Mena Massoud is reflecting on the “ups and downs” of working in the film industry as he celebrates his latest project.
The 33-year-old actor, who stars in Julia Stiles’ directorial debut Wish You Were Here, revealed to PEOPLE at a New York City screening of the romance movie that there’s been a “mentality shift” in the way he looks at things since he previously revealed that he had trouble landing auditions following the worldwide success of 2019’s Aladdin.
“I think it’s a mentality shift more than anything,” Massoud says. “I think we can get stuck in looking at things in a negative way or a positive way.”
“At that time, I was younger. I filmed Aladdin in 2017, so it’s been almost eight years now. And, I think you mature as you go through this industry and you realize like, I mean, look, we’re pretty lucky to do what we’re doing. There’s ups and downs in everything, and I think as long as you keep that passion for what you’re doing, that’s the most important thing.”
Massoud, who stars alongside Isabelle Fuhrman, Jennifer Grey and Kelsey Grammer in Wish You Were Here, has appeared in multiple films since the release of Aladdin, with his latest described in an official synopsis as a “fascinating movie about leaving the everyday world behind to take a chance on true romance.”
Massoud tells PEOPLE, “these kinds of movies aren’t really made that often anymore.”
“I really wanted to play this arc, you know, about this character who finds out something devastating about his life and has to find the joy in it, has to find the beauty in it and that really attracted me to the role,” Massoud says of his character Adam.
“Julia is the queen of these kinds of films. She’s done so many, I think she’s mastered this genre, so to get her to be able to direct it, I wanted to jump at the opportunity to learn as much as I could from her, so I couldn’t pass that up and getting to work with Isabelle as well, that was a dream come true,” he adds. “So, everything kind of lined up.”
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In a late 2019 interview with The Daily Beast, Massoud revealed that no new opportunities had come his way since the release of Aladdin months earlier, in which he played the titular live-action character. At the time, he hadn’t “had a single audition” since the Disney movie. He added that his Middle Eastern background often made him the “wild card,” with casting directors looking for white actors to fill roles.
“It’s wild to a lot of people,” he said in 2019. “People have these ideas in their head. It’s like, I’m sitting here being like, okay, Aladdin just hit $1 billion — can I at least get an audition? Like I’m not expecting you to be like, ‘Here’s Batman.’ But can I just get in the room? … Can you just give me a chance?”
Since then, Massoud has appeared in Neflix’s The Royal Treatment in 2022, the 2023 horror film The Sacrifice Game, and most recently, Wish You Were Here, which is now in theaters.
When asked what advice he’d have for himself as a young actor, Massoud tells PEOPLE that he’d encourage his younger self to “start earlier” in terms of the craft.
“I look at Julia in this industry and even Isabelle, who I think started when she was a young girl,” he says. “There’s such an advantage to doing that. And for whatever circumstances, I didn’t get into it professionally until I was a little older,” he adds. “So, you know, I would tell myself to maybe go for it a little sooner. But I think everything happens for a reason.”
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