Ramy Youssef Teams With Sharon Stone for A24 Comedy 'Martha & Muhammad'
Ramy Youssef will star opposite Sharon Stone in the A24 comedy film Martha & Muhammad, with Youssef making his feature directorial debut from his own script, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film follows a white widowed socialite in New York who develops a relationship with a young Muslim man, threading themes of class, religion, immigration and age. A24 is producing and financing. Production is eyeing a fall start.
Josh Safdie has boarded the project as a co-writer and producer, Yahoo Entertainment reported on 13 August. Safdie produces alongside Ronald Bronstein under their Central banner, with Eli Bush joining Youssef's Cairo Cowboy, and Christopher Storer and Tyson Bidner producing through American Light & Fixture. A24 rounds out the producing team.
The pairing carries its own weight of recognition. Youssef's Hulu series Ramy earned him a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award, plus two Emmy nominations for acting and directing. His comedy specials Feelings and More Feelings each drew Critics' Choice and Writers Guild Award nominations. Earlier this year he released his third HBO stand-up special, Ramy Youssef: In Love.
Stone earned an Oscar nomination for Martin Scorsese's 1995 crime saga Casino and starred with Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct. More recently she appeared in the third season of HBO's Euphoria, played the villainess in Nobody 2 on the big screen, and wrapped David Mamet's Speed the Plow alongside Ben Mendelsohn. She also appears in Marc Maron's ensemble feature In Memoriam and in AGC Studios' Babies with Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick.
Youssef's ties to A24 run deep. He signed an overall deal with the studio in December 2019 to create and develop new projects, as The Hollywood Reporter reported at the time. Together they were behind the Prime Video animated series Happy Family USA, which is returning for a second season.
What makes the project notable is the collision of two very different careers on a script that takes on cultural fault lines — religion, class, immigration — through comedy rather than drama. Youssef, a Muslim Egyptian-American performer, has built his work around navigating identity in America. Stone, a Hollywood icon whose career spans four decades, brings the star wattage of a different era. The film arrives amid growing visibility of Middle Eastern and Muslim-American stories in American culture, a landscape Youssef has been shaping since Ramy first aired.
Youssef is repped by WME, Entertainment 360 and Yorn Levine. Stone is repped by IAG, The Artists Partnership, Link Entertainment and Brecheen Feldman.
