The Crown’s Khalid Abdalla Mixes Acting & Activism In Meaningful Ways

The highly-anticipated offering of The Crown Season 5 has landed on Netflix. One of the biggest draws of this new season is, of course, the breakdown of Diana and Charles’ marriage, and her subsequent relationship with Egyptian film producer Dodi Fayed. The actor who portrays Fayed in the upcoming Netflix series is Khalid Abdalla, but what do we know of this actor, producer, and activist?

Abdalla was born in Glasgow to Egyptian parents who were both physicists. He was brought up in London, schooling with actor Ben Barnes and comedian Tom Basden as his classmates in King’s College School, where he first became interested in acting and drama. Abdalla then went on to read English at Queen’s College, Cambridge, where he continued getting involved in the student drama scene alongside his peers Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall. He went on to receive a joint win with Cressida Trew for the Judges’ Award for Acting at the National Student Drama Festival — who Abdalla later married in 2011.

Theatre notwithstanding, Abdalla has numerous screen roles under his belt, having made his Hollywood debut in United 93 (2006) and garnering critical acclaim for his portrayal of 9/11 hijacker pilot, Ziad Jarrah. His most well-known role is the main character of Amir Qadiri in The Kite Runner (2007). And you may have also seen Abdalla starring in Green Zone, Assassin’s Creed, In the Last Days of the City, Undergods, and Marvel’s Moon Knight.

But it isn’t just acting that keeps him busy, activism also runs in Abdalla’s blood. Both his father and grandfather were well-known anti-regime activists in Egypt who were imprisoned several times, and when major protests broke out in Egypt against the Hosni Mubarak regime in 2011, Abdalla left London to join the demonstrations in Cairo. He also helped to found the Mosireen media collective, which documented the Tahrir Square protests.

Most recently, the 42-year-old has been campaigning for aid for his friend Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a British-Egyptian pro-democracy activist and writer who has been kept behind bars for a decade on the charge of spreading fake news. Speaking on Good Morning Britain on Nov. 7, Abdalla highlighted how Abd El-Fattah is escalating his hunger strike to a water strike in prison.

He also appeared on the red carpet for The Crown S5 premiere with the words #FreeAlaa on his hand, which he later shared on Twitter with the caption, “At #TheCrown premiere with this on my hand because we need @FreedomForAlaa, who is on hunger strike in prison and may die any day now only because he makes us believe that a better world is possible.”

Abdalla can be found on Instagram under @k.ab81, though he is more active on Twitter under the handle @khalidabdalla.