Saudi star Yasin Ghazzawi on ‘King of the Ring,’ ‘The Office,’ and seizing the moment
DUBAI: Yasin Ghazzawi has waited a long time for his big moment. The Saudi actor spent the better part of a decade knowing that he had talent and sure that he was capable of so much more, but had no pathway to follow. Then, in 2018, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture launched a series of free workshops to help develop the country’s nascent creative community, and the young performer started skipping work to attend each one.
Now, as the star of “King of the Ring,” currently showing in cinemas across the Gulf, a cast member of MBC’s Arabic-language remake of “The Office,” and with another major global streaming show on the horizon, Ghazzawi’s moment has finally come.
“I’ve learned that to succeed, you have to seize the opportunity. But if you’re not ready for it, you’ll never hold onto it for long. I have to give credit to the people that helped get me here — the government, the acting instructors and the workshops, because that’s when it all started to happen for me, and for a lot of people,” Ghazzawi tells Arab News. “The world is about to witness the rise of a lot of great Saudi talent.”
Ghazzawi loves an underdog story. It’s partly because he’s always seen himself as one, even now, taking each rejection, failure or false start as another step in his journey to inevitable success.
“My whole life I’ve been an underdog,” he says. “Big guys tend to get counted out, and I’m here to count them back in. I really feel like manifestation got me here, too.”
Over the hours that he tells Arab News his tale, there are too many ups and downs to recount in detail. There was the singing teacher in California that told him he had generational talent and tried to connect him with Miley Cyrus’s voice coach only for Ghazzawi’s father to tell him there was no future in it, and pushing him to complete a business degree instead. There was a failed audition for “The Voice” years later; the viral videos with Telfaz11 that got him noticed but didn’t earn him the momentum he’d hoped for; the projects that didn’t pan out; and the years spent waiting for the phone to ring.
When the phone did finally ring, it was at a time he least expected it — the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Ghazzawi was locked down at home with his immune-compromised mother, working a day job, and unsure when the film industry might pick back up again. He says he watched Jack Black in the wrestling comedy “Nacho Libre” on repeat with his siblings, idly hoping something like that would come along for him.
The call came from a director friend. “Are you still acting?” he asked Ghazzawi. “Because I’ve got a script here. I can’t tell you anything about it, but the character reminds me so much of you.”
The script was for “King of the Ring.” It’s the story of Musaab, a young overweight Saudi man who struggles to get anyone to believe in him as much as he believes in himself. He dreams of becoming a pro wrestler. The project needed a hero in more ways than one, as the day they were set to begin filming in Abu Dhabi, the original lead actor dropped out, leading to a frenzied dash to find a replacement.
“I’m thankful that happened now,” says the film’s director Mohammed Saeed Harib. “Because Yasin came in and he brought the character with him. Musaab was inside of Yasin all along, waiting to get out. The raw emotion he brought with him is what defined the movie.”
Ghazzawi quit his job, said goodbye to his family and found himself on set just days later. He dived headfirst into the role, even training to be a pro wrestler himself.
“Yasin told me, ‘I don’t want a stunt double. I want to do the moves myself. I want to prove to you — just like this character is proving in the film — that I can do this’,” director Harib recalls.
For Ghazzawi, that drive to go above and beyond was more than just dedication to a role.
“Growing up overweight, I’ve spent my whole life with people counting me out,” he says. “Even last week, I was playing a pickup basketball game and the neighborhood guys wouldn’t pass me the darn ball. I just shrugged, grabbed the rebound, hit a fast break and scored on my own. It’s always like that. Doing my own stunts was part of the same fight.
“Plus, there’s no way they were going to find a big guy like me to be my stunt double, so it would have looked super fake. Can you imagine?” Ghazzawi adds with a laugh.
A year after the film wrapped production, as the actor waited for the world to see what they had created, he landed a role on the MBC remake of “The Office.” Ghazzawi played Ziad, the localized version of the beloved character Kevin, played by Brian Baumgartner in the long-running US hit, which was itself a remake of the 2001 BBC original, in which the character was called Keith.
While Ziad only had a few lines in each script, Ghazzawi wasn’t going to let such a huge opportunity slip by. He would throw in improvised lines and actions as they filmed that left the rest of the cast and crew struggling to keep up, changing the shape of the series in the process.
“I knew that if I said something, the camera would pan to me. So I thought, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? I get cut? I get told off? I can deal with that.’ Because the best thing that could happen is they start reworking the entire scene around my new contribution, which is exactly what started happening,” he explains. “I would go from one line to a full scene, and I think some of the other actors didn’t like that.”
While the show was not an instant hit on MBC Shahid, where it was placed behind a paywall, it has slowly built a cult following, with the infamous “fire drill” scene, in which the cast destroys the set, going viral across the world, garnering tens of millions of views.
“When that scene blew up on TikTok and Twitter, it really lifted me,” Ghazzawi says. “People were legitimately laughing across the world at a Saudi TV series, and I don’t think that’s ever happened before the same way. I was so proud of what we created.”
While it’s unclear if the series will get another season, Ghazzawi’s days of waiting for his big break are over. Next up is a global streaming series coming in 2024 — he can’t yet give details — as well as numerous projects in development that he’s writing with his friends and colleagues — building on the skills he learned in those free ministry workshops.
“Every day I’m getting better as a writer and as an actor, and there’s still so much to experience at the same moment that the world is coming to us. I just saw a friend opposite Gerard Butler in Kandahar, and if he can do it, so can I,” he says. “Get me a Leonardo DiCaprio movie. Get me a Will Smith movie filmed in NEOM. Let’s go. I’m ready. Saudi is ready.”