Saba Mubarak Is The Bazaar Arabia September 2025 Issue Cover Star

Who is Saba Mubarak, really? Not even the megastar actress has the answer to that… yet. But as the architect of an identity in flux, she is figuring it out – and letting Harper’s Bazaar Arabia in on the process

Saba Mubarak has a theory.

In her estimation, about 99 per cent of who we are is shaped by factors outside of our control, from the families we are born into and the circumstances of our childhoods, to the attributes and even the histories we’ve inherited. What little remains, though, is ripe for our own making. At least, this is the conclusion the Jordanian actress and producer has reached after over two decades under the spotlight, embodying a range of different characters while also figuring out who she is off screen. “In that one per cent is millions of kilometres of space where you can have free will to say that this isn’t going to be my colour, that I can be different. I can break some cycles. I can create another dynamic,” she shares. “I don’t want to be the victim of my upbringing or my family or my generational traumas or my ancestors’ problems.” It’s a realisation Saba has reached after a lot of time spent sitting with herself, as she is doing now on the other side of our Zoom call from her current home base in Cairo.

Fresh-faced behind a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, framed by a mane of long brown locks, she is at ease atop a plush duvet, barefoot and donning a roomy, bright-green matching set. She has only known me for a few minutes, but she is clearly well-acquainted with her feelings, unafraid to speak openly about having spent the past four years wading through them in order to reach a better understanding of herself. “I used to be, for the longest time, fuelled by my rage and my intense emotions. And I also thought that made me a good actor. I thought it made me powerful,” she explains. But after confronting these feelings head-on, she has since decided that this cyclonic anger was not serving her. Not professionally, and not personally either. “You can be fuelled by rage for a certain distance, [but] the engine is going to explode no matter what you’ve done.” Switching the fuel so that it comes from a place of self-reflection and wisdom instead, however, has allowed for a more measured approach to making the best of that one per cent of her personhood that Saba believes is under her control.

It has also meant she is able maintain a healthy distance from the various and complicated identities she assumes for work. “I started taking seriously the fact that you don’t have to be really in pain to play pain. You don’t have to recall your misery, your troubles. You don’t have to use your own spirit and soul transitioning into this specific character. It’s not really necessary to lose yourself entirely.”

It is the early afternoon in Egypt’s capital when Saba joins our call. She has spent the night shooting her new series, Ward Ala Foll Wi Yasmin, a 15-episode drama from the Arab production company Aroma. Written by Amr Samir Atef and directed by Mahmoud Abdel Tawab, the show is set to stream on Shahid VIP at a later date. The actress is careful not to reveal too much, but she does disclose that it’s a love story and, to her delight, a dark comedy – something she says isn’t common in the local scene, at least not from her experience in the Egyptian roles she has taken on since her 2010 breakthrough in the film Bentein Men Misr.

Saba originally studied theatre acting and directing at Yarmouk University in Jordan, graduating in 2001 and making her Arab cinema debut in the 2003 Tunisian movie L’Odyssée. Decades later and the bona fide star has made a name for herself with more projects under her belt than she can count, comprising a diverse body of work spanning both regions and genres, on screens big and small. She has high hopes for Ward Ala Foll Wi Yasmin in particular, which she describes as “moving and operating with international standards.”

I comment on how it’s a tough balance to strike, creating something heavy that still has its moments of lightness and laughter. “But isn’t that life?” Saba quips in response, and for a moment, we let the words settle over the conversation before they lead us, naturally, to the subject of 220 Days, another series she is starring in which premiered over the summer. She plays Maryam, a photographer whose husband is diagnosed with a terminal illness around the same time that the couple earns of her long-awaited pregnancy with their first child.

On the surface, it seems that Saba would turn to the memory of her late mother, the Palestinian artist Hanan Al-Agha, in preparation for the role of a creative like Maryam. But it’s the character’s complex situation with her father that ended up resonating with Saba the most: “Growing up, I had a very complicated relationship with my father, from him being absent to him appearing again in my life, to the very hard struggles that we had understanding each other.”

