By Steven MacKenzie
INTERVIEW
Mena Massoud swooped onto the big screen as the lead in the live action 2019 adaptation of Aladdin that broke box office records.
“That’s something I’ll be proud of forever,” he tells The Big Issue. “An all-ethnic cast to cross a billion dollars… I don’t think it had been done before and I don’t think it’s been done since.” The film shook up the industry, but it didn’t initially grant all of Massoud’s wishes. A few months later he said: “I’m kind of tired of staying quiet about it … I want people to know that it’s not always dandelions and roses when you’re doing something like Aladdin. ‘He must have made millions. He must be getting all these offers.’ It’s none of those things. I haven’t had a single audition since Aladdin came out.”
Five years on, he says the industry has shifted. “Streaming has really changed the industry in a big way. There’s more content now than ever. Therefore, there’s more actors now than ever. Therefore, there’s more competition. But also more opportunity.”
But that opportunity, as far as Massoud is concerned, comes from creating it yourself.
“I feel like as an artist, especially an artist of colour, our opportunities aren’t plentiful,” Massoud says. “There are not a lot of roles in Hollywood where they’re looking for someone that looks like me. I mean, think about my biggest role to date, Aladdin, it was very specific. I didn’t get cast in a generic role there. And those opportunities don’t come up often in Hollywood for people that look like me so I knew I needed to start a production company to create opportunities for myself, work on passion projects that nobody else believed in.”
Massoud co-founded Press Play Productions, which has been instrumental in him launching a podcast, Growth Untold, and his Evolving Vegan venture, which began as a book then became an acclaimed travelogue series.
“I wrote the book, but the whole point of the book was to then go out and sell the show. I tried to sell that show for about three, four years. I went in to all the studios in Hollywood and got the same response from everybody. ‘Oh, it’s vegan. It’s niche.’ So you hear a lot of nos but I’m proud of the show. Not everybody can understand your vision but you’ve got to believe in yourself and go after it.”
Massoud could b
