As media mogul Logan Roy’s third wife, Marcia Roy had the unenviable role of showing his scheming children their place in the family’s future. Hiam Abbass, who played the unwavering character of Marcia Roy in the HBO series Succession, was a reluctant actor thrown into the high intensity world of television for the first time. (Also Read – Jeremy Strong reveals how Succession ‘messed’ him up: ‘No desire to return’ for HBO spin-off)
“It was the first TV show that I ever participated in,” Abbass told Hindustan Times at the just-concluded Ajyal Film Festival in Doha, Qatar. “Before Succession, I was almost anti-television,” adds the Palestinian actor, who was born in Nazareth, Israel.
“I just loved cinema and the work of the actor on stage, like the engagement with movies where you know the beginning and the end. The TV series was a new experience for me, where you just like, ‘Go’, and you don’t know where you’re going. So it was like an interesting process to learn,” she says.
“I really loved working on the show. I loved the cast, the writers and the directors. I think it was one of the most important projects I had on TV basically,” recalls Abbass, who appeared in all the four seasons of Succession, which ended last year after a hugely successful half-a-decade international run, as a main and recurring character.
The Palestinian Voice
Arguably the most successful Palestinian actor, Abbass donned a variety of roles representing the Palestinian identity and narrating stories of a people who had become refugees in their own land.
She was a Palestinian widow who sued the Israeli defence minister for uprooting her lemon trees in Israeli filmmaker Eran Rilklis’ Lemon Tree (2008), played Palestinian activist Hind al-Husseini who founded the Arab Children’s House orphanage in Jerusalem in American artist Julian Schnabel’s 2010 film Miral, co-starring Freida Pinto, and a tailor in love with a fisherman in Gaza in Tarzan brothers’ Gaza Mon Amour (2020), that explores romance under occupation.
Abbass was also in American director Steven Speilberg’s Munich, about the hunt for the terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated Paradise Now, French-Canadian filmmaker Dennis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, and American series Ramy, on immigrant Muslims in the United States, helmed by stand-up comedian Ramy Youssef.
Last year, Abbass played herself in her daughter Lina Soualem’s debut documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias, the personal accounts of four generations of Palestinian women tracing links with their homeland.
“I’m very happy with Bye Bye Tiberias. Honestly, I was very afraid because when you reveal personal things of your life and go so deep into not only yourself, but people who kind of made you and are close to you, people who are so deeply connected to your past, it’s hard to stay stoic in front of that, you know,” says Abbass about the story of her grandmother, mother, herself and her daughter.
Behind the Camera
Abbass got behind the camera in 2012, to make her first directorial venture, Inheritance, the story of a wedding in the middle of a war between Israel and Lebanon. More than a decade later, as the Middle East is reeling under a catastrophic conflict that has claimed 44,000 lives in Gaza and displaced more than three million people in Gaza and Lebanon, Abbass is aware of the strength of the collective voice of Palestinian artists.
“I’m not an ambassador, you know, of any sort, but I think the most important thing, it’s like the voice that I take, and our voices all together, would make the Palestinian voice,” she says. “Through the cinema and through our work, at least, we were able to raise them up again, and just say, you know, we exist, but we don’t exist as you want us to be, but as our own voices, individually, and we can represent something that we are trying to.”
Abbass, who lives in Paris, has five movies in various stages of production, most of them continuing her representation of Palestinian stories to the world. “There are four movies that I shot all over last year, which will be released in 2025-26. There are two new movies I’m doing at the beginning of next year. One is a Lebanese film with Lebanese-French director Danielle Arbid (of Alone With War) and another with Argentinian scriptwriter-director Santiago Amigorena.”
“Yet another is a movie (All Before You) by Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir (of Salt of This Sea). My character is an old lady in what used to be a resistance in the Palestinian revolution. In the film, I live with my husband and my daughter and her daughter. So there’s a generational thing as well that happens in the movie. But it’s really like a guest role because of my relationship with Annemarie,” says Abbass referring to the acclaimed director’s new project about a farmer-rebellion against the British in Palestine in 1936.
Her new acting roles are keeping Abbass from directing. “Unfortunately, since I directed Inheritance, I didn’t have the time to develop another. I did direct a short film, Le Donne della Vucciria, for the Prada Miu Miu Women’s Tales series. Prada decided to encourage women directors to be more on the market. I was number six in the series. I also directed one of the episodes of Ramy. I love it, I’d still love to do it, but I’m not finding the time to develop. It needs your full time.”
Don’t Ignore Memory
Abbass arrived in cinema as a production assistant in a movie shot in her own village in Nazareth. “(Palestinian filmmaker) Michel Khleifi came to call anybody who was involved in art to help because we didn’t really have any production companies or production houses,” she says, referring to Khleif’s debut film, Wedding in Galilee (1997).
“And I remember one day he asked me to do a silhouette part that was so small. This is where I discovered the relationship to the camera. I guess that was one of the secret reasons deep in me that made me go away from Palestine to look for something different as well in order to, you know, maybe meet with that world one day.”
“The love of acting was in me since I was young. But my relationship to cinema really, I think, happened almost as if in a dream. One day, there was a movie that arrived in the open air at the central square of my village and I remember I was a very, very young person. I took a small chair from my parents’ house, put it there and sat on it. And I looked at something that seemed magical to me.”
On magic, is she going to be in the new Harry Potter series announced by HBO, led by Succession producers Francesca Gardiner and Mark Mylod? “No, no, no. They didn’t tell me this you see, I learned it just now from you. I don’t follow up really in that sense and I don’t go after people to kind of like ‘Hey, what you’re doing next? Can I do something with you?’ I’m not that kind of actor. I’m not judging the others, but I’m not, you know. I work so much that I’m really happy with whatever comes to me. That doesn’t mean that I’m lazy and I’m just sitting waiting. But I have a deep belief that whatever is for me would be for me will come to me.”
Abbass’ decision to act in Bye Bye Tiberias, her daughter’s debut documentary, came as a catharsis. “It was hurtful to talk about the past because it was close to all the pain I was living with that separation (of her mother’s death). Separation reminds you of another and another and another, and it goes back deep into the heritage that you got from all this exile one after the other and that was passed to you despite you wanting to receive it.”
“But today, what I find really interesting as well is I would resume this whole experience by saying that I discovered how important it is for people to be in touch with their own stories and how much it is important always to know that you’re part of a collective, and this collective, you cannot ignore it. The history, memory, is maybe personal at first, but you’re part of a collective memory and we have to stick always to the idea that we are part of a home. We’re not alone in this world.”