Sarah Taibah is trying to live in the moment

Sarah Taibah has never known what to do with labels. When people pin them on her, she feels inauthentic. When she pushes back, she feels pretentious. So she aims for something in between – an insistence on honesty, even when it’s messy, even when it’s misunderstood.

“I know I can’t bring everything – some things are too personal, of course – but I try to bring as much of myself on screen as I can,” she says.

It can unsettle people who expect polish, but the ones who stay become loyal. Over time, that honesty has built a small, committed cult of viewers who see themselves in what Taibah makes.

That connection began with Jameel Jeddan – the 2022 MBC series she created and starred in, about a young woman who wakes from a five-year coma and has to finish high school in a Saudi Arabia she barely recognises. What began as a stylised, offbeat comedy built an unexpectedly intimate fan base, especially among young women who wrote to her as if they already knew her – exactly as she intended.

Cotton polo shirt; embellished pinstripe wool midi skirt; and Galleria leather bag, all from Prada

“I want girls to look at me on screen and feel like I’m their cousin,” she says. “Someone familiar.”

Before she ever acted, Taibah was an illustrator. She studied fine art and spent years creating children’s books – more than 15 of them – long before she imagined herself in front of or behind a camera. Even now, she still carries a notebook everywhere – a mix of diary pages, loose drawings and half-formed ideas. It’s where she goes when things feel loud, a place to steady the rush in her head.

And things often feel a bit too loud. From afar, Taibah can look like the life of the party, but crowded rooms overwhelm her, and it takes careful self-management to tap into the collective joy she feels with her fellow creatives.

“A lot of people think I’m an extrovert,” says Taibah. “But I’m really a high-functioning introvert.”

More than anything, she tries to stay grounded. Her notebook is full of affirmations, as are the walls and mirrors at home or whatever hotel room she happens to be staying in. “I make magic. I am balanced. Replace anger with passion. Things like that,” she says.

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Her hands are often covered in smudged ink from the notes she writes on them – usually reminders or grocery lists. “They’re in my face that way,” she says.

There’s one phrase she returns to more than any other. It first came to her during a depressive episode after returning from an artist residency in Europe – back home and feeling like her creative momentum had dropped off again.

“I wrote it on big pieces of paper across my wall: ‘Nothing to wait for. It’s happening now.’”

Now, that line is everywhere – in her notebooks, on room-service menus and scribbled across her bathroom mirror.

“I have to remind myself to be here, not in yesterday or tomorrow,” she says. “Because my brain loves yesterday and tomorrow. It’s being in the now that I struggle with. I need constant reminders to get out of my brain and get back in my body.”

For a long time, she managed it. She worked, she acted, she wrote. She carried that phrase with her like a compass – until the thing she cared about most fell apart.

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She had spent nearly two years developing what she calls her “baby” – a series she believed would define her next chapter. She built it with a close collaborator whose voice was deeply woven into the world they were creating. When that person stepped away, the project halted.

“It was a heartbreak,” she says.

She recovered, made Jameel Jeddan, and when it was done, she went back to the “baby” and rebuilt it almost entirely. By the time she finished – every beat planned, every detail sharpened – she realised it was the best thing she had ever written. For the first time in years, she felt exactly where she wanted to be.

Then came the next blow. Something shifted internally at the platform developing it, and they told Taibah they could no longer move forward. The show stalled. And something in her stalled with it.

“That was the second heartbreak,” she says. “And it triggered something in me – I got an artist block worse than I’d ever gotten before. I realised that I don’t have an identity – I don’t know who I am without art and creativity and work,” she says.

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She pauses, remembering the sensation of facing that emptiness. Everything stopped. Her creativity. Her momentum. Her sense of self. “I put a pause on everything,” she says.

At the same time, her mother – her biggest inspiration – was dealing with health issues. Emotionally, everything pressed in at once.

The block didn’t arrive as silence – it arrived as a question Taibah suddenly couldn’t answer.

But, just like it often was, the answer was waiting for her in her notebooks. It was a seed planted years earlier, long before the heartbreaks. The concept was simple: A guy who wants to kill meets a girl who wants to die. But when she’d initially tried to make it work, the idea didn’t come together.

