Ramy Youssef
speaker
353 appearances
6 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Ramy Youssef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And then now it's kind of like, so when does the turn end exactly? What's what's going on? Yeah. You know?
Yeah, I mean, I grew up in New Jersey, and there was this burgeoning emo rock scene, and I was so jealous of my friends who had the straight hair and wore the tight pants, and I had this curly fro, and I tried to hide it with a hat. I was always wearing hats, and even in my older age, it's such a holdover from being a kid and trying to just stuff it under a hat. But, you know...
The beauty of this series for me has been that I think everyone code switches, you know, and I think we leaned into this animated style where the family literally looks different when they're inside the house and when they're outside the house. And I think to an extent, everybody does that, you know, and what becomes...
You know, the larger pressure cooker is that there is this performance that this family is literally doing for the FBI agent who moves in across the street. But at that core underneath all of it, I think this is what everybody does. And I think it's certainly what kids do. And so in so many ways, it really feels like this quintessential just middle school experience.
But you add on to it, you know, the creation of Homeland Security.
It's yeah, it's very much OK. Is Courtney the popular girl talking about me behind my back? And are the phones tapped? You know, and usually people just have to deal with the Courtney part. And now this kid has has both of them. And that's where the series lives.
Well, you know what it was? It was my sister Reem. She was a producer on the animated show with me and she had pulled up all these videos when I was a kid because I was struggling really finding these voices. I've never done this kind of acting before. And when I was a kid, I used to make these videos and I'd do them sometimes when my parents were sleeping.
And so I'd kind of like whisper and I'd kind of be raspy, you know, and I'd be in that place. And so I just copied what I actually sounded like as a kid there. And then I was trying to find the complete opposite and go really deep into my stomach and find the anxiety and find it in the bottom of the throat, you know. And then that became the dad.
Totally. I mean, I think there's this father who, you know, I think in both cases, being the head of a household in the ways that they think they are in the ways that they totally aren't. And they end up banging their head every direction that they move. The father in this show, Hussein Hussein is his name. His anxiety takes him over in this way that is almost vulnerable.
And it's certainly very vulnerable because he does these musical numbers throughout the show. that kind of tap into what's really going on with him and he kind of became the star of the show where I went oh yeah wow I mean he's he's the one that is most split by this and is probably furthest into this idea of a code switch kind of splitting you right down the middle
My father's really cool. I mean, I think part of my and my mother's is so cool. I mean, I'm really lucky. I mean, I feel part of why I've been able to explore these feelings in my work artistically is that they gave us the space as parents to to understand our feelings. And so it's not like these elements didn't exist in our communities and in our families.
And so this kind of constant fear and paranoia is actually not exaggerated. I would just say that my family saw it. Even if they were experiencing it, they were actually able to see, well, maybe we should turn the volume down. And then I think the fun thing with making something, especially a cartoon, is you never have to turn the volume down because it's a cartoon. And so...
I think that my parents, when they watch my work, I kind of painstakingly go through making sure that a lot of details are different enough. And we also write these, you know, shows in writers rooms where we're drawing from other writers and their families and kind of what they went through. So I think my parents, they're pretty good about kind of going, who cares?
You know, especially at this point, too. My dad's really funny about this stuff. He just is like, I'm seven years old. Like, who cares?
My grandparents never lived with us. I mean, this is trying to kind of create something that's more emblematic of that generational thing than my actual grandfather, who was quite different and was also, you know, my grandfather is really interesting because he grew up in a village. He was one of two people who could read.
And then he took that and became one of the only ones there, again, who went to college and then actually became an interpreter there. For the United Nations, he interpreted between Arabic and French and English for, you know, over 20 years. So he's kind of this totally different mold, I think, of that, Jen, because he was such a... It is so much more impressive.
Sometimes people will say to me, oh, dude, you were just like a kid in New Jersey and now you have this whole Hollywood thing. And I go, man, in terms of arcs within my family, that's not really. It's like, yeah, I should have. Of course I have to look at what what came before me. I mean, he he set the bar.
Oh, hello, neighbors. You're afraid of us near you. But the only blood we want is to bleed red, white, and blue. I know you think we're scary, but I swear to you, we're fun. We will prove to you our love. We will be number one, number one. So what made you think you should turn part of this into a musical?
So, yeah, that song comes out of the earlier clip that you played where he kind of proclaims out of peak anxiety to his family that they're going to erase their identity. And then he bursts the door open and starts singing this proclamation to the neighborhood. Yeah.
And, you know, I felt this it's either going to be we're making something depressing or something so insane that you have to laugh at this depressing subtext. And so it had to be the latter. And that's where music just started to feel like such a fun extension.
Showing 41–60 of 353 · page 3 of 18
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