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Features
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A Man of Many Middle Eastern Faces
Actor; writer; director; translator. Ashraf Barhom, the charismatic wild card co-star of The Kingdom, is evidently only just getting started.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 4:30 PM
By Richard Horgan
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Lester Cohen/WireImage.com
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Enjoying his first Hollywood premiere
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The 2001 film in which Palestinian actor Ashraf Barhom made his debut as an actor, Yadon Ilaheya (Divine Intervention), went on to win the Jury and FIPRESCI Prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. His 2003 drama The Ninth Month earned him a nomination as Best Actor at his country’s equivalent of the Oscars. And the incendiary 2005 drama Paradise Now, in which Barhom played a mystic higher up in the terrorist chain of command, became the first movie from Palestine to ever be submitted and-or nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film.
In other words, positive things tend to happen to movies starring Barhom that are released in odd-numbered years, which is good news for The Kingdom, Peter Berg’s new action thriller arriving in theaters September 28th. As the Saudi Arabian police Colonel helping a team of American FBI agents (Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, Jason Bateman) investigating the terrorist bombing of a U.S. army compound, Barhom has delivered in his first American project a Best Supporting Actor caliber performance. It will be up to his studio, Universal, and his new Hollywood agent, Endeavor, to put that notion in front of Academy voters this coming awards season.
But in speaking with the affable and very modest actor, it becomes clear that none of the above projects hold a candle to the level of artistic challenge of his current project: translating Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from English to Arabic for a production Barhom hopes to direct back home in Israel early next year. It will be staged at the Tarshesha/Fringe Theater, the same place where he made his theatrical directorial debut in 2004 with a production of One.
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Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com
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Lots of improvisation
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“I’m working very hard,” Barhom tells FilmStew during a recent one-on-one interview. “I started translating it two years ago and I have another three or four months to finish it. I am using lots of dictionaries and yes, there are words that exist in English that do not exist in Arabic.”
The Bard has played an important part in the shaping of Barhom’s acting skills. While a student of Middle Eastern studies at Haifa University, he starred in school productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. In The Kingdom, Barhom and Jamie Foxx develop the kind of convivial relationship enjoyed by Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. But unlike the task of performing Shakespeare, Barhom says working with Foxx involved lots of improvisation.
Another difference Barhom cites within the context of The Kingdom is that unlike many of his theatrical peers, the actor sees no need to contemporize a Shakespeare play or recast it against a different historical and political background to get the message across. The meanings, he insists, are clear in each play and do not need to embellished or reframed.
“When you do Shakespeare, you can see where you are as an actor,” suggests Barhom, who cites Macbeth as his personal play favorite. “It’s like a meter; you will know how much you need to be better.”
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Gregg DeGuire/WireImage.com
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An actor who works at a different level
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It’s all a rather unlikely vortex for Barhom, who grew up as a teenager with no aspirations towards an acting career and who, along with the works of actors like De Niro and Pacino, was a big fan of Stallone, Van Damme and the TV series The Incredible Hulk and MacGyver. Separate from the simple genius of Shakespeare, Barhom says he was able on the set of The Kingdom to quickly appreciate the simple genius of co-star Chris Cooper, with whom he shares two personal scenes.
“Chris Cooper works at another level,” he marvels. “When I look at his work, it’s very hard for me to know how he’s doing it. It’s invisible and very deep, and as a person he has a good soul.”
“When I worked with Chris, I felt like, ‘Wow, how much can I be good, because I’m in front of him,’” he adds. “He affects you as a partner and gives you good energy. I felt like I was working with a father. Chris works very quietly and I don’t know how he does it, which is why I find him so interesting.”
In interviews, Barhom is careful not to reveal his personal religion, not because of some studio edict but rather due to deeply held personal belief. As a native of a valley clearly divided into Jewish and Arab halves, he wants to be able to continue to move freely between roles such as the Palestinian terrorist in Paradise Now and the Saudi Arabian law enforcement officer in The Kingdom.
“I am a human,” he declares. “When you are alone, you don’t define yourself politically. It’s just a label. I know I am a man who will live for 70 years, and after that I will die and I will go up. I believe in God and that I am going to go to another life. It’s not what I think politically, it’s what I am living here for, what I serve. Do I serve money, political ideas, human ideas? It’s about what I serve.”
In Barhom’s case, he is a human who comes from the Palestinian village of Mallot Tarshea, has three sisters-no brothers, traveled to the U.S. for the first time because of The Kingdom and cannot travel to the real Saudi Arabia because of his country of provenance. He is also a human who in the space of the last three years has found his way to a pair of breakthrough film opportunities. And in keeping with the sentiments expressed above, Barhom says that although he is being offered lots of scripts in the positive glow of The Kingdom, he wants to be very careful about the types of additional English language projects he chooses.
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