The executive producer and co-star of the new Pierce Brosnan flick shooting in Abu Dhabi was once a rally driver who made it big on YouTube.
Abu Dhabi has been abuzz with the news that former James Bond Pierce Brosnan is in town to shoot the gold heist thriller The Misfits with Die Hard 2 director Renny Harlin and co-stars Jamie Chung and Hermione Corfield. But it’s one of Brosnan’s lesser-known co-stars who perhaps brings the greatest intrigue to the story of the film’s creation.
Executive producer and co-star Rami Jaber, who has a major role in the film “The Prince,” has a backstory as intriguing as any James Bond plot. The Palestinian actor grew up on the divided streets of Jerusalem before escaping to Finland, where he is now a citizen and resides close to the Arctic Circle.
Jaber carved out a career as a rally driver in his new home, and in 2010, he decided he needed to do something new to please his sponsors. He came up with the idea of making a series of short films of him driving around Finland and eventually elsewhere, pulling off stunts and racing through the streets of European cities.
Path to Hollywood
The videos took off on YouTube, and Jaber’s sponsors told him to continue.
As his online popularity grew, Jaber began to dream of heading to Hollywood. “I was already spending over $1 million [$3.67m] on YouTube videos, so it seemed the next step to do something bigger,” he tells The National in Abu Dhabi. “But before I could make a feature, I needed to learn. How do you make a movie? How do you edit? All that kind of stuff because I’d never been to film school or studied movies or anything like that.”
By way of learning, Jaber brought in Prison Break’s Robert Knepper, Rockmond Dunbar, and Amaury Nolasco through his production company RNG Media to make 2016 short, Fate, which achieved the US and Finnish distribution and can now be found on iTunes. The same year, Jaber began starring in the long-running online action-comedy series Tough Love. His path to Hollywood was taking shape.
The idea for The Misfits was Jaber’s own, and on embarking on his Hollywood journey, he teamed up with Sin City 2producer Kia Jam, who he asked to find him a writer to turn his dream into reality. The established shorts writer Robert Henny was drafted in for his feature debut. The trio would spend the next three years fine-tuning the script, working day and night.
Finding their way to Abu Dhabi
The film was originally due to be filmed in Puerto Rico, but when Hurricane Maria struck in September 2017, shortly before the shoot was due, the team’s proposed location was left in ruins.
It was at this point that Jaber’s partners in RNG Media became crucial to the story. Qais Qandil and Jalal Abu Samir, who both have executive producer credits on The Misfits alongside Jaber, live in Abu Dhabi. The pair had actually initially suggested Abu Dhabi as a shoot location, but Jaber admits that his US team knew little about the place.