Everywhere Saba Mubarak lived as a child, her mother made room for art. The family moved around often, and with them went paintings, palettes, canvases and piles of books. Adorning shelves and tables were small objects – a nail, a piece of wood, something oddly shaped – brought in from the street because her mother had seen something in them. Mubarak grew up, she says, inside “a moving gallery”.
In those homes, creativity was not treated as something separate from daily life. Her mother was Hanan Al-Agha, a Palestinian visual artist and poet, and Mubarak remembers her as someone who had little interest in the practical machinery around a public life.
“She was one of those hopeless romantics,” Mubarak says. “And she was very impractical about it. She did not understand success in terms of career-building, promoting herself, being a hit artist or doing whatever was working at the time. She was just herself.”
Following in her footsteps felt inevitable. And Mubarak did, just not how she thought she would. At 17, she was studying fine art in Jordan, moving towards a future she thought she was destined for.
“I was preparing myself without even thinking about it,” she says. “I had the skill to be a painter, and that was my whole identity.”
Acting wasn’t on her mind until the day she accompanied a friend to an audition. Mubarak was just there to keep her company, only for the director to ask her to try out too. She told him she was not an actress and had no idea how to act, but he insisted.
“I felt it was kind of magical,” Mubarak says. “I went on stage and auditioned. Apparently, I did well. He chose me to star in the play. Within six months, I was touring the world. I won many international awards for that first role.”
There is an Arabic expression for what happened next, she says, something like a creature calling your name until you follow it. It does not translate easily into English. But Mubarak heard that call, and what began as an accident became the work that has shaped most of her adult life.
“This is not a career to me,” she says. “It is part of me – part of my identity and who I am. Maybe that is a bit toxic and problematic, because you need to separate yourself from what you do, but it is very hard for me to do that.”
It is a modest way to describe a body of work that has made Mubarak one of Jordan’s most recognisable actors, and one of the rare performers in the region to build a truly pan-Arab career. She became familiar to Egyptian audiences through dramas including Sharbat Louz, Hekayat Banat, Moga Harra and Afrah Al Qoba, while her film work includes Daughters of Abdulrahman and The Guest: Aleppo-Istanbul, which won her Best Actress at Ireland’s Silk Road International Film Festival.
More recently, she led the hit Shahid romantic comedy-drama Ward Ala Foll Wa Yasmeen, a 15-episode series about a chance encounter between two people from different worlds. Through Pan East Media, the company she founded in 2011, Mubarak has also become a producer, giving her a measure of control beyond the roles she accepts.
She may not have become a painter, but she still sees herself as an artist. She dropped the brush, not the way of seeing the world.
“I was heavily influenced by my mother,” she says. “In fact, I think I am still influenced by her. If you had asked me this question 10 years ago, I might have said: ‘No, I found my own identity.’ Now I look at it and think it is very cool that I am still influenced by her direction in art and the way she presented herself.”
Al-Agha was a Palestinian refugee, and the ideas of homeland and displacement entered Mubarak’s life through her before they became subjects in her work. Mubarak was born and raised in Jordan – her father is Jordanian – and says the dual identities of her parents did not feel divided in childhood because families around her were already mixed.
With time – and travel – the distinction became clearer.
“When you live there, when you are born and raised there, you never really think about these things,” she says. “It is only when you start moving outside your country, to places where there are fewer Palestinian refugees, that you understand they live in very different circumstances elsewhere.”
That plight has continued to inspire her work, including Abu Dhabi TV’s drama series Obour in 2019, described as the first series filmed entirely inside a real refugee camp.
“That specific cause – protecting refugees, fighting for them and helping them find their voice in the society they are living in – is something I think I have engraved in me because of my mother,” Mubarak says.
Her own movement across the region began partly out of a yearning to express herself more fully. Jordan gave Mubarak her start, but the country still does not have the structure to sustain a full industry, even if it has strong artists, films that travel to festivals and productions that win major awards. After stops in Tunisia and Syria, Mubarak says Egypt was the inevitable next step.
“When you come to Egypt, it is our Hollywood, our Bollywood,” she says. “It is a whole industry that is growing and changing all the time.”
From there, she kept moving. Theatre had already made it normal for her to work with different nationalities and methods, and she discovered she could learn dialects and accents easily. What began as a practical advantage became part of the pleasure of the work, as Mubarak traversed the region’s various Arab film and television scenes like few others.
“It made my journey very rich,” she says. “It made me feel that, as an artist, I belong everywhere and to everyone, which I like a lot – to not have borders.”
That fluency brought opportunity, but it also led to her becoming too accustomed to the system. Mubarak says she reached a point when she had become, in her words, “a daughter of the industry”. She knew how things worked, what was expected and how to be good. The danger was that being good could start to replace being free.
