Fares Fares

Fares Fares leans back on the sofa at his wife Clara Hallencreutz’s art studio. We’re in Stockholm, where the warmth and light of early summer have hit with full force and the city is heaving with people out enjoying it all. 

The Swedish actor has recently wrapped shooting on A Day and a Half, his directorial debut due to premiere this fall, and he’s clearly proud of the work. “Acting is fascinating, but with directing I get to tell the story my way,” he says.

Fares became a name in Sweden after starring as Roro, a park cleaner whose parents want to marry him off, in the 2000 movie Jalla! Jalla!—a low-budget production shot by his brother, Josef. They cowrote the movie over the course of a couple of weeks with their friend Torkel Petersson, who also stars in it. It became a sensation on release—the public and critics loved it, with the latter even going so far as to claim it as part of a new wave of Swedish cinema in its portrayal of a side of Sweden few had at that time seen on the big screen.

Since then, Fares has acted in everything from stage shows to music videos to the American television series Westworld. Recently, he co-developed and stars in the Swedish hit crime thriller Partisan, which delves into the dysfunction and dark secrets of an organic farming cult. Then there are the 27 feature movies that Fares has appeared in, which include big name blockbusters such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty and Swedish director Daniel Espinosa’s Easy Money and Safe House, all of which have helped catapult Fares onto the global stage. (Although he doesn’t exactly see it that way: He describes the experience of trying to make it in Los Angeles as “a slog—never-ending auditions and crap. For a really long time.”)

A Day and a Half is a love story turned kidnap chase set in the Swedish countryside. In the movie, Artan (played by Alexej Manvelov, whom Fares acted alongside in the HBO series Chernobyl) takes his ex-wife, Louise (Finnish actor Alma Pöysti), hostage in the hopes of reuniting with their daughter. The idea came from a real-life incident that had been percolating in Fares’ mind for some time. “There was something that drew me to the tragedy of two people who love each other, but then things go wrong, and a child ends up in between,” he explains.

Although Fares didn’t initially want to act in the film (“I couldn’t be bothered to change into costume”), he ended up playing the police officer who tails the couple on their high-stakes road trip. “You can’t tell if a film fully follows your vision before you’ve cut it and watched it through,” he says. “But I’m determined and know what I want—and I won’t stop until I have it.” 

Sitting opposite Fares—tall, angular, bordering on brooding—it’s easy to imagine this to be true, until, with a smile, he adds quickly: “Not in a demonic kind of way or anything.” Fares seems to have his radar switched on at all times—as if he can feel your pulse—and it’s an energy that is palpable on-screen. Some 20-plus years into his acting career, he’s had enough time to practice channeling “characters that go through change”—the type of role he says he’s most drawn to.  

Five of the films in his back catalog are Danish productions, including The Keeper of Lost Causes in which Fares plays a police officer who digs into cold cases, and for which Fares had to learn Danish. “I’m drawn to challenging work,” he says, explaining how he believes experience has taught him to “peel off layers, shed the unimportant stuff,” and reach deeper, to make his character true to what he feels they should be. 

Watch him in 2022’s Boy from Heaven, and you’ll see what he means. Directed by Fares’ longtime friend and creative mentor, the Swedish auteur Tarik Saleh, Fares plays Ibrahim, an Egyptian state security official.¹ That meant mastering Egyptian Arabic for the role, which Fares says was difficult to get right despite speaking Levantine Arabic from his childhood in Lebanon.