Ramy Youssef and Mo Amer on the Bittersweet Final Season of ‘Mo’: “Everything Going on Now Made It More Powerful” – Hollywood Reporter

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterThe Netflix comedy’s EP along with its star-creator discuss crafting their timely ending, exploring Palestinian culture, portraying immigration detention centers and whether there’s more ‘Mo’ story to tell.
By

Abbey White
Associate Editor & News Writer
[This story contains spoilers from season two of Mo.]
“The way I would describe the season is bittersweet. Everything was bittersweet, and it felt that way throughout the entire season,” Mo Amer, the star, creator, writer and first-time director tells The Hollywood Reporter about the Netflix show’s second and final season. 

The groundbreaking series, which debuted in 2022 and is executive produced by Ramy Youssef, centers Mo Najjar, a Palestinian refugee, and his family awaiting asylum for two years in the heart and heat of Houston, Texas. Celebrated not only for its rare centering of Palestinians, the show has been lauded for its expert balance of drama and comedy while exploring issues around immigration, religion, language and disability. 

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Following a critically acclaimed first season, Netflix announced in early 2023 that the half-hour comedy would be returning for a final eight episodes — an endeavor that took nearly two years. “We started the writing room, I believe, in late March, the first week in April. We were there until May 1 and then we had the writing and acting strikes,” Amer explains of the second season’s extended production timeline. “After the strike, we had five months, and we came back, lucky us, October 1, and then, of course, six days later, everything changed.”
Amer is referring to Oct. 7, 2023, when the terrorist group Hamas attacked a music festival and communities close to the Gaza border in southern Israel, killing more than 1,100 and taking around 250 hostages. In the year and a half since, Israel has responded with retaliatory attacks, their military operations in Gaza resulting in the deaths of at least 46,000 Palestinians, injury of over 109,000 and displacement of 1.9 million, per the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Calls for a ceasefire began as early as October 2023 but were unsuccessful the last 15 months until this January. Seventy-nine hostages remain in Hamas captivity.
The series finale of Mo ends the day before Oct. 7, where Mo and his family, after taking their first trip to Palestine in two decades, are stopped and searched at an airport while trying to return to the U.S. Amer and Youssef told THR that they’re happy with the show’s ending, but ultimately are not averse to doing more within the show’s universe. 

“I’m extremely happy with how the season turned out and I’m very happy with what we were able to accomplish with the resources that we had. I’m very, very pleased with that. That being said, there’s so much more to tell,” Amer explained. “We put everything that we had into this, and I really truly believe we’ve done the best that we can. We’ve accomplished that. Can we do more? Would I do more? Yeah, I’m open to it. I’m definitely open to it.”
Youssef, also creator-star of Hulu’s Egyptian-American Ramy, added, “Mo is a really prolific stand-up and obviously such a great performer. So many of these stories are pouring out of him. It certainly doesn’t end here, regardless of what form and which way it’s going to go.”
Below, Amer and Youssef speak to The Hollywood Reporter about navigating the show to its timely ending over a year and a half, Amer stepping into the director’s chair, portraying U.S. immigrant detention centers and Palestine, the power of language (and olive oil), and embracing disability within Arab families.  
***
The show ends on Oct. 6, but you were renewed for a second season in early 2023. How much of the ending is what you already had planned and how much did you adjust in light of Oct. 7? 
MO AMER We had such a great flow in the writing room up until the strike. We had something special already brewing. When we came back on Oct. 1, and all the events that ensued after, clearly a lot of very difficult conversations happened in the room. Not “difficult” meaning we were going at it or anything. That’s a sacred space and I want to respect that as much as possible. It was more like very, very important conversations that had to be had to take the show to a better place. We all became much closer as a team because of it. It was such an emotional — and still is an emotional — time, with the avalanche of events that happened after that.

