believes, means establishing boundaries around her freedom to evolve as an artist.
“I have the right not to feel bored and sick of myself doing the same thing because I’m not corporate, I’m an artist,” she stresses. “Art is about freedom, it’s about change, it’s about trial and error.”
With each role, Zaki starts by building a life for the character beyond what exists in the script. She works with an acting coach on every project, drawing on different techniques to construct the character’s history.
One of the most important parts of that process, she explains, is imagining a character’s life before the audience ever meets her. Zaki might close her eyes and picture the woman she’s playing at seven years old, in her childhood home with her mother, building memories and emotional associations that will never appear on screen but are critical to the performance. “I don’t have to say it, but I can make people feel it the way I felt it.”
That method was put to a different test with “El Sett,” Marwan Hamed’s biopic of Umm Kulthum. This time, Zaki was building a character from the life of one of the Arab world’s most revered cultural figures, with decades of history and public memory with which to contend. She plunged into what she calls “crazy research,” watching every piece of footage she could find and repeatedly listening to a rare two-hour radio interview that became one of her most important references.
“The whole internal emotions are the imagination of the writer and me.” While the facts of Umm Kulthum’s life are immutable, Zaki still had to find the woman behind them.
To bridge that gap, Zaki imagined the parts of Kulthum’s life no archive could relate: the emotions, relationships and private struggles that might have shaped her from childhood. The character stayed with Zaki long after cameras stopped rolling, and she found it difficult to sever that connection after filming wrapped.
“I came out of the project feeling that I’m a 70-year-old woman. I’m serious, this was not a joke.” For months, she had taken on not only the physical transformation into Kulthum, but also the emotions and experiences of a woman decades older than herself. Fully returning to Mona Zaki proved disorienting. “I think my whole face changed after that,” she recalls. “I couldn’t accept myself in the mirror.”
Some of Kulthum has proven difficult to shake. “I’m trying to get rid of her,” Zaki muses. “I only have a few leftovers, gladly. Honestly, I don’t want to feel like I’m 70 and I’m not there yet.”
Asked what she looks for in a role now, after more than three decades of acting, Zaki doesn’t hesitate. “Reality. Honesty. That would just take my heart.”