Middle East Eye
Last week, it was announced - to great glee - that Egyptian-American actor and Oscar winner Rami Malek will play "a mysterious villain armed with dangerous technology" opposite Daniel Craig in the 25th James Bond film, slated for release next year.
BBC Entertainment tweeted charmingly: “Bismillah! Oscar-winner Rami Malek has been cast as the latest Bond villain." Appearing on “Good Morning America” to discuss the news as the audience applauded and swooned, the Bohemian Rhapsody star remarked that there have been “such great villains in film history”.
But, come to think of it, there’s also such a history of villainising Arabs in film.
Now, it’s not my job to weigh in on the debate about whether Malek’s Coptic Christian identity should prevent him from being claimed by the Arabs.
The fact is that his heritage lies in what is now often referred to as the Arab-Muslim world - and that, regardless of how beloved a Bond villain Malek may be, this is as good an opportunity as any to reflect on Hollywood’s treatment of characters from that world.
A February cover story on Malek for GQ Middle East muses that: “In the West, actors of Middle Eastern descent typically have two options: be ignored, or be stereotyped." This was initially the case with Malek himself, who was "a magnet for one-dimensional roles playing terrorists, brutes, and a smorgasbord of Arab caricatures".
After playing a suicide bomber in the Fox television series 24, Malek says he decided the typecasting was "bullshit" and that he would no longer respond to "any calls that come about playing Arabs or Middle Easterners in a negative light".
Incidentally, 24 was singled out by the late scholar Jack G Shaheen - author of, among other titles, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People - as one of the pioneers of the post-9/11 "vilification process" of America’s own Arabs and Muslims, often portrayed as “clones of Osama bin Laden”.
Both 24 and the Showtime series Homeland, Shaheen wrote, “provid[ed] a means for the national security state to publicise fantasies of an Arab Muslim terrorist threat”.
As for pre-9/11 vilification, Shaheen’s New York Times obituary in 2017 noted that “his analysis found that of about a thousand films with Arab or Muslim characters made between 1896 and 2000, only 12 portrayed them positively”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.