So we started seeing what we could do differently to address what happened post-Oct. 7, and there’s a lot of things you have to factor in. Number one is that it’s been 18 months since the show was greenlit for season two. From the time you start filming, you have a year that’ll go by, at least, until the show comes out. There’s all these ever-changing things that you could potentially address in the show that are going to be completely different. That was a huge risk. Secondly, this timeline that it all started on Oct. 7 is also incorrect. This has been going on for a really long time, like 80 years. I think it would be detrimental to feed the storyline that this all started then. 
Ramy has talked about this a lot because there were a lot of passionate conversations about: Do we talk about it or not? How do we talk about it? The reality of the situation is that with our characters, once you start delving into this particular event, you lose everything. You lose all your characters, you lose your story — you just don’t know what’s going on with anybody. Emotionally, it becomes very didactic, and you’re just arguing on camera and the story goes down the tubes. To be honest with you, it doesn’t bring out the best of each character.
Additionally, I would say the layers of what each character deals with and what’s already there and the fact that this has already been going on — my mom checks the news obsessively. I was on the phone with my aunts in the West Bank today, and it’s like a norm for Palestinians to regularly check on their family to see what’s going on; is everything ok. This is a thread throughout my entire life. I wanted to incorporate that in the show and use our characters to fuel the story, rather than just making it about this event. For all those reasons, we thought it would be best to have a timeline for the show and end it on Oct. 6 with something about the smile and moving forward. 

This is something we already had in place before the strike, and it’s something based on my own experience when I was there in the West Bank and I would go through checkpoints. I would always maintain a smile, but not a huge one where I felt like I was antagonizing or anything. I would just maintain a peaceful sense to myself, no matter what. The idea behind that is that I’m not going to allow my spirit, my heart, my mind to break. I won’t allow it to take that away from me. This is the power that I have, and I’m going to hold on to that, as difficult as it is in these extreme situations. If you can hold on to that, it’s a victory. I’m winning if I can maintain my own spirituality and mindset. Preserving all that is very powerful. This is something that we wanted to do pre-strike, actually, and everything going on now just made it more powerful.
RAMY YOUSSEF More people are at the table for the conversation than ever before, and that’s probably the biggest shift. To pull this back a bit into context, we always knew that this show about a Palestinian refugee would have to end by going to Palestine. That’s just a given. We were making Mo at the same time as we were making Ramy, and we did an episode there where I very clearly drew certain lines in terms of the Ramy character being this first-generation immigrant kid, but when he goes to Palestine, he essentially has white privilege because he’s an American citizen. This is a totally different story. There’s even a fine line between diaspora and refugee with a character like Mo. 

Us working on both those things, we knew that we were going to do an episode and a storyline that was going to cover everything that’s there from a much different point of view than anything we had done before, or that these characters had certainly seen. So everything that Mo is saying is super spot on in the sense that I don’t even know what changed other than more people are aware of what we’re talking about. This has been the DNA of why we wanted to make a show together around Mo’s story, and why it felt so much more distinct for me personally than anything we were doing on Ramy, or anything anyone has seen. That’s why this show has always been so important to me. The end, so much of that is Mo’s vision that he had with him when we first started talking about this pitch in maybe 2017. 
Mo, you take on the role of director for the first time. Why was that something that felt right to do this season? 
YOUSSEF It’s a natural extension when you know you are a showrunner of a self-titled [series]. Also, this show is so incredibly close to Mo that it feels like a natural evolution. So much of it comes from these vivid stories that Mo would tell, or he would have in his head. That’s always been something I’ve heard from him and known about him from when I first met him. This might have been in 2015, but I remember Mo telling me this detailed description of how he wanted to open his stand-up special. I was like, “Dude, it’s not a stand-up special. It’s a movie. It’s a show. That’s not stand up.” But look, especially when you have an ecosystem built around it, it just becomes a natural extension. Not to say that it’s easy. Making a show is not easy. But once you get to the point where you’re doing it, it just feels organic. Especially if you talk about that last episode. It would just be weird if anyone else did it, honestly.

