Anna Daniels
The next role Kenzari was offered proved to be quite a double-edged sword. He appeared as Malik in The Mummy, a mega-budget, Tom Cruise-starring adventure that was meant to launch the Dark Universe, an interconnected film franchise featuring studio Universal’s classic monster properties. If you’re even a casual film fan, you probably know how that went: The Mummy flopped so hard that it startled birds out of trees from coast to coast, and when it went down, it took the entire proposed slate of Dark Universe films with it. (Fortunately, Universal rebounded by teaming with Blumhouse to produce lower-budget, standalone features based on those classic properties, starting with 2020’s successful The Invisible Man.)
Kenzari’s string of stateside flops and underperformers came to an end when he was cast as Pierre Michel in Murder on the Orient Express, director Kenneth Branagh’s rollicking adaptation of the classic Agatha Christie novel. Not only did Kenzari get to share the screen with the likes of Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp, Daisy Ridley, and Dame Judi Dench (plus Branagh himself as Christie’s iconic detective Hercule Poirot), but the flick was also well-received and a significant commercial hit.
Kenzari followed up that success with appearances in 2017’s What Happened to Monday opposite Glenn Close and Dafoe, and scored the lead role in 2018’s Israeli-American Netflix spy drama The Angel. But in 2019, he landed the gig that would give him his highest visibility yet — and if the body of work we’ve covered so far hasn’t rung any bells, then we’ll bet dollars to donuts that it’s why the actor’s face looks so familiar.
Written by: Looper
