My Interview with Ramy Youssef and Steve Way for Film Independent
Recently I got to interview Ramy Youssef and Steve Way, two comedic creative forces who are also the stars of the Hulu series Ramy.
The video was put online as part of a joint venture by Film Independent and the Media Access Awards. But I also transcribed our conversation, to make it directly accessible for Deaf and hard-of-hearing folks, or for anyone interested in reading about how these two friends work together and what drives their storytelling.
This conversation felt so personal and moving. It’s clear they not only share a dry and wicked sense of humor but also a deep connection. I admire how much the series has done to elevate voices that so often go unrepresented, and I think they both make awesome points here about why disability inclusion is so needed in television.
Thank you to Ramy and Steve for taking the time!
DAVID RADCLIFF: Hi! I’m David Radcliff. I’m a member of the Committee for Writers with Disabilities at the Writers Guild of America, West. I have cerebral palsy. I am a skinny white guy, wearing a blue argyle shirt, and headphones, and I’m seated on a white couch.
We are very proud to bring you Film Independent Presents: A Disability Inclusion Showcase, marking the premiere of the 2020 Media Access Awards, presented by Easterseals. We send our thanks to the Media Access Awards, and to Easterseals, for making this showcase possible. And thank you to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which is the lead sponsor of Film Independent Presents. We send additional enthusiastic thanks to our screening partner, Vision Media.
I’m here with Steve Way and Ramy Youssef from the hit show Ramy, and I’ll let them introduce themselves and describe their surroundings to you.
RAMY YOUSSEF: Oh, this is so cool. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my name is Ramy Youssef. I am a, I would say, light-brown-skinned man with a medium beard that I’ve been debating shaving, because I’m in quarantine and I keep playing with it. I had a mustache, for a minute. Steve didn’t like it — he made fun of it, so I grew it all back out. I’m wearing a blue beanie, a grey sweater, and I’m in my living room right now, and it’s a really nice morning in LA.
STEVE WAY: Hey, thank you, David. I’m Steve Way. I have sixties-style glasses, and I’m wearing a ventilator mask around my nose. I’m sitting in a black wheelchair. I have a towel thing around my neck. Uh, I have somewhat of a goatee facial hair that I’ve been growing for about six years now, and I think it’s peaked. I don’t think it’s gonna get any bigger. I also have a Himalayan salt lamp behind me. I don’t think it does anything, because I’m still depressed. And it is not a nice morning here in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
DR: Thanks so much, guys. We’re going to jump in with some questions about the show and about your friendship.
My first question: this is such an intimate show about friendship and about relying on each other, and learning from each other. And as I’m watching it, I’m realizing: in this COVID time, the idea of social distancing is more difficult for some than for others, and for some people in the disability community, social distancing can sometimes be a non-starter. So, Steve, I’m wondering how you’re navigating this COVID time and whether you have any tips for some of us in the disability community.
SW: It’s really not good. During all of this, I had a court battle with my Medicaid provider, my health insurance provider, at Horizon NJ Health. I tried to get more at-home care. I had to move out of my parents’ house because my sister got COVID.
DR: Oh no.
SW: So within a couple of hours, I was out of there. And my girlfriend works all day long. So I don’t have enough personal care assistance hours. I’m alone for at least four, five hours every day. And I took my health insurance provider to court, and they basically told me I’m not disabled enough —
DR: Wow.
SW: — for more at-home care. So, it’s not safe for me to have random people out there, you know, just coming into my home. Right now, I’m better off being alone — whereas, before this, I thought I wasn’t. So, you know: winter is coming. New Jersey’s cases are really going up. So I’m at the point, now, where I’m having to really re-evaluate my living situation.
DR: That question of being alone, and of being with other people, is so much at the forefront of our minds now, and it’s also always been so central to the show. And I’m curious how — you know, pitching this show, and developing this show — was it difficult to sell them on this concept that deals so intimately with so many underrepresented stories and characters?