AMER It felt natural for me to step into the chair. It was all building from a particular point. I’m a very visual person already, as Ramy knows. And I want to tip my hat to all the experience that I’ve been blessed to have, whether it be watching things on Ramy or Black Adam with [director] Jaume [Collet-Serra] and the DP [Lawrence Sher], picking their brains. This is years and years of seeing how it’s done, watching a DP in action on that level. Then stepping into season one of Mo with [director Solvan] Slick [Naim] and us working together, he being such a great collaborator and just giving me the room to play with these flashbacks. He would inquire about how I visualized them because they were real to my life experience. From there, it was truly an organic progression into season two. What a blessing to have that opportunity. Episode seven, directing Farah [Bsieso, Mo’s mother Yusra Najjar] and Shireen [Dabis, Mo’s sister Nadia Robinson] together and that wonderful scene on the dock brings me to such an emotionally bittersweet, yet elated space. It’s a different experience, and I treasured it and did everything that I could to do it justice. I tip my hat to the team around me for helping bring those things to fruition.
Mo has also been a show about existing beyond a single culture, a single border. But this season you go from Mexico to the Texas border to Houston. Can you talk about recreating an immigration detention center? 
AMER The detention center was tricky because we wanted to do it justice, not only from a production design standpoint but a storyline standpoint. These detention centers are pretty basic. They’re just warehouses, and they bring fencing. That’s how they put them together. The production team did a phenomenal job of replicating that for us to bring this story to life. When we walked into it, we were all in awe. Every single person had a different emotion hit them when they walked into it. It was a big deal for us to get that right. Also, we were only there for a little bit of time [on screen], so how can we get what I call the sliding scale of refugee experiences? You have someone, as you see in the episode, speaking to his experience, going through the mudslides, jungles and snakes. He’s dodging the cartels and drinking the juice out of a Vienna sausage can. But then he looks at Mo and is like, “How’d you get here?” And Mo’s like, “I took a bus.” It was all to see what everyone was dealing with, to have a little peek into that window to see what their experience was before they arrived at the detention center. 

But seeing our Mo character [in there] trying to make the best of what he has, I started thinking about it more. What about these detention officers? They’re kind of in a jail themselves. They’re also in a detention center. We’re sitting there projecting all this stuff on them, and it was just to have that insight. I was inspired by Midnight Run. It was very inspired by that relationship in that old movie from ’87 with [Robert] De Niro and Charles Grodin, where he kept calling him Jack, and he was super annoying. He eventually did break Jack down, so it was interesting to see Mo take on this relationship with the detention officer, see him potentially break him down at the end, and have a peek into his life. When [Mo] says, “Where’s your heart and all this?” [The guard’s] response is that I have no choice. I wake up every day and either come to work or blow my brains out. It’s seeing that I have a leak in my roof, I have two disabled children and a mother-in-law living in my house, and I’m dying too, inside. Humanizing him for just a second was interesting as well. But I didn’t want to leave there being in a detention center for the sake of being in a detention center. I wanted to see what everyone’s experiences are — what they eat, seeing how they live, how they’re treated in a very dehumanizing way — and trying to get Mo out of that. Then, of course, the repercussions of him crossing the border illegally.
You also took the Najjars to Palestine. How did you approach filming that? 

AMER That was big because we wanted something as realistic as possible to my village of Burin. Thankfully, we had some archival footage from when I had the dream sequence in episode three last season. Then we supplemented whatever we were missing by sending a splinter crew out there and capturing the drive into the West Bank. All of that is actual Palestine, actual West Bank, and the call to prayer — the exterior — is the actual mosque in our village of Burin. We did a little mash-up of Malta in Burin and Israeli territory. You have all three together to have the most realistic Palestinian version of an episode. Malta was such a spectacular place, by the way. Aside from the architectural differences that we had to avoid for the camera, it was pretty spot on. You saw the village life there was very similar to my experience with my family there. It was a profound experience to be able to bring a cast from Jerusalem and Nazareth. The actors who played my cousins and aunts in the show were all from Jerusalem, Nazareth and Palestine. They came in and when they got there, they couldn’t believe the resemblance. They were very pleased. 
You lean heavily on the imagery of olives to talk about Palestinian culture this season. There’s the sequence entirely on the olive oil process, as well as the olive trees later in the season. What was your process and inspiration for bringing these moments to the screen? 