After the collapse – the heartbreak of losing her series, followed by the first major creative block she had ever experienced – it was the only project she could bring herself to look at again. She pulled the folder out.

This time, something moved. The characters arrived clearly – a girl who feels cursed; a doctor with heart problems who gets a secret thrill from surgery. The tone was sharper. The world made sense.

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She sent the new draft to the Torino Film Lab without expecting much. She was accepted. And when she arrived in Amsterdam for the workshop, the momentum continued. “It was such a good week,” she says. “Things finally started to click.”

Working with her long-time collaborator Anas Ba-Tahaf, she rebuilt the project from the ground up. Scenes tightened. The emotional logic held. The block, finally, lifted.

By the end of the programme, her writing had momentum again – and with it, a sense of herself Taibah thought she’d lost.

What came back with the writing wasn’t confidence so much as clarity. She remembered what she loved – not the industry, not the recognition, but the craft itself. The decisions that thrill her. The discipline of tightening scenes until they’re lean. The satisfaction of removing anything indulgent. “I love killing my darlings,” she says, referencing the editing ploy of eliminating words and ideas that do not serve a story well.

Taibah’s taste has always skewed towards the sharp and the uncomfortable. She talks about Chewing Gum, Fleabag, Girls and Search Party the way some people talk about teachers – with affection and a kind of creative allegiance. What she responds to is honesty that isn’t softened, comedy that comes from wounds rather than punchlines, female characters who are messy, unguarded, contradictory.

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“I love dark comedy,” Taibah says. “It’s the most real. It’s the closest to how life feels.”

There are parts of her in her A Matter of Life and Death character, to be sure – in a way, it’s a way of working through her own obsession with the past and future. But she’s also Taibah’s reclamation of the manic pixie dream girl trope, a familiar archetype, often portrayed as a two-dimensional fantasy, lacking agency of its own.

“I wanted to show her perspective,” she says. “Her wants, her needs.”

Taibah says this lightly, but it echoes something deeper in her: a refusal to be flattened into an image. Years ago, a casting director told her to fix her teeth and get fillers. She didn’t. She never considered it.

“I have to be honest – things like that do play with your self-esteem,” she says. “But I’m not going to do it.”

On set, she feels fully present in a way she struggles to access elsewhere. “After praying, the most alive I ever feel is on set,” she says. “That’s where everything goes quiet.” The performance she has given opposite Yagoub Alfarhan is unlike anything she’s done.

He brings discipline, sharpness and a kind of gravity; while she brings instinct and volatility. Together, they found something that felt alive. And for the first time since the heartbreak, Taibah felt like she kept finding herself where she should be – in the moment.

Single-breasted velvet jacket; embroidered cotton shirt; and Galleria leather bag, all from Prada

At the same time, another version of her is appearing on screens in Hoba, Majid Al Ansari’s Emirati horror film, now in cinemas across the Gulf. The character – the film’s terrifying villain – is so unlike anything she’s done that those who have seen it say they can’t even recognise her in the role. “That made me so happy. I thought: ‘OK, I can do this too.’”

For her, that was enough. Proof she isn’t bound to one tone or version of herself – that reinvention sits more easily on her than she once believed.

And with that renewed confidence, she’s bounding forward like never before. She’s writing again. She’s acting again. She’s scripting a feature – not her idea this time, which she finds strangely freeing. It lets her treat writing as a craft rather than an extension of her identity.

The series that broke her still sits in a folder. She isn’t ready to open it. “One day,” she says, not promising anything. What she carries now is simpler, steadier. She knows what silence feels like. She knows what losing her identity feels like. And she knows what it takes to climb out of it. Taibah keeps writing notes to herself, not because she wants motivation, but to remind her she’s headed in the right direction.

She repeats it: “Nothing to wait for. It’s happening now.”

The reminder is working. For the first time in a long time, she feels present in her own life. The work is here again. The rhythm is back. And, finally, so is she.

Photoshoot credits

Fashion director: Sarah Maisey

Photographer: Ben Cope

Make-up artist and hairstylist: Karolina Kurowicka

Styling assistant: Maanoshri Ganguly

Special thanks: Najd Altaher

Photoshoot created in partnership with Prada