RY: Well, you know, it was kind of incremental, right? Because you kind of start talking about the show, initially, from the basest level of what the show is. Which is kind of starting out with a pitch of: “We’ve never seen a Muslim family on TV before. And let’s really see them in a way that we haven’t. Let’s see them in this kind of politically divided town, and let’s see the things they have to go through.” That’s kind of, like, the super-bird’s-eye view.
But then, when you really get into what we did — in terms of actually making the show, after you sell it — you start to think: “Okay, so, what does this young guy who is an outsider — what does his life look like? What does his inner circle look like?”
And then that’s really where a friendship like the one that Steve and I have — outsiders in our own different ways, but really kind of bound together by that, in real life and in the show. That’s where you start getting a level of nuance that never really would have been in the initial pitch.
But when we’re allowed to really tell our stories and make them, I think they kind of start to surprise people, in terms of what it is that we’re able to get into. Because everything is so much richer than it feels in a news headline or how it might seem conversationally.
And on our show, we work really hard to avoid the obvious, and we really kind of dig into the things and the nuances that you wouldn’t know. And that’s where the friendship that Ramy and Steve on the show have becomes this really rich part of what we’re doing. It almost is obvious once you see it, but before you see it, you almost can’t imagine it.
DR: Right, right. And to that friendship: what would you like audiences to know about the differences between the TV versions of Ramy and Steve and the real-life connection that you have?
RY (laughs): Oh! Oh, no, no, there’s a bunch. I mean, I would say the plotlines are all exaggerated. And Steve mentioned at the beginning, when he was just describing his living situation, that he’s had a girlfriend for quite some time. They have a really great relationship. I’m very — I admire their relationship a lot.
That obviously is not what we look at in the show. I think what we look at in the show is — for myself and for Steve — we almost kind of look at: what are the versions of ourselves that we fear? Or what are we afraid might happen? And we kind of dip into that.
So the storylines kind of inform that kind of “worst case scenario but with your best friend.” We really try to live in that, throughout every storyline that we explore, on a character tension level. But I would say what is definitely, really real is the loyalty and the love despite whatever’s going on.
SW: Also, I really love how Ramy writes, and how we portray it, just the duality of our lives. Ramy’s life is surrounded by structure and rules, specifically around his religion. Whereas me, I’m more free-spirited. You know, it’s weird, because my rules and my structure are with my body, and Ramy’s structure is more spiritual. It’s something he’s brought on to himself. And it’s — I love watching the two sets of that clash, where I call out Ramy for him picking and choosing what rules to live by. And then Ramy having to kind of live his life, when he’s with me, around my structure of what I can and cannot do.
I really love the situations that mean we have to work within where those sets of rules clash against each other.
RY: I’ve never thought about it like that. That’s really good. Have you been working on that? (laughs) That’s good!
SW: Yeah, I workshopped that during quarantine.
(laughter)
RY: (laughs) That’s a good one! Yeah, that’s really good framing.
SW: All right, I’ll keep using that.
RY: You just called my mind disabled. (laughs)
DR: It seems to me, Steve, that your character is the one who usually calls bullshit on things. In some ways, your character reminds me of a friend of mine who has a similar condition. I remember I said to him once, “You’re just so outgoing!,” and he said, “When you have three different caretakers throughout the day” — as my friend does — “and somebody is wiping your ass, you don’t have the luxury of being shy.” That always stuck in my —
SW: Yes!
DR: — head because it sort of forces you to be constantly social. Because your whole life is depending on relationships and navigating communication with other people.
SW: Yeah, I mean, during my real life, I barely have any privacy. At some point throughout the day, somebody will see me naked.
(laughter)
SW: You know? I need help with everything. Everybody knows my laptop and my phone passwords. So, you know, if there is something I can have some privacy around, then I’m going to hold onto that for dear life.
RY: I just realized how many passwords of yours I know. Like, you just said that and I haven’t even thought about it. I know so many of your passwords! That’s crazy. (laughs)
DR: How do you both sustain that level of privacy when the show is increasingly successful and you’re winning awards and getting interviewed and doing things like this? Is it hard to tap back into the versions of yourself that you were before everybody knew who you were?
