Fares Fares, the Swedish actor whose best work keeps returning to Cairo

Fares Fares

Photo: Frankie Fouganthin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 29, 1973 Beirut, Lebanon
Occupation	Actor and film director
Known for	Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Zero Dark Thirty, Safe House
Awards	2 Guldbagge · 2 Robert · Litteris et Artibus

Most international viewers have seen Fares Fares without learning his name. He is the CIA officer Hakim in Zero Dark Thirty and a senator of the rebel alliance in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story; on television he spent three seasons as Ishamael, the ancient enemy of The Wheel of Time. American productions learned to call him when a scene needed authority with a Middle Eastern face, and he answered often. The work that shows what he can actually do came from somewhere else: a cycle of films by the Swedish director Tarik Saleh, set in Cairo and built around men who serve a system they have stopped believing in.

That split runs through the odd shape of his autumn. In the same weeks, Fares is the lead of the Swedish film that went to the top of the national box office and was chosen as the country’s Oscar entry, and one of the four leads of a Netflix thriller released worldwide. For an actor who reached Sweden as a teenager fleeing a war, becoming the safe commercial bet of the national industry is its own plot twist, and it arrives months after the most serious prize of his career.

He was born in Beirut on 29 April 1973, into a family of Assyrian origin, the elder brother of the director Josef Fares and of four sisters. In 1987, with the Lebanese Civil War still dragging on, the family left for Sweden, where relatives had already settled, and made a home in Örebro. Fares has said he picked up Swedish within three months. By 15 he was acting with a local theatre group; at 19 he went to drama school in Mölnlycke, outside Gothenburg, and then spent six years with Teater Tamauer.

His screen career began as a family business. Josef cast him in Jalla! Jalla! in 2000 and in the police comedy Kopps in 2003, broad comedies that made both brothers familiar faces at home. The turn came with Easy Money (Snabba cash, 2010), Daniel Espinosa’s Stockholm crime thriller with Joel Kinnaman, which travelled well beyond Sweden. Within two years he was in Espinosa’s Safe House, opposite Denzel Washington, and in Kathryn Bigelow‘s hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty.

A second door opened in Copenhagen. For The Keeper of Lost Causes (2013), the first adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Department Q novels, he learned Danish in two months to play Assad, the assistant whose humour and buried past carry a sour cold-case unit, opposite Nikolaj Lie Kaas. He played Assad in four films and won Denmark’s Robert Award for best supporting actor twice, for The Absent One and The Purity of Vengeance, before the rights changed hands and both parts were recast. Television kept him busy in English: the reporter Fauzi Nadal in FX’s Tyrant, a recurring role in Westworld, and Bacho, the weary veteran who teaches a young recruit to shoot abandoned pets in the exclusion zone of HBO’s Chernobyl.

Saleh had already used his voice in the animated Metropia, but The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) made the partnership. Fares plays Noredin, a chain-smoking Cairo detective who takes bribes as routine and then refuses to let a murder case go, in the weeks before the 2011 uprising. The film won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for drama at Sundance and brought him his first Guldbagge for best actor. In Boy from Heaven (2022), which won the screenplay prize at Cannes, he is Ibrahim, a State Security officer steering the election of the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. Eagles of the Republic (2025), shown in competition at Cannes, closes the cycle with George Fahmy, Egypt’s most adored film star, pressured into playing the president in a film commissioned by the highest authorities. Istanbul stood in for Cairo in both of the later films.

The trilogy is also where the limits of his position become visible. Each film puts a man of the system at its centre, and Fares plays him with a tired, watchful decency that makes complicity look almost bearable, which is precisely the point and also the risk. Reviews of Eagles of the Republic were warm but not unanimous: Time Out admired its Iannucci-style satire while noting that it does little for its female characters, and a critic at the Kerala festival found that it never quite takes off. His American record has the opposite problem. Early on he told The National that he was not interested in playing bad guys, yet his most visible English-language work of the past decade has been a run of operatives, officials and one fantasy arch-villain, while his widest range stayed in Swedish, Danish and Arabic-language films seen by smaller audiences.

He has also widened the job description. He produced and starred in the series Partisan (2020), and in 2023 he wrote and directed A Day and a Half (En dag och en halv), a Netflix drama loosely based on a real case, about an armed man who storms the clinic where his estranged wife works and takes her hostage in a desperate bid to see their daughter. Fares kept for himself the role of Lukas, the police officer caught up in the standoff. He has said he divides his time between Stockholm and Los Angeles.

This year has been his most decorated. On 19 January 2026, at Cirkus in Stockholm, Eagles of the Republic won six Guldbagge Awards, including best film, and Fares took best actor for the second time. Nine days later he was named among the year’s recipients of the Litteris et Artibus medal, awarded by the King of Sweden for artistic merit. In October came Alex Schulman’s first feature as director, Adult Supervision (Arkipelag), in which Fares plays Bobo, the seemingly most self-assured of three fathers on a school trip to a remote island with their teenage daughters, opposite Gustaf Skarsgård and Linus Wahlgren. It opened in Swedish cinemas on 9 October, went straight to number one, and had already won the top prize of the New Wave section at Fantastic Fest in Austin.

On 30 October Netflix released A Couple of Lies (Bytet), a four-part adaptation of Stefan Ahnhem’s novel directed by Kasper Barfoed. Fares plays Carl, who with Helene, played by Frida Gustavsson, trades a home in the Stockholm archipelago for a villa in Sicily while another couple, Emma Appleton and Jakob Oftebro, moves into theirs. No new role has been announced beyond those two releases. The next date on his calendar belongs to Arkipelag: the Academy’s shortlist for best international feature is due on 15 December.