Magic, Representation, and Writing Her Own Characters: In Conversation with Yasmeen Scott
Yasmeen Scott is a British Emirati actress, raised in Abu Dhabi but relocated to the UK. At 25, she started pursuing a career in acting on the foundation of a strong love for performance in her childhood. We spoke about true representation in film and TV, her dream role (and magic, and mermaids), and taking those two things into her own hands.
By Amelia Defeo.
So, you were raised in the UAE. Abu Dhabi wasn’t it?
Yeah, so my Dad is Emirati, he's from Dubai. I was born in England, but when I was six, my dad moved back to the UAE to get work because we were living in poverty in the UK. So my dad's like, I'll go back there, get a job and then we'll come back, so he got work in Abu Dhabi.
So your family currently lives out there?
Yeah, family lives out there. My mum lives in Abu Dhabi. My brother lives in Abu Dhabi with his family. And me and my two sisters live over here. But I think my oldest sister is thinking about moving back.
Abu Dhabi's home. My mum’s lived in Abu Dhabi longer than she ever lived in the UK. So even though she's white English, she has UAE nationality now.
Would you ever want to move back?
I would love to live there just because it's such a struggle here at the moment, but I feel like I can't achieve my career goals over there, unfortunately. Yeah. So I'm here with everyone else.
What’s the earliest memory that you have of the entertainment industry over there?
Well, actually, I think my earliest kind of experience, I guess, in the entertainment world, was when we were all kids, I must have been about eight, we joined a ballet company. And we performed on a semi-professional basis. It was a Ukrainian ballet teacher. And she was married to an Emirati and she started up her own ballet school, and she arranged it with the cultural foundation in Abu Dhabi. We would put on ballet shows and she would invite other ballet companies from Ukraine to come and perform as well. And they would sell tickets, and we'd have people come and watch us, but the funds just went towards the cultural foundation, so we didn't earn money from it. So that was my first experience being a part of the entertainment industry and understanding that it was something that you could do as a job.
It was what I wanted to do. I knew, I knew I could do it as an adult. We used to watch videos of the Royal Ballet School, and the Royal Ballet production, and the Royal Opera House and, you know, have these dreams of performing as adults for ballet companies. And that would be our job. So that was kind of like my earliest kind of entry level into performance.
And during that period, my sister auditioned for Hermione and Harry Potter.
Oh my god.
Yeah, she must have been 12 when they were doing the audition. So I was about 10. But I remember watching her film an audition, and being like, oh, is this the book that she loved? And my mom was helping her tape it and they were saying, oh, yeah, they're making a film. So that was my first time understanding like, well, I guess seeing any kind of background into acting.
So it was really dance that came first for you. And then, acting came later.
Yeah, dance was always what I loved. And then I was very sporty at school. So I was always doing extracurricular things at school.I was doing cake decorating competitions I used to enter into elocution competitions. The first elocution competition I did was actually a Quran recital competition. I was quite young. I think I was in year five or six. And I won that. And I was shocked. I thought I came third, I didn't know what I came because I wasn't paying attention when they announced who won and then I went to get my ribbon and they were like, “what did you come? Which one do we give you?” And I was like, “Oh, I don't know. Third”, and they gave it to me and I walked back in. My teacher was like, “You won”, And I was like, “Oh, I thought I was third” and she said, “No, you were first.”.
I just assumed because I had learned Arabic on a second language basis and, in my opinion, I didn't have a good accent, and thought there was no way I came first but yeah, lo and behold, I was first. And then I basically always wanted to do things that were on stage. That's kind of, I guess where it started.
I was so the opposite of that. I used to sign myself up for everything, and then get off on the stage and start crying.
I just loved it. I didn't know what it was. I was quiet in school as well. But I always put myself out for the solos. I don't know where that confidence came from. I was really shy and introverted but when I was doing things like that, I didn't feel it.
Was it the activity itself? Or was it the feeling of being in front of people?
I think it was a bit of both, I think it was the excitement and the adrenaline that I enjoyed. And then the activity because I was not an academic child. I was very active. I wanted to be doing things like sports or art.
More creative.
Super creative.
And when was that first push into acting?
I must have been 24. I was working in London for Etihad Airways on their graduate management scheme in corporate sales, and I was just having a meltdown, like depression and panic attacks. I didn't know what to do. I just had this strong understanding that I have one life and if I go down this path, there's no changing it. What I really wanted to do is pursue acting, but I never thought I could when I was younger, because I never did it as a subject at school, I never got trained in it. And it was always something on my mind that I always wanted to do when I was a kid but it was never a serious option. I never thought it was something that you could do. But I guess because I was just having a mental breakdown, really, in my mid 20s.
