“Please tell me you’re seeing this too,” was the deadpan reaction of Rami Malek, the star of hit TV series Mr. Robot, when he took to the stage to receive his Emmy award last night.
The opened was a riff on a line from his character, Elliot Anderson, a renegade hacker who suffers from hallucinations caused by mental illness. But it touched on much more than that, too. The 35-year-old is the first non-white actor in 18 years to win best actor in a drama at the Emmys. And his victory is being seen as a milestone for Arabs on TV.
Malek beat the big names of Kevin Spacey, Kyle Chandler and Matthew Rhys to win, in a victory that Vanity Fair said “breaks the white male antihero trend”.
For many Arab-Americans, the win was huge news. After years of Arabs being commonly typecast in stereotypical and sometimes offensive roles in TV and film, Malek’s win felt like a game-changer.
Best part of Arab American Rami Malek winning Best Drama Actor in #Emmys.
His role has nothing to do with terrorism pic.twitter.com/X2mfTegMhS— Khaled Beydoun (@KhaledBeydoun) 19 September 2016
Mr. Robot is written, directed and produced by Sam Ismail, who’s also Egyptian-American. It’s also notable that Malek’s character wasn’t based in any way on his heritage. "I play a young man who is, like so many of us, profoundly alienated," he said as he continued with his speech. It’s a sentiment that many could relate to.
Rami Malek. I needed him when I was an Arab-American teenager and people called me a camel and threw things at me in school.
— Randa Jarrar (@randajarrar) 19 September 2016
Imagine telling this kid he could win an Emmy in theory. pic.twitter.com/3xPOdpG54h
— Muhammad Ali (@Mohjo09) 19 September 2016
In Mr. Robot, Malek’s character is set on disrupting the structures that govern how we see the world. In real life, he might just be doing that too.
Bethan Staton
