Taking shape

Liza Foreman

• Last Updated: November 18. 2009 3:21PM UAE / November 18. 2009 11:21AM GMT

The Palestinian-American actor Waleed Zuaiter, centre, appears with George Clooney and Ewan McGregor in The Men Who Stare at Goats. Laura Macgruder/ Westgate Film Services

How many actors can say they shared the stage with Meryl Streep, dined with George Clooney and landed a role in Sex and the City 2?

Waleed Zuaiter can. The 38-year-old Palestinian-American has risen through the ranks of the New York theater scene to emerge in a supporting role with Clooney in The Men Who Stare at Goats, currently playing in the UAE. It is the highest-profile film yet for the rising star, who made his breakthrough on Broadway in Eliam Kraiem’s 2004 play, Sixteen Wounded.

The show’s three-week run created enough buzz for Zuaiter to jump to his next production, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, and he has gone from strength to strength ever since. But he says he has to periodically remind himself of his success – “I have shared the stage with Meryl Streep. I can die and go to heaven” – and he constantly worries about landing jobs. “Arabs worry and Palestinians are even worse because they don’t know what will come tomorrow,” he says.

It doesn’t sound like he needs to fret too much. In addition to a busy theater career, his recent screen roles include playing Saddam Hussein’s best friend in the series House of Saddam and a lecturer in Veronika Decides to Die. His role alongside Streep was in a prestigious Central Park production of Mother Courage.

“My parents hadn’t even heard of Meryl Streep,” he says. “Acting isn’t a very well respected career in the Middle East. They are business people. It wasn’t until Goats when they said: ‘George Clooney. We have heard of him.’”

To help take his career to the next level, Zuaiter recently moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles with his wife and their two children. He met his wife at school in Kuwait, where she had a certain influence on his career.

“She was in a play at school and I basically started acting to be close to her,” explains Zuaiter with casual, rugged charm. “I have been doing it ever since.”

Zuaiter is off shortly to Morocco to film his part in Sex and the City 2, in which he plays a watch salesman in a souq. He has also signed on to the Lebanese director Chadi Zeneddine’s drama Barbershop Trinity and he is working on a long-gestating adaptation of On the Hills of God, a coming-of-age novel set in Palestine in 1948, which he has optioned the rights to. “It is a beautiful story, told through the eyes of three friends, a Palestinian-Christian, a Palestinian-Jew and a Palestinian Muslim,” he says.

The roles he has played mirror his multicultural heritage. He was born in California to Palestinian parents and raised in Kuwait. He moved to America to study in 1989 and has now spent more time living there than anywhere else.

“I am a Palestinian-American,” he says. “I always feel that if you feed too much into it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I can’t lie about where I am from. Some people identify first with religion and culture but I don’t obsess too much. I identify first with being me.”

Ultimately, Zuaiter doesn’t want to be pigeonholed, which is a sound approach for any actor – especially in the fickle town of Los Angeles.