It’s that feeling that you've sort of got nothing to lose, so I might as well just do what I love and fail.
Absolutely. The great thing that came out of having those corporate years was that I was able to afford to go to acting classes and evening courses. So I utilised the fact that I had the income to do it.
I went part time at my corporate job and then I left it. I carried on with the acting classes. I went to the Identity School of Acting and met a director who was starting his own training programme, and he invited me. I remember, he just randomly messaged me one day saying, I got one more space left on this training programme I've just started, it's going to be doing this many days a week for this long period. I think you'll be great for it. And that's, that's when I considered that I actually started pursuing it in a serious manner.
Because someone else sees it as well.
I was 25 when I did that and I remember feeling so old to be pursuing it. Everyone else had been doing it at school and going to drama school. I had no confidence and no experience compared to everyone else.
Within this country too, in terms of the acting industry, the pathway into it is so narrow. It’s made up of such a specific type of people who have been educated at certain places. To even have a foot in is such an accomplishment.
Exactly. Exactly what you said. It’s such a narrow way in. Even when you get, like, a toe in. And it’s not a linear career either. It's not like, you've booked something, now you're going to take off, you have to carry on trying to convince people to book you. So you might book something, and then you'll have a few years of nothing. It’s such a tight knit industry and it's so difficult to break through into it.
You see people on TV, or in the theatre and think that's the industry when actually, that's a really small percentage. And the other half is like what everyone else is doing, which is auditioning every week, and getting close calls, then it doesn't go any further, and then doing loads of commercial work that no one ever sees. And that goes on for years and months and weeks and days.
Is that the biggest challenge of getting into acting? Or is there something else that you've faced getting yourself through that door?
I think that's one of the biggest challenges that a lot of people face, such as myself - is the financial part because I'm not from an incredibly privileged background. I'm privileged in the sense that in emergencies I would have family support now, but that's not to say that I can just pursue acting and my family would financially support me. I have to work outside of acting to pay rent, bills and make ends meet, this usually will be in hospitality or retail jobs to keep the flexibility to do auditions or book time off for acting roles. So the pay is terrible but it’s hard to find appropriate work that pays a decent living wage.
You're exhausted from doing a full time job. Then on top of that, you have three auditions a week, and you’re just so tired. And sometimes you don't give it your all because you just want to get it out of the way, and then you look back and you're like, oh my god, I really messed that up because I was just too tired to focus on the role or the audition.
If you look at the industry today it is filled with people from very privileged backgrounds, and that's because they have the flexibility to give it their all without being exhausted from working full time jobs on the side, they can just focus on acting, and then they get the roles. And I think that that's that's very much the picture of the industry at the moment, that people that are breaking through, from the UK specifically are from a middle class background, so working class talent has decreased rapidly, partly due to the fact when trying to just earn enough to survive on top of pursuing a really difficult career.
Do you think there'll be a milestone that you'll hit where you'll feel like, ‘oh, I've done it’?
It changes with what I will measure as success. And I think that that's my choice. I can decide what success looks like for me. So right now I'm content with, I guess, the growth.
I just had that TV role in the summer, when I booked that I just thought finally. I’ve spent so many years trying to get to this point. Then I've actually just filmed a role in a really exciting film, which will come out next year. These little things are just boosts for me to feel like I'm on the right path. Keep going, keep going.
And I'm okay with the slowness of it. Obviously, there's days where I'm thinking, ‘how long can I do this for?’, but I understand that it will take time. And in the meantime, I'm still doing what I love. Even if it's not always going to be big, amazing roles on TV or film. I'm still doing commercial work. I'm doing music videos, I'm reading scripts every week. It’s still in my sphere. And that's what I enjoy doing. So I think I just have to get to a place where as long as I'm doing enough every week, and I feel like I'm being creative, then I'm fulfilling the purpose.
So what's the dream role for you?
Right now the dream is just to have a system. On TV, that would be amazing. Like if I just had a role, where I was recurring. But obviously if we’re talking about anything in the world…I mean, I love to look at really strong female characters. It can be something that's really, societally politically important. Or it could even be - and I know this probably sounds really dumb - but a superhero. The whole reason why I loved film and wanted to be an actor when I was a kid, is that it was the closest that I would get to being able to experience magic. I used to love films like Peter Pan or Harry Potter.
I loved the idea of magic. And I really wanted it to be real. When I was a kid, part of me just wanted it to be real so much, so the the closest way I could experience it in my head was by being in films. I’d love to fulfil that childhood hole of just magic and glory and superpowers and flying.
