May Calamawy
Egyptian-Palestinian actress
May El Calamawy (Arabic: مي القلماوي, romanized: Mayy al-Qalamāwī: Egyptian Arabic: [ˈmˤɑjj (el)ʔælæˈmæːwi]; born October 28, 1986) is an Egyptian-Palestinian actress. Calamawy gained recognition for her portrayal of Layla El-Faouly / Scarlet Scarab in the Marvel Studios miniseries Moon Knight (2022), marking the first Egyptian and Arab superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Born in Bahrain to an Egyptian father and a Palestinian-Jordanian mother, Calamawy was raised across Bahrain, Qatar, and the United States. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in theatre studies from Emerson College and later trained at the William Esper Studio in New York. Calamawy began her acting career in independent cinema, making her feature film debut in Thursday (2006), followed by a series of short films, followed by roles in the Hulu comedy-drama Ramy (2019–2022), Together Together (2021), The Actor (2025) and Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026).
Early life
May El Calamawy was born in Bahrain on October 28, 1986, to an Egyptian father who worked as a banker and a Palestinian-Jordanian mother. She has an older brother. Raised mostly in Bahrain, she also spent six years living between Doha, Qatar, and Houston, Texas, before she was twelve years old. Calamawy speaks English and Arabic and also plays the piano.
Calamawy has stated that she was inspired to become an actress after watching the film Death Becomes Her (1992) when she was a child.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “May Calamawy” as egyptian-Palestinian actress. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as egyptian-Palestinian actress. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q97319251. VIAF identifies the subject as 1032171976989218240005. The Library of Congress control number is no2024067616. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1986, 2022, 2006 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “May Calamawy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.