In November, at the Ajyal Film Festival in Doha, I had the opportunity to interview the actor who played one of the most imperious characters in the HBO universe: the one who rules over the one who rules everyone in "Succession." In-person, Hiam Abbas feels just as towering. When I shared a photo of her from the interview, a friend said, "I am now convinced they developed the Marcia character based on Hiam Abbas herself." As our conversation revealed, this is not too far from the truth.
While her role in "Succession" might be the one that made many of us became aware of Abbas’ powerful presence on the screen, her acting career stretches many years back. This is a fact I was more or less aware of through my adventures in Arab language film, but I really started appreciating her commitment to her art after I watched Abbas’s daughter Lina Soualem’s documentary "Bye Bye, Tiberias." Abbas’s acting career started in Palestine and then continued much further afield- she has worked with directors including Yousry Nasrallah, Hani Abu Assad, Steven Spielberg, Jim Jarmusch, Denis Villeneuve, Terrence Malick and Ridley Scott.
When I came to the interview, I wanted to start with the early days when Abbas was a theater actor. I asked her about the different experiences of acting on the stage and for the camera, and she said that this was a question she never knew how to answer. She explained that acting on stage and acting for the camera requires two different mental states – that there are two different things "facing you" in each medium: the audience on stage and the camera on set. "One has a very different relationship with the camera; it either loves you or it doesn’t," she said assuredly, and it’s clear that the camera loves Abbas. When I suggested that this relationship with the camera might differ from set to set, such as in Hollywood versus in the Arab world, she insisted that once decided, the relationship with the camera remains the same, wherever she may be filming.
I tried to understand the different experiences she must have on different sets and asked about what kind of difference it makes when she is acting in different languages. To this, as well, she had a holistic approach: "I do not feel a difference. It is not the language but the connection you have built with the character that determines your acting," she said and anticipated one of my questions "I have also played different accents in Arabic." Her versatility is something that her fans have commented on and I felt like I was finally learning one of Abbas’s mysteries: "Acting in different accents is a lot of work. I get coaching. I sometimes get them to record the lines so I can listen to them in that accent before I start filming." This conversation about playing women from all over the Arab world swiftly brought me to my own burning question: "Where is Marcia from?" She smiled: "We have a theory about where she is from, but we don’t want to ruin the mystery," she said. I didn’t push the point because it is generally agreed that Marcia, Roy Logan’s third wife, is Lebanese with her super worldly ways and her French-accented English. Was it Jeremy Armstrong’s choice that Marcia should be where she should be from? Abbas doesn’t like to speculate on Armstrong’s intentions, but she revealed that Marcia was written as a "foreign wife" for the pilot episode – in keeping with the predilections of Rupert Murdoch, whose family has inspired the plot of the show. It is the viewers’ good luck that the series’ producers went with Abbas, and it is easy to see that she has helped develop the character sheerly by her acting, bringing so much depth of character to any conversation that she has, with a slight bent of the head, pause in a sentence and dry smile- as happened in this interview. A character that may have remained more or less marginal has taken real flesh and become central, bringing both mystery and a touch of old-world class against which American follies unfold in "Succession."
Another internationally popular character that Abbas plays is Maysa Hassan, Ramy’s mother in the Hulu series "Ramy." In this role, she portrays a more readily identifiable character: an Arab mother trying to find her way in the U.S. When I asked about the difficulties of being an Arab actor in Hollywood, Abbas was quite optimistic about Arab representation. She said that there are now more nuanced characters, like the one she plays in "Ramy." When I then asked her if recent anti-Palestinian sentiment in the American and European film industries has set the clock back on the way Arabs are represented – and whether that has affected the kind of roles she has been offered – she said she hasn’t experienced anything yet. She expressed confidence in the younger generation, believing that viewers will no longer accept these stereotypes because they have been exposed to real stories with Arab and Muslim characters. The one change that Israel’s war on Gaza and Palestine, in general, has brought to her work is that the Arab films she wants to act in now face more difficulties: a Lebanese film she was preparing for cannot be shot in Lebanon because of Israel’s attacks and had to be relocated elsewhere.
It has been commented elsewhere that Palestinians, partly out of necessity, have become great storytellers. Abbas’s commitment to making Arabic language films while she has many opportunities elsewhere suggests she is proud to be part of this tradition. As a veteran of the Arab film industry, she is familiar with all kinds of setbacks her art form faces and with future projects that need financial help to get made. However, in all her answers, she insisted on hope and expressed a trust that stories will be told, and Palestinians, Arabs and everyone else whose stories are often told by others will, through cinema, find a way to exist on their own terms.
