Oded Fehr has spent a quarter of a century being handed a uniform, a warning and a straight face, and carrying all three with more dignity than the scripts deserve. A good supporting actor rarely given a part worth the name.
Fi1m perspective
In The Mummy (1999) Oded Fehr's Ardeth Bay does what he will spend most of the next twenty-five years doing. He arrives, sets his jaw and issues a warning the film needs to ignore in order to happen. He is not sinister, greedy or ridiculous, which puts him ahead of every other Egyptian in the picture, and he is not given much else. Our review put it as a stern jaw and a warning and little more, and that has turned out to be a fair description of the career.
He came back for Stephen Sommers's sequel, The Mummy Returns (2001), then crossed to the Resident Evil films (2004, 2007, 2012) as Carlos Olivera, the decent soldier whose employer has stopped answering the radio. Television took him for longer stretches: the lead in Sleeper Cell (2005–06), a run of Mossad agents and officers across NCIS, The Blacklist and Covert Affairs, and a Starfleet admiral, Charles Vance, in Star Trek: Discovery (2020–24). Set the parts side by side and they are one part in different hats. Somebody in authority, often from the Middle East, who knows more than the heroes and tells them so.
What he brings to it is a body that looks as though it has done the training the character claims, and he is convincing in a fight. In Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), a film we found to be mostly noise in the dark, he plays the soldier straight, as if the situation were real. The film has no interest in that. It wants running and shooting, and it gets them. Milla Jovovich understood what kind of film she was in; Fehr did not, or would not, and the film leaves him standing there.
The honest reaction, watching The Mummy again, is that we were glad every time he walked back into frame and slightly cross that the film had nothing for him to do once he had. He is the only Egyptian the picture takes seriously, and it treats his seriousness as decoration, the way it treats the sand. That is the career in miniature. He has been trusted with authority for a quarter of a century and almost never with a choice; the guardian guards, the admiral commands, the agent knows things, and the scene moves on to someone who is allowed to be wrong.
He has said that The Mummy "made me into a working actor", and working is the right word: steady, reliable, seldom asked for more. Watch the 1999 film for what he does with almost nothing. Then, if you catch yourself wishing someone would give him a great deal more, you have arrived where we are.
Biography
Oded Fehr is an Israeli actor. He was born on 23 November 1970 in Tel Aviv and trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in England.
Fehr is known for playing Ardeth Bay in The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001). He also appeared as Carlos Olivera in Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) and Resident Evil: Retribution (2012). His television credits include roles in Charmed, NCIS, Once Upon a Time, The Blacklist and Star Trek: Discovery.
