Wearing Cartier, Tara Emad tells us how burnout made her question whether acting was still for her. Grief changed the question entirely. What followed was a return to the craft on her own terms.
Tara Emad can often be found in her own head.
Her mind wanders when she’s hanging out with people or travelling, sometimes at the worst possible times. Once, while cycling all the way from Cairo to Aswan, she zoned out so completely that she flipped right off her bike.
Where her mind actually goes during these mental escapes, though, is a lot less dramatic. “Usually recipes that I want to make,” she shares a bit sheepishly. Other times, it is something she wishes she had phrased differently, or simply a flood of thoughts arriving without much order. “I don’t fully live in my head, but I spend a lot of time there.”
For someone who makes a living slipping into other people’s minds, that tendency has its uses. People-watching has become its own kind of acting exercise. She reads psychology for much the same reason, driven to understand why people tick and, naturally, stashing those little observations away for later.
There is an irony to how closely Emad studies other people. For much of the past decade, she has been the person everyone else was watching. She was eleven when she first appeared in a commercial, fourteen when she began modelling and fifteen when acting entered the picture.
The Egyptian actress has moved between film and television with roles in The Blue Elephant 2, Suits Bel Araby, Beit El Ruby, Catalog and, more recently, 7 Dogs. She has become a familiar presence in the region’s fashion landscape, working with houses including Chanel and Cartier.
Being looked at, however, came with its own set of expectations — particularly in the modelling industry, which she remembers as far less forgiving than the one she sees today. “It was brutal,” she says. “You had to look a specific certain way.” For a teenager, that scrutiny was difficult to separate from the way she saw herself. “I had a lot of body dysmorphia through my teenage years,” Emad shares. “My skin was not right, my height was not right, my weight was not enough. Everything was never right.”
By twenty-four, acting was taking up more of her life, and modelling no longer felt like something she wanted to pursue for its own sake. This time, leaving was as much her decision as starting had been. “I was able to decide for myself that this was no longer serving me,” she admits.
More than half of her life has played out around cameras, sets, campaigns and characters. At some point, though, between the momentum of moving from one acting project to another, the excitement began to wear off. “I got a bit tired,” she says. Not bored, exactly. Something closer to disconnected. For a while, Emad continued acting without feeling fulfilled by it. “Something in me died out about three years ago,” she admits. The work was still happening, the roles were still coming, but acting stopped feeling the way it used to.
That frightened her, because acting had never started as a career calculation. Ages before there were sets to report to, Emad was already performing at home: dancing, singing, re-enacting scenes, becoming whoever she felt like becoming that day. “Fame was not something that I was aware of as a kid,” she says. At home, the promise of acting was never that she might become famous, but that she could make films, travel the world and, most importantly, become someone else for a while. In real life, she couldn’t suddenly decide to become a doctor or an engineer on a spaceship. On screen, she could spend months finding out what it might feel like.
At one point, she even began to wonder whether acting was still what she was meant to be doing. Part of the problem was the pace. Moving from one project to another had left little room for the things that once made her curious about acting in the first place. “I stopped wanting to learn. I stopped wanting to be better,” she shares. “With the whirlwind of so many projects, you don’t have time to fall in love with acting,” she reveals.
Then, two years ago, Emad lost her mother. Her mother’s absence is something she has learned to live alongside rather than leave behind. Grief settles into small, inherited rites of earth and green. Her mother had loved the garden, tending to herbs, tomatoes, potatoes, and apples. They would lay out seeds and green shoots, sitting side by side to repot them. Now, when the weight of her absence swells too heavy to carry quietly, Emad returns to the soil and begins again. “My role in life has completely changed from being a daughter, to now I’m just me.”
So she gardens. She might spend an hour repotting plants, sometimes two or three, recreating an activity that once belonged to the two of them. “Just doing the things that we would do together,” she begins, “in a way to honour her and honour the way that we would bond together.”
There is another ritual she has kept intact. Every Friday, Emad and her mother would share a cup of Turkish coffee. She still makes one every week, though the shape of the custom has shifted — she drinks it now, “thinking about her, talking to her.” These small acts have become one way of moving through a grief that Emad describes as strangely contradictory: entirely universal and, at the same time, profoundly isolating. “You feel that no one feels what you’re feeling,” she opens up. “I miss her so much. I can’t breathe from how much I really wish she was here.”
She knows she is not the person she was two years ago, and she no longer expects herself to operate as though she were. Her capacity has changed. So have the things she is willing to tolerate. “I lost the dearest thing to me,” she says. Grief, in that sense, has reorganised more than her life. It has reorganised what she is willing to give herself away to. If something drains her, why keep forcing herself through it? If someone no longer belongs in her life, why keep them there simply because it’s fine?
