Rise to Fame
A decade of supporting roles in a Fox sitcom, an HBO miniseries, and three Night at the Museum films would've buried most careers. His broke when Sam Esmail, after auditioning close to 100 actors, cast him as the paranoid hacker Elliot Alderson in Mr. Robot in 2015. He won the Emmy the following year. From there, the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody made him the first actor of Egyptian heritage to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He's said Mr. Robot is what got him Bohemian Rhapsody.
In the Spotlight
Winning the Oscar at 37 is the kind of thing that can either accelerate a career or turn it into a victory lap. For him, it was neither, really. A Bond villain in No Time to Die (2021) and a supporting turn in Oppenheimer (2023) kept him present without a defining follow-up. Two 2025 films are testing his range: The Amateur, where he plays a CIA cryptographer going rogue, landed at 62% on Rotten Tomatoes. Nuremberg, alongside Russell Crowe, has an active Oscar campaign behind it.
Side Notes
His identical twin Sami teaches English at a high school in Los Angeles. They used to swap classes as a prank. The contrast tells you something about the family: parents who emigrated from Cairo in 1978, a Coptic Christian household where their father would wake them up at night to call relatives in Egypt. He has described growing up as 'white passing' but with features that marked him as different. His older sister became an ER doctor. He became famous by playing outsiders who barely survive their own interior lives.