Ramy Youssef on Juggling ‘Mountainhead,' ‘#1 Happy Family USA,' ‘Mo,' ‘The Studio' and Perhaps — Eventually — a Baby
The last time he appeared on Variety's Awards Circuit Podcast, he was promoting his HBO standup special 'More Feelings' and a hosting stint on 'Saturday Night Live,' having just come off of a press campaign for his first movie role in 'Poor Things' — plus Netflix had just set a comedy series co-created by Youssef and Will Ferrell.
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This time around, he's outdone himself with four projects to promote simultaneously: The animated Amazon Prime Video series '#1 Happy Family USA'; the second and final season of Netflix's 'Mo,' which he co-created with Mo Amer; his role in Jesse Armstrong's HBO movie 'Mountainhead'; and his guest appearance in 'The Studio' on Apple TV+. He's also doing stand-up again, on a tour called 'Love Beam 4000.' We talk all about that and more on the latest edition of the Awards Circuit Podcast — listen below!
The next time Youssef joins the podcast, he jokes, he may only have one thing to promote: 'If I have a baby, could we just have a podcast where I talk to you about my baby? Could we do an FYC for my baby? And there'd be no project, because I'll just be home with my wife and the baby.'
That one has yet to be greenlit — 'We're in development on 'Baby,'' Youssef jokes — but there's plenty on his mind until then. If there's a throughline between the disparate things he's working on, it's that each one feels urgent, deeply connected to an of-the-moment struggle.
Take 'Mountainhead,' for example. The film examines the complicated and even violent friendships between a group of tech billionaires who are wading through real-life, apocalyptic consequences of AI.
'I write a lot about man versus system, and [Armstrong's] version of it, and his entry points to it, are different than the ones that I gravitate towards as a writer,' Youssef says. 'But as an actor, it all made so much sense to me the second I read it.'
Later in the conversation, Youssef relates that idea to 'Mo,' which follows an undocumented Palestinian refugee who tries, fails and tries again to get his green card in the U.S. 'With 'Mo,' we looked at man versus system in an on-the-nose way,' he says. 'You're watching him go through these courts, and through these double standards […] I felt compelled that this thing has to exist, because there is no humanization — of not just Palestinians, but even refugees. People think 'refugee' and they just see a random CNN image of people displaced on a boat near a shore. And those images need to be tethered to real families and real stories and things that you can understand.'
Youssef expanded on his thoughts from a previous Variety interview, where he and Amer shared why they chose not to reference the current war in Gaza in 'Mo' Season 2, emphasizing that they wanted to be timely while still making sure the show would hold up years after the war's eventual end. This is a skill Youssef first honed by observing his comedy idols.
'I love watching old specials. Pop on an old Eddie Murphy, pop on an old George Carlin,' he says. 'Carlin's great at this, because he'll talk really topically about the time, but it always has this core emotional thing that's actually the bedrock of the joke. I don't know the senator he's talking about from the '90s, but I know exactly what he's feeling.'
In '#1 Happy Family USA,' Youssef applies the Carlin treatment to 9/11. More than 20 years on, he's still meditating on how Americans at large responded to the terrorist attacks, and how that response impacted Muslim families like his own. To him, the emotional truth that still resonates today is the way he was taught to 'code switch,' or present a version of himself in public that was different from the person he truly was at home. So in the series, the Hussein family goes to absurd lengths to make the white people they meet in public more comfortable.
'Everyone has this part of themselves that they go, 'I gotta hide this now that I'm going outside.' In a way, it's the premise of 'Severance' — that thing of, 'I gotta be somebody else when I'm not home,'' Youssef says. 'With that being at the bedrock of it, we can get super wild and crazy and really go at this with a satire that that period of time has never really gotten from the perspective that we show.'
He continues: 'There were so many people who were really sidelined from having their own experience for a really long time in this country. And that time is back and even worse. Anyone who lived through the early 2000s as an adult, who is Muslim, will tell you that it's worse now. This idea of needing to prove your patriotism. It's why the show is called '#1 Happy Family USA.' It's this idea that you gotta get out there on that front lawn and shout it to everybody in order to be deemed safe and worthy of living in the neighborhood.'
And while the stakes of the headlines referenced in 'The Studio' are less life-and-death, the Seth Rogen-led comedy is still cut from the same 'man versus system' cloth. Even though Youssef only appears once, as the host of the Golden Globes in Episode 8, it was a logical addition to his rolodex of timely and prescient projects — though he didn't need much convincing, considering he got to bring his dog to the shoot.
Also on this episode of the Awards Circuit Podcast: Variety's Clayton Davis talked this spring to star/EP Forest Whitaker about MGM+'s 'Godfather of Harlem,' now in its Season 4. The show picked up in Season 4 with Bumpy Johnson, played by Whitaker, as he continued his bloody war for control of Harlem against New York's mafia families, while contending with the emergence of a potential rival in newly arrived Black gangster Frank Lucas.
Variety's 'Awards Circuit' podcast, hosted by Clayton Davis, Jazz Tangcay, Emily Longeretta, Jenelle Riley and Michael Schneider, who also produces, is your one-stop source for lively conversations about the best in film and television. Each episode, 'Awards Circuit' features interviews with top film and TV talent and creatives, discussions and debates about awards races and industry headlines, and much more. Subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or anywhere you download podcasts.
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