Ramy Youssef on Working With Bella Hadid, Exploring Polygamy in ‘Ramy’ Season 3 and Potentially - Video

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you haven’t watched “Ramy” Season 3. Ramy is suffering an identity crisis. “Ramy” the show, as well as its creator and star Ramy Youssef, couldn’t be in a more confident place creatively. After Season 2 finale “You Are Naked in Front of Your Sheikh” saw Ramy confess to Zainab (MaameYaa Boafo) on their wedding night that he’d cheated on her with his own cousin (Rosaline Elbay) the night before, Season 3 begins with a full embrace of the dirtbag Ramy has become. He’s left his job with his uncle Naseem (also a dirtbag, played by Laith Nakli) to start his own competing business in New York’s diamond district, and having lost the religious guidance of Zainab’s father, Sheikh Ali Malik (Mahershala Ali), he is nothing outside of his work. He’s rich now, but nearly friendless, especially neglecting his longtime best friend Steve (Steve Way). Ramy’s only comfort comes from Boomer, the dog that the Sheikh had him rescue in Season 2. In lieu of God, Ramy searches for meaning in his nights with a sex worker named Olivia (Sarita Choudhury), and the two accidentally kill Boomer. With so little remaining connection to his old life, he finally begins to self-reflect. The finale, “We Gave It All Up For Hot Dogs,” ends with the implication that Ramy could find redemption. With Season 3 now streaming on Hulu, Youssef spoke with Variety about sex, drugs and the end of “Ramy.” Season 3 opens with Ramy making a difficult decision about whether or not he should travel to Israel for business, being a supporter of Palestine and the BDS movement. Was it a difficult to decide to shoot on location in Jerusalem? Shooting in Jerusalem was a no-brainer. We worked with a really amazing Palestinian crew that supports a very vibrant, up-and-coming film industry that we were excited to be a part of. Annemarie Jacir, who directed the episode, was an amazing collaborator. This is an episode that we put a lot of thought into. We’re a writers’ room that has Muslim writers and Jewish writers, and [the episode] is a very diverse palette of the conversations we have. This is a pretty heated topic, obviously, and what I always thought could be comedic is, how do you take this big situation of Israel and Palestine, throw Ramy in there, and somehow he’s the biggest asshole of the whole thing? How can we unify by him bothering everyone on every side of the conversation? And in doing so, bring out the most human themes: What is a nation state? What does it take to have a nation state? We talked about [Noam] Chomsky in the episode, and to me, that’s always been the biggest takeaway from it. There’s a really high cost to have a country. We examine that in a pretty universal lens where Ramy has to think about what it means to be an American in the same way that we probably all do. The next hot-button issue: Bella Hadid making her acting debut as Steve’s awkward girlfriend. How did you build Lena’s character, and why is she so obsessed with “The Office”? We were just joking around in the room. A bunch of people found that they were just mostly watching “The Office” when they were dating somebody — this joke of “The Office” being enough to keep two people together. Ramy can’t believe that Steve has this really beautiful girlfriend, but they are just together because they love “The Office.” That is the most important thing in their relationship. It was really making us laugh. It was one of our bigger swings as an episode, and then it became Bella. She did the script as written, but brought something to it that was so different and really, really unexpected. Lena (Bella Hadid) only talks about “The Office” at dinner with Ramy (Ramy Youssef) and Steve (Steve Way). Ramy’s inability to support the relationship becomes a turning point for him and Steve. Why did you want to break up their friendship? Ramy is going through this crisis of faith, and he’s dug himself into a really difficult place, and it’s [caused] a separation between him and not just his family, but his friends. The way the episodes are designed, we see Ramy alone a lot, and we see his family and even his friends together without him. Like, we started this series with Mo [Mo Amer] hating Steve, and now Mo and Steve are hanging out and Ramy is not there! And where we leave Ramy, it feels like this glimpse at what could be a new chapter for him. As we think about what would be happening in our next season, I think there’s another big chapter for him and Steve. So much of what Steve struggles with is needing people [because of his disability]. Ramy was always there for him, and s