Ramy Youssef on his hit show

Highly anticipated new series Ramy, created by stand-up comedian Ramy Youssef, is currently at #16 on Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the best TV shows of 2019 so far. It’s now streaming first on Showmax in South Africa. 

Ramy Hassan (played by Youssef) is a first-generation Egyptian-American in politically divided New Jersey, where he’s caught between a Muslim community that thinks life is a moral test and a millennial generation that thinks life has no consequences. 

Ramy won the Audience Award at this year’s SXSW and has a 97% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with The New York Times hailing it as “a quietly revolutionary comedy,” Entertainment Weekly praising it as “generous, profound… a must-see new sitcom” and Wired celebrating it as “an essential voice for millennial TV.” 

If that’s not enough to get you excited, we could add that Egyptian Oscar nominee Jehane Noujaim (The Square) is one of the directors, Emmy nominee Dan Romer (Beasts of the Southern Wild) is the composer, the multi-award-winning Hiam Abbas (Succession, Blade Runner 2049) plays Ramy’s mother, and Hulu recently renewed the hit comedy for a second season, which will star two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book) in a guest role. 

We caught up with writer-director-executive producer and lead actor Ramy Youssef to talk about the groundbreaking show.

Where did the idea for Ramy come from? 

Ramy is loosely based on my experiences. My parents. my uncle, my sister, and my two best friends are amalgamations of people in my community. I grew up Muslim and it’s something I believe. I’m a practising Muslim. But I always wanted to see a show where we saw people and what they believed – and then what they actually do. My character has this idea of who he should be and these ideas of how he should be, and the show is really him navigating as he’s pulled between his family and friends, who all have their code of how they live. He’s really just trying to be good. 

Tell us about the character of Steve, played by Steve Way.

The character Steve is actually my real-life best friend since I was 10. It’s really cool to have him in the show. It’s this friend group that will tell you everything your worst enemy would tell you about yourself but then hug you.

How was filming in Egypt? 

These episodes are really representative of something that I find really fascinating, where there’s this narrative that comes from certain places in America: ‘Go back where you came from; that’s where you belong.’ Sometimes you have this idea of, you know, ‘What if I went back there? Everything would make sense.’ And it doesn’t. 

What’s your favourite thing about the show? 

How dark we’re able to go, while still keeping what’s funny about the situation. We have this episode that’s totally based on my subconscious experience of being in middle school when 9/11 happened. It’s a really hard thing to talk about. We tried to treat it with the respect it deserves, and show not what’s funny about what happened, but what’s funny about the fact that we had to deal with that… 

What would you like viewers to take away about Muslims from watching Ramy?
That we have the same problems as you do. In Hollywood, so many of the things that come out are trying to portray us as perfect or trying to go against this public bashing that’s happening. And I don’t think this show is really interested in doing that as much as it is in being like, ‘Hey, we struggle with the same values, same desires, and the same problems.’ 

The tension here is what we’re all going through: people trying to deal with what they believe and trying to find their way. That for me is the most universal thing. 

It’s set with a group of people you probably don’t know that much about, so you’ll get to watch it and see things that feel familiar to you next to things you have no idea about.