That became clearer during the pandemic, when the pace of work slowed and she had more time to sit with herself. Mubarak began asking why she was still acting and what the work had done to her.
“I was different,” she says. “Not necessarily better, just different. I started to miss the brave, courageous, carefree artist who was not afraid of messing things up.”
Acting can make that difficult because it is built through other people. A performer is always working with a writer’s script, a director’s vision, another actor’s choices and the demands of a production, and while Mubarak values that collaboration, she also knows the effect that can have.
“In this profession, anything can divert your direction,” she says. “All of those factors can make you adopt information and beliefs that are not yours.”
That realisation changed the kind of collaborators she wanted around her. She credits Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Diab – who directed her in Jordan’s 2022 Academy Awards submission Amira as well as in Marvel’s Moon Knight – with helping her recover a part of herself that had become too controlled.
“He made me re-evaluate everything and go back to my crazy little self,” she says. “The version of myself that searches for the fun in the moment and the tiniest details in what I am doing, not the bigger picture. Because in art, there is no bigger picture. That is what I have discovered over the years.”
That is not to say that Mubarak is careless about her craft. She watches her performances closely and talks about acting with discipline – she just does not want that discipline to create a comfort zone.
“Wanting to be safe in a role, or just being good in general, is not very interesting to me,” she says. “I do not mind being cursed or failing at something. I just want to do different things.”
That is why she turns down more than she accepts, even when the sensible choice might be to protect what already works. “If this were just a job for me, what I am doing would be crazy,” she says. “But because it is not, I try as much as possible to choose whatever feels different, new, exciting or scary to me.” And as much as she always strives to do the best both for herself and her audience, deep down, her greatest concern is that it may resonate too greatly.
“I am most scared when something is very successful,” she says. “Even more than when I fail at something, because it is very easy to want to stay comfortable in that love bubble.”
That instinct has become harder to protect in the current climate, in which audience reaction arrives earlier and louder than it did when she started. “I belong to a time when there was no social media,” she says. “We did not know what people were saying or throwing at us. We were just exploring, trying different things and following a passion.
“Now you have to be correct. You have to adhere to what the audience wants. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is limiting.”
But even after Mubarak realised she had become too careful in her work, her instinct for risk had not disappeared. It had simply moved to the wrong part of her life.
“What was happening was that I was keeping toxic people around me and being safe in art,” she says. “I decided to flip that. If I am going to try to untame a part of myself, it should be my creative brain – not crying over toxic people or feeling unsafe in my day-to-day life.”
That thought brings her back to the artist she was before acting. Mubarak does not paint now, but she still thinks visually. She loves fine art, architecture, Art Deco buildings, museums, literature and poetry, and is drawn to installation art because it lets a viewer step inside another artist’s world. She still sketches sometimes when working as a director or creative producer, mapping scenes and where characters should stand in a room.
As she travels, she still seeks out exhibitions wherever she can, and can picture the kind of painter she might have become. An impressionist, she says. She is particularly drawn to Spanish painter Francisco Goya and the way his pre-impressionist portraits carry something darker beneath their classical form.
“I am obsessed with Goya,” she says. “I love how he turned classical painting into something scary, something that gives you a dramatic feeling the second you look at it.”
It is a part of herself that she lost connection with after her mother died in 2008. “Maybe I was trying to go away from that for the longest time because it reminds me so much of my mother,” she says. “Maybe it was a way of separating myself, of taming that missing, that void. Maybe I am just analysing now with you, but I never thought about it before. Why did I stop painting altogether?”
The question hangs there, and Mubarak does not force it into an answer. She once thought the story was that she had found her own identity away from the first artist who shaped her. Now, after all the roles, countries, industries and years spent trying not to become safe, she seems more willing to see the beginning again: the house full of paintings, the mother who worked without calculation, and the young woman who learnt to look before she learnt to perform.
Maybe she will paint again, if the feeling returns. For now, she can look back without apology. “I’m proud of it all,” she says. “The flops, the failures, the successes, the projects that taught me things and pushed me forward. I’m proud of the entirety of the body of my work. I feel a little shy saying that, but it’s true.”
TN editor: Nasri Atallah
Fashion director: Sarah Maisey
Photographer: Hussein Mardini
Producer: Omar Kerdany
Hairstylist: Bishoy Naguib
Make-up artist: Dana Khedr
Production by Butter Films
Photographer assistant: Omar Khaled
Stylist assistant: Mariam Hegazy
Make-up assistants: Marianne Ashraf and Habiba Ahmed
With thanks to Kareem Samy and Nadine Ashraf at Mad Solutions
Shot at Gearbox Studios, Cairo
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