Do we like them?

Do we like Omar Sharif Jr.?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record and real advocacy, held back from higher only because the coverage we could read is thin and mostly older.

Omar Sharif Jr. grew up with one of the biggest names in Arab cinema as his grandfather, and the Omar Sharif name opened doors. In 2012 he used it for something harder: he came out as gay and half-Jewish in a very public letter, asking whether he would still be welcome in Egypt. It made him a name well beyond acting.

He has said his famous grandfather never made an issue of his being gay. That story landed in 2015 when he went on Arabic-language TV to talk about it, which was a big deal for an audience that rarely sees a gay Arab man talk openly about his life.

Harm check first. We went looking for anything on trans people, women, migrants, vaccines, climate or conspiracy theories and found nothing from him that fits that pattern. His public record runs the other way: he took a job as a national spokesperson for GLAAD in 2013 and was named to The Advocate’s 40 Under 40 list in 2014. The honest caveat is that most of what we could read is a few years old.

The one real backlash we found was aimed at him. When he joined the cast of an Israeli TV series in 2021, he was called a ‘traitor’ in Egypt, according to the Algemeiner. That is abuse he copped for taking a job, not something he did to anyone, so it counts for nothing against him.

Nothing new on him lately: we couldn’t pin down a fresh news hook from the past few months. The latest dated item we could confirm is his 2022 appointment as chief advancement officer at Holocaust Museum LA, a fundraising and communications role at a museum focused on remembrance and fighting hatred.

Court record and allegations: nothing turned up for him. We found no lawsuits, charges or misconduct claims, only stories about his late grandfather, who is a different man. That doesn’t prove there’s nothing out there, just that our searches found none.