AMER There’s this song that really caught me, and I built the whole scene around it. [Amer begins singing Lefty Frizzell’s “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time).”] I know it sounds ridiculous, but that timing and that cadence brought all the visuals together. We always wanted to see the insides of [making Palestinian olive oil]. I was talking to Slick about this episode, and describing it to him. We found this antique — it’s actually in front of my office. I took it home. This beautiful old Italian man in his late 80s had hand-wrench equipment that makes olive oil. There’s this whole process, two or three different stages, taking out the pits and all that. That antique machinery is what inspired all the visuals. It brought the whole thing together, just the movement and the timing of everything. Nobody makes olive oil like this, except in Palestine in the villages. They roll stones over the olives, and the olive oil comes out and pours through naturally. That’s the inspiration for it. 
I tip the hat to the team for finding this equipment. It was pretty wild that this man had it and preserved it for so many years. It’s from the early 1900s, so we were able to put that together and inspire the whole scene to look inside what it’s like to make hand-pressed olive oil. The visuals of episode eight, it was something that is rooted in traditional Palestinian culture, certainly in village culture. You just hang out underneath the olive trees in picking season and essentially have picnics. They sing traditional Palestinian folk songs. It’s a way of celebrating and spending time with the family. At one point, episode eight had so much folk music in it, it felt like a musical. (Laughs) But it’s part of that culture. My mom will see an olive and she’ll recite a poem, or be reminded of this old folk song. This is something I’ve always wanted to show, especially when they were going back to Palestine, for olive season. It’s important to showcase this beautiful Palestinian culture, something that has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.

There’s this human-led immigration pipeline that Mo finds himself navigating all season, from the ambassador and detention center guard to the immigration judge and immigration department agent. What did you want to expose about that experience and the process of immigration in the U.S.? 
AMER You have this thing where you can get deported and released under your own recognizance. We didn’t even know that was a real thing. My immigration attorney, who has over 40 years-plus of immigration law experience, consulted on the show, and when he shared this with us, we were shocked. I was like, “Wait, this is like a real thing?” He goes, “Yeah, it happens like 30-plus percent of the time. It’s pretty common.” So what does that do to a person? As far as the judge is concerned, in the courtroom, and seeing this fantasy where he gets to truly express what he feels inside — where he just goes off on the judge — you get a peek into what’s going on in his heart. He’s got this controlled rage, always. He’s always smiling, but inside he’s dying. It’s empathizing with people who just want to exist, live a normal life, have a family, and have some kind of future for themselves. It almost seems like the system is in place for you not to do that. He does everything he can to come back legally, but essentially, he wouldn’t let go of what matters most to him. 
That’s why with the ambassador, he couldn’t let [the use of occupation versus conflict] go. He’s like, “Eeh, not really conflict.” He just couldn’t hold it. (Laughs) Now, did he think he was going to spin out of control? Probably not, but he doesn’t care. He’s like, “Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, but I feel better. I’d rather cross the border with everybody else.” He’s trying to maintain his integrity in the process of everyone trying to take it away. It’s empathy — having some empathy and understanding that these are all human beings, and everyone is trying to fulfill their purpose in life without these enormous roadblocks that don’t need to be there. Then you start thinking about why are they there. Maybe it’s good for business that you get deported and released under your own recognizance. Oh, and by the way, you get a work permit. You can work, but you’re going to pick strawberries. How can you take care of your family with that kind of record? It’s impossible, so it’s about having empathy and shifting this frame of thinking of an immigrant coming here and becoming a citizen the next day. 

It’s actually an insanely difficult process. It took my mom 21 years to get her citizenship. Took us 10 years to get her asylum. It takes five years for you to get your green card, and then on top of that, you have to wait another four years and nine months to apply for your citizenship. Now you can shortcut it and have a fake marriage, and that’s why we explored that in the show. But then it’s this idea of love — is it real love, or just saying, “Who cares about that? Get your paperwork.” That’s why the character Hameed (Moayad Alnefaie) is so interesting because he’s figured it all out. He’s happy he’s got citizenship. He’s got his papers and he’s moving on with his life. He’s genuinely in love with her because she’s done everything for him. So why wouldn’t he love her? There are all these elements to explore. So many years to unpack. It just can’t be answered so easily in one sentence.
YOUSSEF There’s no people in [these systems], and I think that’s what Mo does such a good job of capturing. We did it in season one, but I used to go on the road all the time with Mo, and one of my favorite jokes that he did was he was locked up at the airport without a passport, and then the dog comes in to sniff him, and the dog has a passport. It’s the encapsulation of dehumanization. This dog has a passport, and I don’t.
You mentioned the debate Mo has with the ambassador over the use of “occupation” versus “conflict.” There’s also the Israeli couscous back and forth with Guy (Simon Rex) and the immigration department agent’s use of “customer” to describe Mo. What did you want to get at by centering debates around the power of language like this? 

