Biography
Kareem Badr is an award-winning, Arab American character actor and musician with extensive improv comedy experience. Badr excels at playing eccentric and clever outsiders with a comedic twist.
In 2026, he can be seen in a recurring role in season 2 of Hulu's "Deli Boys". He has also appeared in Taylor Sheridan's "1923" on Paramount+, and "The Chosen" on The CW. His film roles include an abrasive mentor-turned-outlaw in "Laughs & Shadows" and the charming and manipulative villain in the horror feature "Damsel of the Doomed".
Badr was born and raised on Long Island, NY. Growing up with a British mother and Egyptian father in the suburbs of New York exposed Badr to a wide variety of cultures, and helped him develop an ear for accents at a very young age.
In addition to on screen work, Badr starred as Nazrullah, an Afghan caught between America and the Taliban, in two different productions of the rolling world premiere of "Heartland". The role took advantage of Badr's natural talent for accents, and had him speaking dialog in Dari and Arabic. Critics called his performance "compassionate, intelligent and spontaneously funny", and it earned him a B. Iden Payne award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama. A high point in Badr's stage career came when he played the devious and obsessed Salieri in "Amadeus", backed by a live classical score from the Central Texas Philharmonic.
Badr's love for performing was first inspired by improv comedy, which he began studying at The Hideout Theatre. After several years of performing at The Hideout, Badr stepped up to become a co-owner of the theater, saving the beloved institution from shuttering. With his improv troupe PGraph, Badr co-developed dozens of genre shows, running the gamut from French farce to film noir to 1970s psychological sci-fi. Since the troupe's founding, Badr has toured the world, performing and teaching PGraph's unique brand of theatrical improv in over 65 cities in the US, Canada, Australia, France, and the UK. In 2011 PGraph played the entire month of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to critical and audience acclaim. They published "Do It Now", their book of essays on theatrical improv, in 2016.
In addition to performing, Badr co-wrote the fiction podcast "Curtains", a murder mystery set in and around a Detroit vaudeville theatre struggling to survive during The Great Depression. The "Curtains" pilot won The Austin Film Festival Script Competition.
When he isn't writing or performing, Badr spends his time playing guitar with his old-school metal band Concrete Horse. Their debut album was released earlier this year.
