Al Amir is a six-episode Arabic-language action thriller that has assembled leading Arab talent, international stars, and Hollywood expertise into one of the region’s most ambitious television productions to date, backed by Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and produced by Sela Studios in partnership with MBC Group and streaming platform Shahid. The project is based on an original concept by Turki Al-Sheikh, Chairman of the GEA, with the screenplay written by Egyptian screenwriter Salah El Jheiny, a pairing that reflects the increasingly pan-Arab ambition driving Saudi Arabia’s entertainment investment, where the ideas, the funding, and the creative talent are being drawn from across the region rather than from a single national tradition.
The Director and the Cast
The series is directed by Hollywood filmmaker Stephen Hopkins, whose credits include the hit television drama 24 and the action film Predator 2, a director who understands how to build and sustain tension across episodic formats, which is precisely what a six-part thriller demands from its helm. The cast features Egyptian actor Ahmed Ezz alongside Amina Khalil, Khaled El-Sawy, Samy El-Sheikh, Yasmina El-Abd, and Hamza Diab, a lineup that draws from Egypt’s strongest working actors and positions the show as genuinely cross-border rather than a single nation’s product wearing a pan-Arab label.
Where It Is Being Made
The series will be filmed at Al-Hisn Big Time Studios in Riyadh, the same facility where the record-breaking explosion sequence for 7 Dogs was detonated, as well as in key locations in Cairo, giving the production both the infrastructure of Saudi Arabia’s rapidly expanding studio ecosystem and the visual texture of Egypt’s streets, which carry a weight and specificity that no studio set can fully replicate. The production is positioned as a large-scale action thriller designed to appeal to audiences across the Arab world and international markets, reflecting a growing trend toward pan-Arab productions that combine regional storytelling with international production values, and in that ambition, Al Amir represents something meaningful about where Arabic-language drama is heading, and how seriously the region’s entertainment industry is now willing to invest in getting it there.