RY: You know, what we’ve been really fortunate about is what the nature of the show is. The nature of the show is, again, kind of this natural extension of our alter egos, but it feels so real to what we care about.
So I always say, it’s not like we were in an Avengers movie together or something. This is very close to what we do, so any sort of attention that we’ve gotten off of it is almost just encouragement. It’s just like: “Hey, keep being more you!” You know? “And keep going in and exploring these things that are unsaid.”
And again, we live in the margins of, “Oh, man, what if this shit happened?” That’s kind of the margin of what we enjoy most. So it’s kind of the best of both worlds. Because it’s certainly not a biopic of “this is really our lives.” There is a clear separation. But it is so real, because it’s the kinds of things we think about, and it’s what really excites us. So any of it getting more public, so far, has just been further affirmation to keep going, and going deeper. And that’s been really, really cool to do together.
DR: In that constant pushing of boundaries, to see how far you can go, have there been any stories that have made Hulu nervous? “Well, we want you to break boundaries, but we don’t you to break that many?”
RY: (laughs) “Don’t break that boundary!”
SW: Why don’t we talk about the ideas that make me nervous?
(laughter)
SW: Forget Hulu. What about me? I feel like —
DR: What makes you nervous?
SW: I feel like every time Ramy’s in the writers’ room, he’ll call me up with this insane idea, and my reaction is always: “Ughhh. Fine.”
(laughter)
SW: Every time!
RY: It’s always — it’s really cool, because that’s my reaction, too. I’ll think of something for myself and — it’s less so now — but in the first season, I would think of something, and I’d be like, “Oh, man. That would be really cool, but we can’t do that.” And then, I’d be like, “Oh, no, we can. That’s actually the thing we need to do.”
Any time I think, “Oh, that’s awesome, but we can’t”? That’s what we can.
And Steve and I are really fortunate. You know, we have awesome families, we grew up around the corner from each other, and we just grew up with really supporting, loving parents. And I think so many times, we’re like, “Why are we putting our parents through this? They really deserve better. They don’t need to see us being such fools.”
But we kind of push past that stuff, because we know it gets really exciting when you can go to those places with levity.
And I think the network, certainly — so many parts of the show, they’ve taken a leap of faith, and they’ll kind of have initial hesitations, and be like, “I don’t know. Are you sure?” Kind of trying to steer it in other ways. But really, good on them, because they eventually let us do what we do want to do. And, a lot of times, that process of the resistance, when you’re trying to convince somebody why you should be allowed to do something, helps make the idea better.
That’s something I think we’ve both learned from standup. The first time you try a premise, especially if it’s one that’s not the most agreeable right away, you kind of realize, “Oh, okay: in order to get people to this place, I’m going to have to really work harder to allow them to understand what it is I want to do.” Without sugarcoating it, but really walking that tightrope.
I really think that balancing a tightrope is what Steve does so well. He does such a great job of — any scene we write, anything we give him — he’s just kind of a genius at stepping into the emotion of it and making it so much more than a trope. Because there are so many things that, throughout this show, we lean into certain tropes in order to flip them. But I would say, especially with a lot of the stuff we do with Steve, in lesser hands, it would just live on the trope level. But, because he brings so much nuance to it, it really blows past that, and becomes what it should be. And that’s what’s really cool.
DR: The episode that we’re featuring here, called “Saving Mikela,” has so many different moral complexities in it, for both characters — where the lines are that you might want to cross but can’t, for all variety of reasons. In this push-pull, sometimes, in these stories — between the progressive Ramy character and the more conservative aspects of his faith and his family — how has that informed, for both of you, your real-life relationships with your families and with members of your respective communities, and being representative figures for those communities?
RY: Yeah, I mean, I think — and I’ll let Steve speak to this, too — but I think, even with the episode you highlighted, it’s really just about creating grey areas where we can ask questions. Certainly we don’t think Steve’s character should be hanging out with underage women. That, we know. But we’re in the space of fiction, and so, in the space of fiction, you start to say: “Okay, what questions are arising, out of this situation, around loneliness? And questions around, you know, really someone trying to find their place?”
