I first met Stephanie Atala – no relation – more than a decade ago through a production company I was involved with in Beirut. It feels like the kind of apocryphal tale that gets retrofitted to someone once someone becomes successful, but I promise it is not. Even back then, I could tell she had something different. There was no mistaking that she had the makings of a star.
She was up for anything, curious about everything and, most importantly, unafraid to look silly or simply be herself. More than a decade later, with millions of fans across the Arab world and a career that has taken her from Beirut to Cairo, Istanbul, Paris and beyond, remarkably little seems to have changed.
On a breezy August day in Faitroun, Mount Lebanon, Mohamad Al-Rifai, the photographer on our TN cover shoot, asks the Lebanese-French actress if she’s comfortable climbing on to an edge of the cliff-face for a shot. Atala surveys the options and instead suggests an even more precarious perch that would make a better image.
“I am worried. I am always scared,” she tells me when we speak a few days later. “I always say: ‘What if I can’t do this?’ I always doubt myself, but that doesn’t mean that it stops me from actually doing it.”
It is a contradiction that lies at the heart of Atala’s career. The apparent fearlessness has always contained plenty of fear; she has simply become good at moving towards it. “I feel like it’s this positive stress that’s always pushing me forward,” she says.
Today, Atala, 32, is in an enviable position. She has become one of the region’s most recognisable television stars, particularly after the enormous success of the 90-episode drama Crystal. She has made films, released music, worked across the Arab world and, most recently, crossed into French television with the HBO series Privileges. Yet ask whether she feels she has arrived and the answer is an immediate no.
“I’m not sure if anyone ever feels like they’ve achieved what they want to achieve in life,” she says. “I might be in a great place at the moment in my life, career-wise and on a personal level as well, but I feel like there’s a lot more to do.”
There are, she says, “things that people don’t know I can do”. One is writing. Atala has completed a screenplay she hopes to film, although she is reluctant to reveal much about it. There is a love story, she allows. There is Beirut. There is an element of fantasy, or what sounds to me like magical realism. And there is plenty of Atala herself.
“It’s inspired by my life as well, by stuff I’ve been through, and things we’ve been through in Lebanon and in the region,” she says. “In my relationship, even, I’ve borrowed some stuff that my husband has gone through. I feel like this script is a mixing bowl of everything that I am and everything that I’d like to tell.”
Writing makes sense when Atala explains how she sees herself. Acting and music might look like parallel careers, with writing now adding a third dimension, but to her they are expressions of the same thing. “At the core of who I am, I feel like I’m a storyteller,” she says.
The funny thing is that a career devoted to storytelling began by accident. Atala was four when she found herself in a restaurant where an advertisement was being filmed. Another child was struggling with the scene, so Atala wandered over to help. Somehow, she ended up appearing in the commercial herself. As a teenager, more advertising work followed.
Atala nevertheless went on to study art direction at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, seemingly destined for a life behind the camera. Before long, she found herself in four short films in the same film festival. That was where Lebanese actor and director Georges Khabbaz invited her to audition for his play. He cast her. That same week, Atala auditioned for a Ramadan television series and landed that, too. Suddenly she was filming television, rushing to the theatre to perform every night, then returning to the set.
“My life was just a tornado from that moment on,” she says. “From year one, I was fully booked and it was crazy.” It has, more or less, remained that way.
There is something telling about Atala’s insistence that all of this happened accidentally. Opportunity might have repeatedly presented itself, but she had to keep saying yes. Beneath that willingness was a shy young woman who, she says, perhaps wanted exactly this all along.
“I feel like I always wanted this, but I was always too shy to ask for it,” she says. “And then one day I was just ready for it.” Some of that shyness remains, although Atala says she knows herself better today. “I like myself more,” she says. “I’m proud of who I am. I’m proud that I’m a good person. I’m kind. I have a good circle of friends. I love my family. I’m there for them.”
That grounding is important, particularly because Atala has made the unusual choice to build an increasingly international career without really leaving home. Her French passport – her mother is French – means she could have relocated to Europe at any point, just as Cairo might have offered a more obvious base for a pan-Arab acting career. She never seriously wanted either. “I’ve always had the option and I never took it,” she says. “I’m choosing to live in Beirut because I deeply love it here. I cannot live anywhere else.”
Instead, the work comes and Atala goes to meet it. She spent months in Paris filming Privileges. Before that came two long productions in Istanbul. She is currently filming in Egypt, with another series in Beirut to follow. There have been projects in Tunisia, Morocco, Cyprus, the UAE and elsewhere.
The turning point came with Crystal in 2023, which transformed Atala from a successful working actress into a pan-Arab star. The series topped MBC Shahid and made her a nightly presence in homes across the region. The scale only really became apparent when she travelled and started getting recognised.
“The more exposure you have, the more pressure and responsibility you have,” she says. That kind of long-form television popular across the Middle East and North Africa creates a peculiar intimacy. Spend 90 evenings in someone’s living room and the boundary between actor and character can become surprisingly porous.
“I am called by many names,” Atala says with a laugh. “I’m called Faye, I’m called Mirna, I’m called by all the names of the characters because [the audience] feel like you’re part of their lives now. You’re in their house every night at the same time, and they feel like they know you.”
Sometimes strangers simply ask to hug her. After she played the villainous Mirna in Salma, however, encounters could be less affectionate. People would approach her demanding: “Why did you do that to your sister?” She remember responding: “Guys, I’m not her. I am an actress.”
It is partly why Atala maintains a deliberately unpolished social media presence. Between glamorous shoots and red carpets are occasional goofy videos, many originally intended for her parents or her husband before she decided to share them. “[The audience] forgets who you are as a person. It’s good to be relatable because we’re all actually the same.”
That distinction between the career and the person appears important to Atala. Acting is a huge part of her life, she says, but “it’s not everything”. “I’m not willing to lose the connection I have with my country, the connection I have with my husband, with my parents, with my friends. I feel like this is the thing I cherish most.”
Her husband, musician Zef, occupies an interesting position within both worlds. Their schedules are frequently chaotic, but their creative lives are deeply intertwined. “Art is part of our relationship,” Atala says. “We’re always discussing it, always dreaming together and aiming for more for each other.”
It was Zef who, during a particularly stressful production, offered advice that changed how Atala approaches acting. She had become anxious about everything happening around her – schedules, direction, decisions beyond her control. “Steph, stop being so anxious,” she remembers him saying. “This is not your project. It’s someone else’s responsibility. Just go and play the role they got you to play.” From that advice, she learnt to enjoy the work more.
It is an approach that has served her well. Her recent French production came almost as unexpectedly as the opportunities at the beginning of her career: an email from a casting director, a Zoom audition, a callback with the directors and then the Privileges role. More European auditions have followed.
For now, though, she isn’t uprooting her life to chase them. She seems content to allow some of those happy accidents to continue finding her. Atala has spent more than a decade taking the opportunities that appeared in front of her, climbing on to whichever precarious rock presented itself and seeing where it might lead. Now, increasingly, she wants to decide where the story goes.
Fashion director: Sarah Maisey
Photographer: Mohamad “Rifo” Al-Rifai
Hairstylist: Moe Rida
Make-up artist: Kevork Tavitian
Assistant stylist: Joe Daccache
Assistant photographer: Joe Massoud
Executive producer: Samer Fleihan
Production co-ordinator: Carine Malek
Production house: Fifteen O Five
Location manager: Pin Your Film
Unit Manager: Ali Sbeity
Shot on location in Faitroun, Lebanon
Photo shoot created in partnership with Prada
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