AMER This idea of conflict, every time you hear it, it’s this idea that there’s just two people fighting. It’s just not a realistic description of what the reality there is. Is there conflict? Yes, but what’s the root of that conflict and where did it all start? This is important to unpack in the show, and I felt the ambassador was the perfect medium, truly, because he’s this politician. He plays the game. He’s an ambassador to the United States. He’s in Mexico, living this lavish life. That was the ideal place to have this conflict conversation. I think it’s really important to contextualize what is going on there, and I love that Mo couldn’t let it go. When he goes to his buddy, [his friend is] like, “Bro, why did you do it? You could have just let it go.” He’s like, “No, I can’t sell out. I’m not going to sell out my people.” For someone like Mo, there’s no way he could have forgiven himself without clarifying and getting more behind the definition. What do you mean by conflict? It’s a different perspective that we wanted to give and to make people think a little bit more. 
And when you take someone’s food, you’re erasing their culture. You’re erasing an entire part of their identity. We have a song about olives, olive oil, cheese and omelets — what you make outside underneath olive trees. This is so inherently part of who we are. The roots of the trees are us, and that’s how it feels. This is what we live by and once you chip away at that, it’s essentially erasing an entire culture. So it was important to have that. It’s also hilarious to see someone so frustrated over the misuse of hummus or Israeli couscous, or whatever it be that [Mo] wants to pick at it. That’s why this is such a great line in episode six. When he’s confronting Guy in his restaurant, he just snaps and says, “You know what’s behind the wall? That’s where the recipes come from.” It’s such a powerful line. Then to see him at the end realize what he just did and what could happen from his outburst. You see the vulnerability in his eyes after he’s had it. He’s says, “I’m really sorry. I was just deported.” But everything he said is true. 

There’s no easy way to have those conversations, but it is also really funny to see someone yell about hummus or falafel tacos. To everybody else, it’s just a falafel taco, but no, this is my life. My mom says this all the time. “You want to take everything, just don’t take our hummus.” That’s where it comes from. It’s part of our identity and who we are, and it’s about preserving that and making sure we hold on to it as tightly as possible.
Like Ramy, disabled people are part of the larger fabric of Mo and this season you offer a humanizing and realistic portrayal of being on the receiving end of a diagnosis — both for Sameer (Omar Elba) and his family. Can you talk about how you approached that storyline with similar authenticity as your other storylines? 
AMER Sameer’s story is very, very personal to me because, without disclosing too much, I have a brother who’s dealt with similar traits. It’s very common that it’s brushed under the rug within families, Arab families in particular. In general, people say he’s fine. Everything’s ok. This is the standard operating software within a family. Although in my family, we sought out help and wanted to do that. It was difficult to explore that initially, but in season one, seeing what happened to [Sameer] in the restaurant and just progressing that within the family — activating Nadia to explore what’s going on with him and discuss it with [Mo’s] mother — gave a wonderful thread as well. Then seeing Mo’s frustration in episode four with Sameer, his tics and having him also lose his temper with his own brother — they’ve done this before, where Mo knows how to calm Sameer down. We’re all human beings, and everyone cracks, but seeing that be so real and raw in that moment was important to show. 

Then taking it into a therapy scene, I personally took a backseat on it. I wanted a professional to look in the edit and make sure that they did this scene justice. I wanted to make sure that we were all completely accurate in the description of that, specifically with the therapist. So we had an autism therapist come in and consult on the edit. I just left her with the editor, Lauren [Connelly], to go through it. It’s not about what I want, it’s about what’s actually accurate for someone who’s diagnosed with autism, so I kind of left it at that. She reworked a lot of the dialogue for the therapist, and made sure that it was all 100 percent where it needs to be. I’m very grateful to her and her expertise to step up and make sure that we landed that properly. 
YOUSSEF It is some of the most emotional stuff in the show for me as well, and everything that Omar Elba brings to it is just phenomenal. He’s truly one of the best actors that either of us has ever worked with. 
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Source: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/ramy-youssef-mo-amer-mo-ending-1236127835/