Wretched Creatures: Who Is Rami Yousef, This Stand-In With Emma Stone?

After The Favorite, actress Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos teamed up again for Poor Creatures. An ambitious feature film that follows Bella’s baroque journey of initiation, a woman-child as a result of a medical experiment, an insatiable sexual appetite and curiosity. The actor delivers an impressive performance that could earn him another Oscar nomination.

She stars opposite Willem Dafoe, who plays the brilliant and traumatized scientist who “gave birth” to Bella; Mark Ruffalo, in the skin of a depraved lawyer, with whom she begins a crazy odyssey; and Remy Youssef, who plays Dafoe’s student, who Bella falls in love with.

The latter, of Egyptian descent, was born in New York and raised in New Jersey. At university, he abandoned his studies in political science and economics to devote himself to comedy, which he studied at William Esper’s studio. He landed a recurring role in 2012 on Papa does his show!, a sitcom centered around a stay-at-home dad.

Golden Globe winner

He then appeared in television (Mr. Robot) and film (The Boyfriend: Why Him? Don’t worry, he won’t walk far), but his career took off in 2019. His first stand-up show, Rami Youssef: Feelings, airs on HBO, and has its own series, simply titled Ramy. Show creator, producer, screenwriter and performer Rami Youssef tells his own story of a first-generation American-Egyptian torn between two cultures. In 2020, he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy Series.

Training in funeral directors

Thanks to Yorgos Lanthimos, he got his first main role in the movie “Poor Creatures”. Rami Youssef doesn’t really know which Greek filmmaker cast him, but he was immediately captivated by the script, he says. GQ columns : “He told me that he had seen my show and that he loved it. Obviously, what he does is very different from my work, but when I read the script, I realized that “he was making a film that had never been made before. I immediately felt that Max had this fork in the road where he could be potentially incredibly annoying, or he could be honest. I got the impression that he wanted me to use some kind of honesty.

In order to prepare as much as possible, he and Willem Dafoe trained in the school of a real funeral director: We’ve been using medical equipment since the late 19th century to learn how to sew up the body. We worked with animal organs to perform the procedure. We got our hands dirty. hands. It was a unique way. Build a relationship between me and Willem both in real life and on screen.”

Poor Creatures, in theaters now.