And the discomfort that the fiction causes you allows you to ask questions in real-life that, I think, for myself, for my family — and, I think, for a lot of our friends and a lot of our families — it opened up conversation that brings you closer. So I think that’s always been the goal of the show, which is: it’s not prescriptive; it’s descriptive.
We’re describing something. We’re not telling you what to do. We’re not telling you this is what’s right. We’re showing something, and then that really gives the ability to have, what I think are, the right types of conflicts. Because if you get to argue about a TV show, that’s the best kind of argument — because it’s not real! You’re not arguing about your friend’s life. You’re not arguing about your uncle. You’re not arguing about someone real. You’re arguing about fiction, but the argument is based in so much reality, because you cared enough to have that fight, or to have those thoughts and questions. So that really leads to a closeness that I’ve experienced, and I know Steve has had that, too.
SW: Um, I’ve never tried to have sex with an underaged girl.
(laughter)
SW: It never happened. I play a fictional character in a fictional universe. My lawyer told me to say that every time it comes up.
(laughter)
SW: No, there are — what I love about the scenarios that Ramy puts me in is that it really heightens certain feelings and emotions, whether it’s the fear of death, the fear of loneliness, dating, sex, friendship — Ramy is able to craft it in a way that allows me to portray it in a way that you’ve really never seen before on television. And I’m so honored, and I feel so special, that I’m the guy to play that role.
Obviously, there always is some hesitation going into it, that I am the guy to do it. But, no, as Ramy said: it’s really fun to see the arguments on Reddit and on Twitter — the things that I make Ramy do. It’s really fun to see both sides of it. Especially within my own family, whether it’s my sister, my parents, or my cousins watching it. To hear their reactions.
It’s obviously a little uncomfortable, you know, when I hear my family say that they’ve watched the LAF City episode, but I have to say that I have so much love and support from the disabled community, especially from that episode, who say that before that they were so uncomfortable with talking about a situation like that. I’ve had so many conversations with people like me, after episodes like that, that they were so much more comfortable opening up to the people around them about problems like that that they have.
I think it’s really a testament to Ramy’s writing, and to our acting on screen, that we’re able to open up these doors to have these harder conversations with people. To give examples, to give people a reference, too, in order to have these conversations.
RY: And to be clear, too — you said, at some point, you feel lucky to play the part. There is no part without you. It’s not like we’re writing this in a vacuum and then, like, “Let’s go out and find a guy with muscular dystrophy.” I think what’s really important is that you are really part of the process, right? Because it’s like, we can’t make this stuff, or even go down the certain rabbit holes that we do, without you.
That’s what’s so interesting about the writing process: you really have to open your mind to the idea of a different character that you haven’t seen in order to get to the storyline that you haven’t seen. You don’t think of the storyline first. You have to really attract the possibility of casting someone like Steve, the possibility of writing with someone like Steve.
And Steve is very hands-on in his — we go through every script together, and he changes it and adds so much on set that I could never take credit for. I’m just kind of trying to build the arena based, again, on the inspiration from him.
So I think it’s really — it’s about access, on that level, right? Once someone like Steve has the access to be on a show, the access to have a bunch of writers daydreaming about what could happen with him, you start to arrive at things that couldn’t have existed before. But it doesn’t work the other way around — there’s no way to just, out of thin air, think of these things and then go out and cast. You really have to be looking for specificity.
DR: That gets into a whole other space about employment bias for people with disabilities, in all industries. We find that — a recent report of the Writers Guild found that 0.7% of the Guild has a disability, which is a very small number, which means that a large community is being generally underutilized in this space. Which makes me wonder about, Steve, your experience in production and in informing stories the way Ramy just described. Have you found interesting solutions to things, as you’re pioneering your way through this industry or on set?
