An interview by Daniel Williams, published at Washington Post Foreign Service, with superstar Adel Imam, it says “…For four decades, Imam has been the most popular comic in Egypt and the Middle East. Now at 65, he is taking yet another potential star turn. He plays Zaki, the ruined seducer of women, in "The Yacoubian Building," the film version of the best-selling novel of Cairo life.”

"Frankly, I was scared to play the role," Adel Imam said at his apartment in Cairo's upscale Mohandessin neighborhood. "But the story is irresistible. I don't wait around for the role of a lifetime, but if this is it, okay."

In "The Yacoubian Building" film, an episode is left out that features The Big Man, a character whom readers of the novel consider a stand-in for President Hosni Mubarak or his son, Gamal. "Simply, we would not have been able to make the movie," Imam said.

Like many of his generation, Imam longs for a Cairo of the past: cosmopolitan, smaller, orderly and easygoing. That memory is part of the appeal of his role as Zaki. "He lived through a beautiful time when Egypt was privileged with multiple ethnicities and religions," he said. "The city looked beautiful. Buildings were more beautiful than in Paris. Now they are filled with garbage."

The Zaki character is a resident of "The Yacoubian Building," a once-elegant but, by the '90s, decayed apartment in downtown Cairo. He wards off efforts by his sister to grab his property.

Imam sees "The Yacoubian Building" as reviving a political thrust in Egyptian movies after a decade in which comedy was limited to apolitical farce, including most of his own, because that was where the money was.

"I believe in social context for movies," he said. "We need a new generation that will create such films. So far, it is mostly just for laughs.

Fatigue is not in Imam's program. "My only fear is that at some point no one will offer me a role," he said, "and then I will have to drive a taxi for a living."