That’s the most important thing though, and if you have a job that lets you do that then that’s the best. I think I was fully convinced I was a mermaid when I was younger.
I used to do stuff like that in the swimming pool, and we had access to a swimming pool, like every weekend living in the UAE.
I would just dream about it, you know, I would always dream about magic and romance.
I wanted to talk about representation, because I watched you talk about it with regard to MENA voices and it's obviously quite a double edged sword of talking about that whilst also being active in the industry itself. You still have to walk through it the way that you're expected to, but you're still speaking out.
So in terms of representation, do you remember a time where you actually felt represented on the screen?
Weirdly, the thing that I feel represents my family experience, in particular, was a film called East is East. Have you seen it?
I have!
So that film, for me, is so symbolic because it's so similar to what my family experience was where I had this really Arab, Muslim dad who spoke broken English he learned from my mum, who was thrown into the Western culture when living in England. Then I had a really strong minded working class English mum who adored my dads culture and tried to adopt it as much as possible for us and him.
So that film, even though they're not Arab, but they are Muslim, the Muslim culture is very much similar across non-Arab muslim and Arab-muslims, so the experience is very familiar. It’s like the battle of the two cultures back and forth and as kids it portrayed the struggle of identity when you’re mixed. It demonstrated the mixed race muslim experience that I had to some degree. I've always wanted there to be more just like that, that shows the complexities that they experienced in that film, or that showed the divide between the family and how the kids were brought up. I think when you're mixed, it is a different experience because you do feel this push-pull from both sides.
Do you think there's a cap on the way that representation is actualized in this industry? A lot of the time, efforts for representation or inclusivity are focused on what we see rather than the dialogues, or the dialects, different family dynamics, different slang, the things that are so integrated into certain people's culture and certain people's upbringing, that maybe we don't have enough people of that culture behind the scenes, in the writing room, producers, directors, to actually put those things into practice.
Exactly. It just becomes the filler of the other story. The side characters, or the background characters that are like the diversity ticks. There are so many stories in the world and I think people forget that, when we talk about representation, we're not talking about just getting as many people of colour on screen as you can. It's about making it feel how it is in the world. And rather than always showing the same type of story, show all of the different stories that exist out there. That’s not difficult to do. But it becomes difficult, because what they do is they just keep showing the same story, but filling it out with the diversity on the outskirts, and it becomes forced.
Could you ever see yourself maybe being on the other side of that? Would you ever want to write or produce or direct?
Weirdly, actually, my therapist is trying to drive me into doing more writing. I don't know why. He's just got this idea that I should be writing roles for myself, and I've always been like, oh, but I'm not a writer, I don't even know where to start. It completely baffles me to think about having to write a script. I said I’d think about it. And when I was on the tube the other day, something just came into my head and I was like, I have it. I actually have something that I want to write for me to do, like a short film. So it is something that I want to try and see whether or not there's anything there. But it's obviously something that I think a lot of actors do. You do feel like there's a lack of things that you can perform in or there are roles that you don't see. And you're like, why don't I just write that for myself? I don't know if I can write. I have no idea. I mean, it all starts with an idea, right?
Absolutely. I am so adamant that everyone's voice comes from the way that they've lived, the people they've been around, the way they've grown up, what they've learned, so they’re all valuable in different ways. Even the way that you write will lend itself to the character you want to write.
That makes complete sense. Everyone does have a story. I was given some advice by my boyfriend who writes music, and he said, the ideas always come to you when you're not thinking of them, and if you sit down and say, right, I'm gonna write today, nothing will come.
I’ll be lying in bed and I’ll think of something and just put it in my notes app or write it down quickly.
Yeah, that’s the best way to do it. That’s what I’ve been doing now too. It’s crazy how the mind works like that. If you think about it: no. But one day it’ll just pop into your head.
You’ve also spoken about the gap between the roles that you’re put up for vs. the ones that you feel truly represent you. Do you think there’s been a movement towards the latter of being up for roles that you identify with?
I’d hope so. It’s difficult to say. Sometimes I’ll get something and think, “Wow, this would be cool”, but other times I’ll get something and think, “I guess it could just be what I make it to be”, so that choice could be on me. I think I’ve started to realise that my experience is different to people who may be fully Arab, and I’m mixed, and those roles I’m not getting. So why don’t I write my own? And that goes back to what we spoke about before, just taking control over those roles because they’re the ones that I’m dying to see. Another East is East.