SW: For me, I’ve had nothing but great experiences, working on this show. Everybody has been super welcoming and accommodating and just treated me like everybody else. But I have so many friends who have not been as lucky with that. But I’ve also had a lot of people reach out to me and say, “Hey, I saw you on Ramy, and I’d never thought about having a disabled character. Can you help me or talk to me about what that’s like, being on set? What kinds of accommodations do you have? What is it like for you, filming?” So it’s been really rewarding to be able to consult in that way. To help open the doors for more performers like me. I love that I’m able to do that for even more diverse disabled voices, whether it’s Black and disabled or gay and disabled or trans and disabled. I’ve had a lot of Muslim disabled people reach out to me and say they love the show and love our characters, just love me being disabled in this Muslim world.
RY: And —
DR: What does that — Oh. Go ahead, Ramy.
RY: No, I was just gonna say, to the point Steve is making about the way he’s been consulting with a lot of people and how — what a set environment looks like and what inclusion looks like. I’ve always been trying to put it in the framework of: when you’re dealing with someone Hollywood considers an ‘A-List’ celebrity, and you walk onto that set, there are a lot of accommodations made. There are, “Hey, he’s not gonna shoot for more than this amount of time. They want this kind of food. We need to pick them up in a better, different car. We need to — ”
So the idea of accommodating is what’s Hollywood is about. Hollywood is so in that pocket of that type of HR for those who they deem deserve it. So it’s about extending that to disabled people who want to be part of the process. And not only want to be but need to be. Because the stories need someone like Steve, and they need a lot of these stories that haven’t been told, if purely only because storytelling is getting boring when we’re continuing to just only have the same points of view.
So the employment statistic that you put out — I actually have a lot of optimism that, post-pandemic, when people realize that so much can get done from just being at home, even when writers’ rooms are back open and people are meeting in person, we can all kind of draw back to, like, “Well, why can’t we hire that person who is in a different state, or a different country, or who has a disability and can’t be here?” We already know it can work, because we’ve worked that way. So I have a lot of optimism that that framework can exist, if we want it to.
DR: I can’t think of a better note to wrap up on than that, because that addresses so much of what we’re trying to champion here through Film Independent and the Media Access Awards. Congratulations to you both on your recognition at the Media Access Awards this year, and on such a great show that’s doing so much for so many communities that we don’t see enough of on TV.
Do you have any final words of wisdom, for independent filmmakers and/or people from underrepresented groups, like your own, to just push us through this industry and COVID?
RY: I’ll let Steve say something. But just to say something about Steve and why I’m so proud of him:
We grew up in Jersey together, and we grew up doing comedy with each other and a bunch of our friends. And we would always go into New York and get up on stages and try out material. That’s how we started building it. And Steve didn’t have that opportunity. I saw him still write, and I saw him still think of stuff. We were performing four times a week, and Steve would maybe have once a month, or once every two months, where he would have access to a stage that he could get on and perform. And he’d be just as sharp, if not sharper, than any of us. Because he knew himself, and he knew what he was doing.
And that leads to him being so equipped to be able to be on our show, once I’m able to get something greenlit. And then, now, we’re developing a show that’s around Steve and set fully in the disabled community. And all of that really came from his ability to continue to believe in himself. Really, it’s so hard to — especially in comedy — it’s so hard to develop what you need to do, without stage time. Steve really continues to put his mind to getting around all of that. So it’s super inspiring.
SW: The industry just needs to give disabled people a chance. There’s no excuse anymore, as Ramy talked about, with the accommodations. We’re good enough. We’re smart enough. We’re clever enough. We’re funny enough. They just have to give us a chance. And I’m forever grateful that Ramy gave me a chance. He advocated for me and fought for me. So I think it’s up to us to really just pay that forward.
We’re trying to do that right now, but it’s really up to the people in power to give us a chance, the same way you’d give anybody else a chance. There’s no excuse anymore.
DR: Well I’m very grateful for you both, as a fan and as a creative person and as a disabled person. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Good luck with staying safe and being creative and working on Season 3. We’re very excited about it. Thank you so much.
RY: Thanks, David. Good to meet you.
SW: Nice to meet you.
