Waleed Zuaiter spent years playing the colonel, the suspect and the terrorist's son, and gave each of them more thought than the scripts asked for. The leads, when they came, show what had been going to waste.
Fi1m perspective
In The Spy (2019) he is Amin al-Hafez, a Syrian colonel in Damascus who takes to a charming new friend and never looks at him properly. It is a small part in a six-episode series and Zuaiter does not inflate it. He plays a man enjoying being liked, which is harder than playing a man being fooled, and it is one reason the Damascus half of the series held us when the Tel Aviv half did not. We wished the series had spent more of its evenings with him and with Alexander Siddig's security chief; those were the scenes in which the writing had something to do.
He came to the screen late, after years on stage in Washington and then New York, and the screen did what it tended to do with an Arab-American actor in the late 2000s. There was Mahmud Daash in The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), a turn in Homeland (2011), the son of a terrorist leader in London Has Fallen (2016), and a long run of guest and recurring television parts in between. The roles were the men the hero has to get past. He is bilingual in English and Arabic and he was, by most accounts, better than the parts required, which is not the same as being noticed.
The turn was something he arranged himself. He produced Omar (2013), Hany Abu-Assad's thriller about life on the West Bank, and played Agent Rami in it. Baghdad Central (2020) gave him a lead, a former Iraqi police officer searching for his daughter after the invasion, the kind of part he had spent a decade standing next to. The same year he was Koba, a Georgian drug kingpin and arms dealer, in Gangs of London, which suggests the menace is still available when asked for. We have not reviewed those, so we will say only that the shape is plain. With Joana Zuaiter he then founded FlipNarrative to develop Middle Eastern and Arab-American stories; his line on it was that "it's not just about showing different faces on the screen. It's also about hearing their voices."
The recent work is mixed in the way supporting careers are. In The Girlfriend (2025) he is Howard Sanderson, a part in a series whose supporting characters we found thin, and he is not the reason to watch it. High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam (2026) casts him as Saddam Hussein; he grew up in Kuwait and was there when Iraq invaded in 1990, so he knows the man's shadow at first hand. Twenty years as the man in the hero's way, and now the leads have started to arrive. More than one of them he had to produce himself.
Biography
Waleed Zuaiter is an American actor and producer of Palestinian descent. Born in Sacramento, California, he grew up in Kuwait before returning to the United States to study philosophy and theatre at George Washington University. He began his career in stage productions in Washington, D.C., Berkeley and New York City.
Zuaiter has appeared in films including The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009), London Has Fallen (2016) and 20th Century Women (2016), and in television series such as Homeland (2011), The Blacklist (2013), Altered Carbon (2018) and Gangs of London (2020). He produced and co-starred in the Oscar-nominated film Omar (2013). In 2025 he played Howard Sanderson in the series The Girlfriend.
