Amir El-Masry is convincing at full swagger, but his quieter work gives us more reason to follow him. We rate his restraint and physical confidence; Giant shows how much an underwritten leading role can still limit an actor.
Fi1m perspective
In Giant (2026), Amir El-Masry's Prince Naseem Hamed starts the entertainment before he throws a punch. The raised chin, the talk and the entrance all belong to a man who intends to be noticed, and El-Masry makes the early Sheffield scenes good company. He understands the pleasure of this showmanship without making every moment an invitation to admire him. We rate the actor more highly than the part Rowan Athale has written for him.
His early work in Egyptian comedies was followed by a part in The Night Manager (2016). Limbo (2020) then gave him the lead as Omar, a Syrian musician awaiting asylum on a Scottish island. His restrained performance holds the ensemble together, asking for a different kind of attention from Hamed's conspicuous self-confidence. It gives us more reason to follow him than an ability to reproduce a famous boxer's manner, however accurately.
The problem in Giant is that Athale gives Pierce Brosnan's Brendan Ingle the fuller character, while Hamed's wants are too often explained by other people. Brosnan is the best thing in the film, but El-Masry has considerably less to work with. We were moved by the scene in which Athale lets the two actors hold a room without a cut, with El-Masry restless and Brosnan almost still. Athale should trust him with more scenes like it. Elsewhere, we learn far more about what the trainer thinks of Hamed than what Hamed thinks about anything.
He has spoken about the pressure to accept limited Arab or Muslim roles, a useful reminder that the size of a part tells us little about what an actor can do with it. His training to play Hamed shows a willingness to do the physical work. We would like to see that effort matched by more writing that lets us understand the person being played. Start with Limbo; leave Giant until El-Masry interests you enough to forgive the script.
Biography
Amir El-Masry is an Egyptian-British actor. Born in Cairo in 1990 and raised in Acton, west London, he studied criminology and sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London, before training at LAMDA, from which he graduated in 2013.
He began his career with roles in Egyptian films, including the 2008 comedy Ramadan Mabrouk Abu El Alamein Hamouda, for which he received the Best Movie Debut award at the Egyptian Cinema Oscar Festival. He later appeared in international productions such as Rosewater (2014), The Night Manager (2016), Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and The Crown (2022).
El-Masry won the BAFTA Scotland Award for Best Actor in a Film for his performance in Limbo (2020) and was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in 2020 and a Screen International Star of Tomorrow in 2021. He is cast as Prince Naseem Hamed in the biopic Giant (2026).