Unfortunately, the two never reached a place of peace before his passing, but working on the series proved to be therapeutic as Saba continues to sculpt facets of her identity that exist outside of her upbringing: “After finishing, I thought, does it really matter?” As far as whether or not she struggled to leave Maryam behind on set once 220 Days wrapped, especially given the ways the woman’s story intersected with Saba’s reality, the seasoned performer recalls a saying she heard early on in her career during her days on stage: “An actor is very similar to a wooden bowl. You fill it and then you empty it, but then there’s a residue left there, and it stays with you, character after character after character.”

She then recalls her experience on the 2016 series Afrah AlQoba based on the novel by the Egyptian writer Naguid Mafhouzs. In it, Saba embodied Doria, one in a group of actors in the ‘70s who is forced to confront her secrets, and the impact those secrets had on others. The job was so draining that Saba ended up stepping away from acting for two years, unable to detach from the darkness. But now, thanks to the work she’s been doing by getting to truly know herself and her emotions, as well as going to therapy, she is better equipped to draw a line between who she is, and who she is tasked with pretending to be; to not let what little remains in that wooden bowl become heavier than its actual weight.

“Sometimes you need to reboot, reset, just disappear and find your own voice again. With all these things that are accumulated [from each character], you think they’re yours, but they’re not yours.” Protecting her peace in this regard is paramount.

After all, if there’s anything 220 Days brings to the fore, it’s the question of time: how much of it we have, how we choose to spend it, and with whom. The older she gets, the more Saba is aware of the months, the days, even the hours as they pass, and she’s determined not to let any of it go to waste. Her plan is to live life to the fullest, and in a way that is true to who she is, even if she’s still figuring out who that person is. Saba’s biggest realisation in this quest of self-discovery has been that she was addicted to success – driven by outcomes rather than the journey.

She’s in “a better place” with that these days, however, endeavouring to reconstruct an identity that isn’t intrinsically linked to external validation. Of course she cares about the work she puts out, and she wants that work to be well-received by the public and critics alike. But that’s not what drives her. Instead she is turning inwards. “There’s always going to be someone who is more successful, more beautiful, or sexier, or younger, or taller, or more talented or clever,” the professional remarks. “But you should – and I have – only made comparisons with myself. You just need to be able to say that I’m improving, I’m doing better…”

She’s more accepting of her failures too, admitting that while she’s proud of the majority of her projects, there are still a handful she’d rather forget. She opts not to name them out of respect for her former collaborators, but assures me that there was at least one that was “so awful, so ugly.” She points out that these are the experiences that have taught her what she doesn’t want, and there’s tremendous value in that.

In keeping with this thinking, Saba tells me that what matters most isn’t how she is perceived by strangers, but who she is in the eyes of her loved ones: her son, her sister, her friends. That, she says, is what gets her out of bed in the mornings. That will be her
legacy, along with, as it pertains to her art, an ever-expanding repertoire of films, TV shows, and plays “in which you will find diversity, truth, transparency, heart, love,” but also content that is “funny, sad, angry.”

With her Dubai-based production company Pan East Media, the industry veteran also wants to help aspiring actors and creatives by giving them opportunities to get involved in projects across the region. When all is said and done, she posits, her sense of professional fulfilment will largely be predicated upon “if I can practically help people’s careers, if I can help young talents achieve something or give them the hand that I needed badly at some point.” It is impossible to talk about Saba’s impact on others without bringing up her efforts to champion Arab women in film. She has long been vocal about the challenges she has faced because of her gender, and about inequality in the industry more widely.