It’s not always done in the best way, but I think there is a shift towards those stories being told. I do think we’re moving in the right direction, and if I don’t end up getting one that represents myself then I’ll just make one myself.
You speak out a lot too about different social and political issues, more so than the average person would feel obligated to in your industry. Is there a reason maybe you do, and others hesitate to?
I’ve always spoken about it since it became something of a passion of mine. I learnt a lot through my sister. She would always correct me, and I listened to her, and from then on I’ve always been outspoken on issues and I think so much of that is because my family are incredibly strong minded and outspoken anyway. I just think, of course I have to speak out about these things because I also had lived experience of some of it, so that's helped educate me and therefore I want to speak up against what I believe is wrong or dangerous. For instance if there’s a really right winged dangerous patriarchal figure coming into power here or in the West, that scares me of course as I would feel vulnerable, being a muslim woman & from the Middle East, and also fear for the more vulnerable people who would suffer. Honestly I do it also because it really just scares & upsets me to think about people suffering when we are all here to share this world and try to enjoy our one life on the planet. No one is more deserving than another, and everyone should have the chance to have a decent life without pain or poverty.
You almost don’t want people who don’t understand to speak out about it in the wrong way, and spread the wrong message. I do believe that we all have a responsibility collectively to improve the society we live in but I would rather if people educated themselves properly before speaking out as we have seen some damage in the past, especially if you have a big platform you could potentially be influencing, and it might be down to the fact they don't feel like it's something they may know enough about to speak on.
But also in this industry, too, you’re building yourself as a brand. You have people who will constantly scrutinise you, and you don’t know who might troll you or harass you, so there’s definitely a hesitation where people feel vulnerable to that. If I don’t talk about it, I'm not being authentic, because these are the conversations I’d be having with my friends offline.
Have you ever experienced any pushback from people that you’ve actually worked with directly with regard to speaking about certain topics because it can be so polarising?
I have discussed with agents, actually, about social media and they’re fine with it. I know that often it’s encouraged to post about charity work they’re doing. It’s gently encouraged, they just don’t want to alienate certain audiences. At the end of the day, I’ve got to be truthful to myself and it’s always about trying to spread the right message and hope that people might learn something the same way I did from my sister.
But there are sometimes times where something really difficult is happening and you don’t want to keep reposting it and potentially harm someone, or trigger someone that follows you. Or a friend. You do have internal battles about what is appropriate to share right now, and maybe what has already been shared a lot and I don’t necessarily need to if it could harm someone.
For WHM, we asked this question: as per the publication title, is there a time where you’ve felt the need to put on a different face - physically or metaphorically?
I feel like my true self is the side of me that is more hidden from the world, and the face that I go out in every day is actually what I’m forced into. A protective bubble. I sort of gloss over without smiling, I keep my head down, I just want to get from point A to point B without drawing attention to myself. I find it more difficult to be myself, which is a lot more relaxed - and I think quite funny - but I struggle to get that side out more. When strangers see me day-to-day, that’s often a mask that has built up from so many things, and society, and not wanting to draw attention to myself. Then I have to sort of get out of that face to be myself again. My childhood was stressful, there is a lot of past trauma there - and I learned as a coping mechanism to be an observer, so I usually check out from myself and watch others and my surroundings instead. I think that's a survival thing but that has stayed with me - It's made me very aware & observant of people's behaviour now to the point where I sometimes feel I've disconnected from my own consciousness when doing it.
I grew up being taught to be quite conservative, I went to a segregated school, I was just around women so I’m always around women. Around men I’m a lot more reserved, and therefore that created a culture where, when I’m in public, I am a lot more reserved. I only become relaxed when I’m in an environment where I feel comfortable, like my family or close friends. Only 30% of my day I am being me.
Looping back to earlier, that is the type of representation that can’t be taught or researched. It has to come from people who have actually felt it, because it is so complex.
It’s such a push and pull factor. And then you relocate to the UK, and everyone has this whole different experience and understanding. Even the way people are with their friends. For example, I’m not a hugger but I grew up kissing on the cheek. Sometimes it was one, or one and one, or three on one side. If we met up with friends it might have been one touch of a handshake. It was never an embrace. That definitely contributed to that reserved feeling.
Do you ever feel that that bleeds into your work with certain roles? Maybe if a character is written to be massively affectionate?
It’s been really quite hard. I’ve had to do the same thing with roles. I try to give myself the understanding that I came into acting late so I’m still practising and learning, and I feel like I’m only just getting that place of understanding that I can be myself in the roles, I don’t have to be someone else, but me within that person.
When you settle into being comfortable in yourself, then you become a better actor playing other people.
