Omar El Sabh
Portfolio of Order & Chaos
I’m Omar, aspiring actor and part-time fool.
I speak Arabic, English, French, a bit of Spanish, and a dash of German.
I love acting because it lets me hold onto childlike wonder and innocence. It makes me vulnerable to the human condition, and it challenges me to represent it truthfully. Acting trains me to focus on details and emotions in ways I never thought I could before.
People are endlessly interesting to me. No one is too far gone to understand, and no one is too small to matter.
I left a stable career to chase this craft and spent everything I had in 2025 on classes, studios, and repetition. I did it because I love the work itself. I love inhabiting any character without judgment. I love how progress shows up through practice. You repeat the scene, you adjust an action, you commit to an object, you listen with the body, the character sharpens, the scene breathes.
Acting teaches me patience and discipline through process, not outcome. That loop is where I feel most alive.
I grew up in Egypt, studied at a Lycée Français, earned a liberal arts degree in Arab politics and culture during the Egyptian revolution, and moved to Berlin three years ago. That mix made my identity transnational, shaped by both the Global North and the Arab world.
My ambition is to bring that voice into roles that bridge the gap between how Arabs imagine Europe and how Europeans imagine Arabs, religion, and identity itself. Both sides carry misconceptions. Both sides miss nuance. I want my work in European and North African cinema to live in that space, where the beauty and the inanities of both cultures collide.
Above all...
Don’t take me too seriously, because I don’t.
I feel deeply. I resist binaries. I like mischief. And yes, I’m a little bit ridiculous..
Review: 3-Week Intensive Acting Course with Matthias Schott
Last week, we wrapped Schott Acting Studio’s three-week intensive.
The course is taught by Matthias Schott. Reading his background, you’re kind of hit by the fact that he’s someone who won’t fuck around with teaching anyone; experiencing him teach is another story. As a personal cherry on top for me, he’s deeply Jungian, having studied and participated in a plethora (that’s right, I used plethora) of Jung-related courses and seminars. This facilitated my choice of investing in this course, but I digress.
The course runs almost daily, 10 to 5, for three weeks. Sundays included. The mission, stated clearly on his website, is to take an actor from “general to specific.” And that’s exactly what it did for me, as I know it did for my colleagues, and will do for anyone who takes this course.
In 2025, I attended numerous workshops and spent most of my savings doing so. I never went to drama school, can’t afford it now, and I’m always slightly jealous of those who did (Mashallah upon you if I threw you an evil eye for going to Drama School). I wanted something that could give me a real taste of it, an authentic exploration of the various aspects of an acting curriculum. Matthias delivered a learning experience that, in many ways, condensed what could be a full year of drama school into those three weeks. Please forgive the exaggeration if you actually went to drama school.
You can explore the program on his website, but I’ll say a few words from my perspective. The program was structured around building skills from the ground up, moving me from broad, general instincts to specific, actionable choices in performance. It drew on Stanislavski’s core ideas and expanded with exercises inspired by British drama schools, Uttah Hagen’s object work and the Meisner technique, combining improvisation, scene work, partner awareness, and vocal and physical expression. Over hours of practice, we worked on being spontaneous in the moment, responding truthfully to partners, and defining clear objectives with our characters rather than performing emotions. I found myself digging into character relationships, object work, and impulse-based choices in a way that changed how I enter a scene and relate to text. What made it so impactful was how each exercise built on the last, helping me trust impulse, sharpen listening, and make stronger, informed choices in performance.
In writing this testimony I’m basically saying thank you to the studio that Matthias has created. A sacred space for creative exploration guided by a formidable acting coach. A coach whose ability to be both assertive and corrective leaves space for everyone’s individuality to shine. His observations are technically precise, almost microscopic, something that can easily suck the soul out of acting in the wrong hands. That never happened. Instead, he left me with something far more lasting. A sense of direction. A sense of purpose. And the feeling that a great mentor does more than teach. He points you somewhere and trusts you to keep walking.
We also had the chance to audit, as observers rather than participants, a two-day self-tape workshop with Anthony Meindl, which turned out to be unexpectedly sharp and grounding, as far as auditing goes. Watching his process clarified something essential for me: how often actors get in their own way by thinking too much. His approach strips the work back to fundamentals, asking you to stop performing ideas and start responding to what the text is asking of you. The emphasis on simplicity, action, and trust in impulse was refreshing, especially in the context of self-tapes, where overthinking can quietly kill specificity. Those two days reframed how I approach the camera and left me with a clearer sense of how strong, memorable work often comes from doing less, not more.
I’ve formed deep friendships over these three weeks, learned a level of discipline that now carries into both my life and my work, sharpened my technique, and driven the “I’m really glad I quit everything to learn acting at 35” nail firmly into the structure of my life, in a way that finally makes me feel like I’m walking with stability as a hopeful actor.
'What The Startup,'
Directed by Meg Zrini, Written by Ben Butler
What The Startup became my first stage production. I joined as the understudy for Flamingo while also playing Lovebud and the Technodancer in the main cast. Working across these roles let me learn the rhythm of the play from multiple angles. Ben V. Butler’s script follows a chaotic Berlin startup team racing to secure investment, mixing satire, techno, and misdirected schemes. Meg, our director, gave the understudies their own performance, turning the track into a real ensemble project. Flamingo grew into a character I shaped through writing and exploration, blending his Freiburg idealism with softness and awkward and at times dorky charm. Performing him marked my first true step into acting.
Monologue: Synecdoche New York - Priest eulogy
For my first-ever monologue choice, I asked my best friend, Golden Globes jury member, late Roger Ebert correspondent, and Rotten Tomatoes critic, Wael Khairy, “If you had to pick a monologue from a movie that best describes me as a person and my life philosophy, which would you pick?”
This monologue sits at the very beginning of my acting journey and has followed me as I’ve grown. I first worked on it in early 2025, when I was just starting, and I’ve returned to the same text four times since then:
-Instant Theater Berlin
-Berlin Scene Lab
-Alone at home (twice at different instances)
-Matthias Schott Acting Studio
I’m sharing these versions to make the process visible, not to present a definitive result. The words stay the same, but I’ve gained more knowledge to know what I know, but also, what I don’t know.
