Making an acting career of cultural responses to political traumas
Friday, 6 March 2026
Khalid Abdalla’s Nowhere is vital and stunning theatre, from the Arab Spring’s hope to the devastating mass killing of Palestinian children, via Glaswegian humour. Screen famous since playing lead hijacker Ziad Jarrah in 2006’s United 93, the father of two is a lively conversationalist. In kōrero with Alexander Bisley at Te Papa, the morning after his standing ovation at Tāwhiri Warehouse, Abdalla is intimate and inspiring company.
Your post-Nowhere Q and;A, and audience interactions, are impressive. A strong point about how The Crown, where you beautifully played Dodi Fayed’s romance with Princess Diana, is an uncommonly sympathetic mainstream portrayal.
As an Arab we’re used to bad representations of our cultures and of Arab men. Here were the resources of The Crown being put towards giving dignity to the Fayed family. You get to know Dodi, not fear him, and love him. And so when he dies, you mourn him.
So much of my career is cultural responses to political traumas. Whether it’s United 93, whether it’s Green Zone, whether it’s The Kite Runner and The Crown. The story of Dodi and Diana, and Diana’s death in particular, is something that people have cried about the world over. And so to step into the space of trying to honour that story, means to honour people’s tears and to honour Dodi. A huge honour for me and to try and live up to it.
The CCTV footage of them before they left The Ritz, where you see the way that they nuzzle each other, clearly they had a falling in love. That’s all I need to know for my portrayal, right? I don’t need to answer the question of what their relationship would have become or wouldn’t have become. So these are the things that tether me. Likewise in relation to Mohamed Al-Fayed and Dodi, you understand that it was a deeply complex relationship with problems, but it was also deeply loving, as very often those complex parent-child relationships can be.
I feel like there is material for another season of The Crown.
The joke is that the next season of The Crown was done by Harry and Meghan. There has already been many things done on Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe at some point Peter [Morgan] will turn around and say now it feels like it’s time. He felt like there needs to be the distance to be able to tell some of those stories.
What do you hope that a Wellington audience might takeaway from Nowhere?
I feel like the play was called here. There are places in the world, theatres in the world that are scared to programme it or that don’t feel ready for whatever reason to have the conversations that are inside the play. Aotearoa Festival was one of the first to ask for it to come.
In Sydney, and now in Wellington, I am learning about the attempts to reconcile with a settler colonial history, that are happening both in Australia and New Zealand: How much they potentially have as a huge gift to give to the world if they walk the distance of where they seem to be headed. I profoundly believe that Down Under’s journey is turning the world the right way up.
As a proud uncle, your comments on how your son and daughter inspire you, resonate. At the end of Nowhere, I love hearing Aya sing Our House.
Nawar’s means one who brings light. I translate Aya as a sign of the miraculous. My daughter happened to be having a piano lesson the day before we opened [at the Sydney Festival] and recorded this version of Our House, and sent it to me. I heard it and I was like, that’s it. It should always have been this. And we got the rights and included it. Another form of the fragility and humility and beauty that exists in a child learning. A song that is essentially about belonging.
It became exactly the right thing, especially when the play relates to Gaza and people’s houses being destroyed and all the devastation. The words suddenly sing out because you re-hear things that are familiar to you. “Father wears his Sunday best”.
Do you have something hopeful to say about Palestine?
I feel there has been a massive shift in global consciousness. It is heartbreaking that it has taken a genocide for that to happen. However, I believe the time is now. Now is the opportunity globally for a shift, the scale of what it meant to end apartheid in South Africa. I believe it is the civil rights movement of our time, it’s the anti-apartheid movement of our time, it’s the anti-genocide movement of our time.
I just don’t believe that this world that we’re seeing unfolding in Palestine and in the Arab region and in Iran is the world that people want to see. It intimately affects our lives. So we have to be the generation to move beyond this.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. Nowhere continues at Tāwhiri Warehouse Friday and Saturday nights. Tickets at Festival.nz