For someone who admits that her brain “does not shut off,” Emad has developed a surprisingly tactile set of ways to quiet it. Besides gardening, she writes and journals every day, she reads, and she cooks slowly.
Unlike the pace of a set, Emad intentionally takes her time in the kitchen. Two people, she argues, could follow exactly the same recipe and still end up with entirely different results. “You can make a soup, exact recipe,” she says, and it can taste terrible. Make it with the intention of feeding someone you love, however, and “it can be insanely good.” She takes the idea quite seriously. Make soup for someone who is ill with the right care and energy, she believes, and “it can actually heal them.”
She loves folding clothes and can easily lose an hour reorganising something that, by her own admission, probably did not need reorganising in the first place. “Cleaning is like my therapy,” she adds. When much of her life is spent travelling, filming and moving between projects, these ordinary tasks force her attention back into the immediate. Give her a pile of clothes to fold and, for a while, there is only the pile of clothes. “I can spend an hour just organising,” she says. “By organising that, mentally, I feel I organise myself.”
It makes the Tara from the beginning of our conversation — the one whose thoughts can wander from human behaviour to recipes to something she wishes she had said differently — feel slightly easier to understand. Her mind is always moving; many of the things she loves doing when nobody is watching require her hands to move slowly.
When she did return to acting, the scales had tipped. Emad says she began attracting — or, as a firm believer in manifestation, manifesting — the kind of work she had wanted for years. “I started to get the roles I actually wanted to get,” she says. “The jobs that really, really fulfil me.”
She describes the change simply: “I shifted my gaze.” Every day she is working, she checks in with herself. Is she anxious? Does she not want to go? Is something about the character not clicking? And, more importantly, why?
After spending years moving through work almost automatically, she is wary of slipping back into that rhythm. These days, she wants every character to give her something in return, and most importantly, have fun doing it. That doesn’t necessarily mean playing someone happy, or even particularly easy to inhabit. A character can be depressive, complicated or emotionally exhausting and the process can still be one she enjoys — something to study, immerse herself in and eventually understand.
Emad is particularly interested in playing women struggling with their mental health. She wants more of that: complicated women, recognisable women, the kind she might overhear or interact with only briefly. The ones she passes on the street, sits across from over coffee or already knows as friends. She mentions women who are the sole breadwinners of their households, whose lives hold the kinds of stories she finds herself hearing.
“Acting without passion is nothing,” she says. Unlike a job with a fixed answer, she argues, acting depends on everything that exists between the obvious choices. “One plus one is two,” she says. But here, “one plus one can be a million, and you need the passion to believe in the million.”
Emad has always had two versions of home. Born and raised in Egypt, she spent her summers in Montenegro, and despite the obvious difference in pace and landscape, she sees more similarities between the two cultures than differences. Both, she says, revolve around family — and feeding people. “The first thing, there’s a feast, and you have to eat.” Montenegro gives her mountains, greenery and quiet; Cairo gives her the opposite. “Here, I get the life happening.”
Ask Emad who she is becoming, and she returns, perhaps inevitably, to learning. “I believe I’m a constant student,” she says. “A student of life, a student of my passions, be it acting, be it writing, be it reading. I’m a forever student.”
It is a particularly fitting answer from someone who can now trace one of the lowest points in her relationship with acting back to the moment she stopped learning. Years of moving through the same cycle had made the work repetitive; curiosity had given way to routine. Finding her way back meant becoming curious again. Now, she is determined to stay that way. There will always be another technique to discover, another school of thought to encounter, another way of approaching the work.
For all the travelling Emad has done since she was young, it was leaving Cairo repeatedly that made her realise quite how attached she was to it. As a child, she remembers always wanting to go somewhere else. Homesickness wasn’t really part of the equation. It came later. “Whenever I land, I’m like, ‘Oh, finally.’” What she misses when she is away is less an abstract idea of Cairo than the very particular life she has built inside it: her house, her friends, the coffee shop she returns to, the little bookstore she knows. When she needs inspiration, she walks Downtown with friends or simply gets in her car and goes somewhere, deliberately pulling herself out of the work-home rhythm she can easily disappear into. “I love Cairo so much,” she says. “Everything happens all the time, all at once.”
Emad thinks Cairo is best understood this way: with someone who knows it. Not through its most obvious landmarks, but through the corners a local knows to take you to, the places you stumble into and, perhaps most of all, its noise. “I don’t know if I’ll ever live anywhere other than here,” she says.
There are the horns and the beeping she finds herself missing abroad. The call to prayer from a mosque, a church nearby, the familiar call of the robabekya seller moving through the street. “Cairo is sounds,” she says. For a woman whose mind rarely seems to go quiet, there is something fitting about her attachment to a city that doesn’t either.
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