Omar Metwally

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Omar Metwally (born April 10, 1974 in Queens , New York City ) is an American actor .

Life

The son of an Egyptian and a Dutch woman was born in Queens but moved with his family to a suburb of Orange County (California) at the age of three . Metwally received his bachelor's degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley and was a member of the Berkeley Repertory Theater there, where he has appeared in a number of performances. With the aim of starting a serious career as an actor, he later switched to the renowned American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco , where well-known actors such as Annette Bening , Nicolas Cage and Denzel Washington completed their training. Metwally graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in acting and began appearing in plays in San Francisco and the Bay Area in the late 1990s , including as the young Ebenezer Scrooge in the ACT production of Charles Dickens ' A Christmas Carol and as Mario in Marivaux ' The Play of Love and Chance at the Repertory Theater of San José (both 1998).

After Metwally had worked in the plays Gum (1999) and Summertime (2000) at the San Francisco Magic Theater , he moved to his native New York in 2000, where he appeared in several off-Broadway plays for the Rude Mechanicals Theater Company such as The Winter's Tale , Company (both 2000) and The Bacchae 2.1 . After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , Metwally's Arab appearance was in the foreground and he was subscribed to the role of the evil Arab. He played this in 2003 in the Chicago production of Tony Kushner's Homebody / Kabul , which is set against the background of the US bombing of a terrorist camp in 1998 in Khost , and in Sixteen Wounded , with which he was directed in 2004 by Tony Award winner Garry Hynes made his Broadway debut , which marked his breakthrough as a stage actor. In the controversial play by Israeli Eliam Kraiem, set in Amsterdam in the 1990s , Metwally acted as a young Palestinian Arab and suicide bomber who befriends a Jewish baker and Auschwitz survivor (played by Judd Hirsch ). For the role of Mahmoud, Metwally was nominated for the prestigious Tony Award as best supporting actor and had already received the praise of the New York Times at the world premiere in 2003 alongside Martin Landau at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven (Connecticut) , for the intensity of his Had described acting performance as "dazzling". He was equally successful in 2005 with Richard Kalinoski's romantic drama Beast On The Moon , in which he and Lena Georgas gave a young couple a face who had survived the Armenian genocide and tried to start a new existence in the American Midwest around 1920 build up.

In parallel to his work at the theater, Omar Metwally made his debut on American television in 2002 with Allan Blumberg's crime film New Americans . In 2005 he appeared in the cinema for the first time with a supporting role as a druggist in Lewis Helfer's comedy Life on the Ledge , who in the same year (after his role in Sixteen Wounded ) played the part as a Palestinian terrorist and PLO leader Ali in Steven Spielberg's several times Oscar nominated drama Munich followed. After guest appearances in the US series Grey's Anatomy and The Unit (both 2006) followed in 2007 roles in the US cinema productions City of Your Final Destination by James Ivory and Gavin Hoods Machtlos . Directed by Ivory, Metwally starred alongside Anthony Hopkins , Laura Linney and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a US student traveling to South America to research the biography of a Latin American writer. In the thriller Powerless , he starred as the husband of Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon, suspected of terrorism , who disappears without a trace on a flight from South Africa to Washington DC. In 2008 Metwally was honored with the Chopard Young Actor Award at the 61st Cannes Film Festival .

Filmography (selection)

Plays (selection)

  • 1998: A Christmas Carol
  • 1998: The Game of Love and Chance ( The Game of Love and Chance )
  • 2000: The Winter's Tale
  • 2000: Company
  • 2001: The Bacchae 2.1
  • 2003: Homebody / Kabul
  • 2004: Sixteen Wounded
  • 2005: Beast On The Moon

Awards

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b cf. Avoid the stereotype . In: Berliner Zeitung, September 11, 2006, issue 212, media, p. 30.
  2. ↑ cf. Klein, Alvin: Theater Review: when Best Enemies Become Friends . In: The New York Times, Feb 23, 2003, Section 14CN, Column 1, Connecticut Weekly Desk, 8.
  3. ↑ cf. Isherwood, Charles: Armenian Couple Find Healing After the Killings . In: The New York Times, April 28, 2005, Section E, Column 1, The Arts / Cultural Desk, Theater Review, p. 5
personal data
SURNAME Metwally, Omar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION US-American actor
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1974
PLACE OF BIRTH Queens , New York City