The last time she graced Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s cover back in 2019, she spoke about how for a long while in Jordan, there was no such thing as female directors. “You’d only find something called a ‘script girl,’” she had said. Not one to sit on the sidelines, Saba’s reason for launching Pan East Media back in 2011 was her answer to this longstanding misogyny: “I wanted to [create characters] for a woman who is 60, a woman who is not conventionally pretty, a woman who is overweight by society’s standards… characters that look like our mothers, our sisters, women we know who really are heroes, who do amazing things.” She has since produced projects about independent mothers and career-driven female leads navigating the relatable balance of family and work, as well as a historical piece depicting a Bedouin woman who rises to take over as a tribe leader. Saba also hasn’t shied away from subjects like domestic violence and the plight of asylum seekers told through the lens of women.

It has been six years since that Bazaar interview, and Saba is compelled to share that she is more positive than she was back then because of a growing number of women she has observed taking up space both in front of and behind the camera, at least in the Middle East. And this is where she stops to correct herself: “I don’t like that term, ‘Middle East.’ Let’s say ‘in our region,’” she states. When asked to elaborate on why, she explains, in a matter-of-fact tone that is sharply unapologetic, how it’s a colonial term, derived from a European perspective that centres the West. “We’re used to using it because we drank this term. But sometimes we have to be intentional and think about the terms that we use.”

And there it is again, that willingness to use her voice, be it in the pages of a magazine, on a stage receiving an award – of which she has many, including Best Actress from both the Middle East Now Festival in Italy and at the Silk Road International Film Festival – or in her art.

One of her proudest examples of this is the Pan East Media production of Obour, a TV series which premiered during Ramadan in 2019 about Syrian refugees and aid workers where it was shot in the Mrajeeb Al Fhood Camp in eastern Jordan. The cast and crew was made up of over 500 refugees, setting an example of how to tell stories about vulnerable communities in a way that is empowering rather than exploitative. “It gave them the chance to create, to work in the art department with us, build stuff, act, work in production, work in catering. That was amazing. I’m so happy to have been part of creating this environment,” Saba shares. Her 2017 film The Guest: Aleppo-Istanbul also shone a light on the plight of Syrian refugees and received international recognition, at festivals from Boston to Vienna to Malmö, along with praise for its sensitive portrayal of the crisis.

While Saba doesn’t believe that every movie or piece of art needs to have a message, when she wants to take a stand, she considers filmmaking to be one of the best ways to do so, especially as she has found social media to be an increasingly ineffective platform for taking real action. “I don’t think we’re at a point where what you say on social media matters. It just creates controversy, it doesn’t create energy for movement,” she asserts, adding that she is constantly fielding criticism on social media, where she is subjected to persistent cyber bullying.

“All day, every day, on everything… [online trolls will ask] are you crazy, are you stupid, are you fat, are you ugly, are you old, are you young [and say] you looked better before, no, you need to lose weight, then you lose weight and they tell you you are too thin, you look unhealthy. You’re attacked all the time.” The propensity for users to shame and pile on one another, and to reduce people to a single comment made or post shared about issues that are far more complex than what can be captured in a single caption – it’s all just talk, and it ends up distracting from the point of these conversations in the first place.

Yes, she’ll still say what she wants to say about the ongoing social injustices in the world that cannot be ignored, but in terms of making a difference – that’s what her art is for. And, perhaps most importantly, the task of raising a family. “What I’m more concerned about now is creating one good person. And he will create another two or three good people, and this is how we create change.” Now that sounds like a legacy worth living for.

Photographer: Simon Lipman at Ray Brown Represents. Art Direction: Paul Solomons. Talent Hair Stylist: Jean-Luc Amarin. Make-Up: Raffaele Romagnoli. Models’ Hair Stylist: Miwa Moroki at The Tag Agency. Manicurist: Audrey Cheri at B.Agency. Senior Producer: Steff Hawker. Production: Jean-Marc Mondelet. Talent Management: Kareem Samy at MAD Solutions. Digital Operator: Quentin Perez. Lighting Assistant: Elena Santolaya. Fashion Assistant: Rosa Montserrat. Male Models: William Adeline, Zackary Derouin, Marin Fabre, Tanguy at Elite Model Management. Rayane Ortolan and Martin Riedler at M Management.

From the Harper’s Bazaar Arabia September 2025 Issue.