Patrick Sabongui’s character in The Art of More is a smuggler, sure, but he’s far more than that.
He’s Iraqi.
He’s an architect, but he can’t practice his profession anymore because of the war.
He’s living under constant threat from numerous Big Bads, including ISIS.
He’s an art lover – and, yes, he’s a smuggler.
He’s the kind of fully formed character that Sabongui has long yearned to play, and that The Flash actor has had more opportunity to play over the last several years, because “there are more roles for Middle Eastern men, or Middle Eastern-looking men.”
“I was maybe booking the same number of jobs previously, but those roles would last a day or two, and then I’d get into a fight with the lead character and get blown up or get killed,” says Sabongui in a recent phone interview.
“As the characters are evolving, it’s translating into more time in the character’s shoes for me.”
The Art of More whisks audiences into the high-stakes world of New York auction houses, where a passion for art and antiquities can intersect with a shadowy criminal underworld.
The Crackle drama stars Christian Cooke as Graham Connor, an Iraq War veteran who now works in a big-time NYC auction house. Kate Bosworth plays Connor's rival, and Dennis Quaid portrays a wealthy collector.
Sabongui appears as Hassan Al Afshar, a figure from Connor’s wartime past who smuggles and exports antiquities.
“As I’m maturing as an artist, I’m finding my creative voice, and I’m finding the things that I believe in that I want to contribute to the world through my storytelling, and one of them is to humanize characters like Hassan from parts of the world that people aren’t familiar with,” says Sabongui.
“Take an Iraqi character that you could easily write off as a bad guy, a smuggler, and a villain, but that’s not what I’m doing. That’s not what the story intends. This is what I see is my mission as an actor, and an artist, is to humanize these characters and get people to see them as people first, and then ask the question, ‘Oh, wait. Where do they come from? What are the motivations?’ And hopefully the motivations they can relate to and understand.”
The 10-episode series filmed over five months in 2015. Sabongui’s hometown – Montreal – stood in for New York City.
The Art of More premiered in November on Crackle and Shomi. In December, Crackle announced that The Art of More had been renewed for a second season.
Below, Sabongui reflects on his The Art of More character, and casts a light on the shadowy world of international art smuggling.
REEL PEOPLE: Your character in The Art of More experiences quite the career jump: from architect to smuggler.
PATRICK SABONGUI: I think the show does a great job of addressing how someone in his position ends up in this kind of sideline job. Opportunities in war-torn countries fall apart. He says at one point, he was as architect, and the building he used to work in doesn’t even exist anymore. It was bombed. We kind of take for granted over here if you have a career path, as long as you perform your job admirably, you have a job to go to the next day. In Iraq and in the Middle East right now and a lot of places in the world where war takes over, there are no guarantees. You have to survive at all costs, and so Hassan above all else is a survivor.
The show itself is placed against the backdrop of high-end art auction houses in New York City, and the main character, Graham Conner, played by Christian Cooke, used to be a US soldier stationed in Iraq, and while he was there, he hooked up with my character, Hassan, and got involved in this smuggling ring. They would smuggle antiquities together and get them out of the country. When we pick up the story in The Art of More, Graham has left the army, he’s left that life behind, he’s now a fancy account executive at one of the biggest auction houses in New York City, and I show up and out of desperation, out of trying to survive, trying to get my family out of Iraq, trying to escape ISIS specifically, I suck Graham back into the world of smuggling artifacts out of Iraq and into the hands of rich North American collectors.
RP: What did you know about the world of smuggling going into this project, and what did you learn about it through The Art of More?
SABONGUI: Smuggling specifically, you do the research and you figure out how some of these artifacts get out of these countries, and you realize very quickly how pervasive it is. It just happens all of the time. As soon as there’s instability in a region like that, those antiquities, those artifacts, become currency with international value.
What I found most fascinating is that it’s so easy from our vantage point to point as somebody like Hassan and go, ‘Oh, he’s a smuggler’ – but it’s a lot more complicated than that. Some of these art thieves were stealing these artifacts right out of museums to preserve them, because they knew what the Taliban would do or what ISIS would do if they got their hands on it. These organizations don’t value art and antiquities and history the same way that we do in the West, or that a lot of people do even there. They either see it as a threat or sacrilegious, so they’ll blow them up or they’ll destroy them or they’ll sell them on the black market without taking care of them or tracking their chain of title or their authenticity.
And so a lot of people who turn to stealing artifacts when stuff starts to go sideways were doing it to preserve them. A lot of these artifacts were stolen and kept in vaults or banks or buried in people’s backyards, and they weren’t trying to sell them. They weren’t trying to make a buck off of them. They just wanted to stop them from falling into the wrong hands.
That’s what I found fascinating, and I wanted to bring that to Hassan in that, there’s got to be a reason that you go from being an architect to something completely unrelated, and I thought, ‘Well, what if he’s in love with them? What if just loves these artifacts, and it’s a hobby and a passion he’s had his whole life, and being resourceful and having the need to survive, he just turned to the one currency that still had any value in the international arena?’ That was the main thing that stuck with me is we just can’t make assumptions about people’s motivations when their life and their survival and the survival of their families is in on the line.
RP: This reminds me of the character you played in Disgraced [part of the Arts Club’s 2015-2016 season]. Your character in that was so fully formed that, even though he did some terrible things, he wasn’t easily dismissible as just a bad guy.
SABONGUI: There’s only so much you can do as an actor in terms of humanizing a character and making his motivations relatable. A lot of that has to be present in the writing. It’s that collaboration between the writer and the director and the performer to underline that, and enhance that, and make sure that reaches the audience.
RP: What can you tell me about your fellow The Art of More actors, and the special qualities that they brought to their roles?
SABONGUI: Dennis Quaid is larger than life, in real life and his [The Art of More] character also. He’s an entertainer, and he’s bombastic and hilarious. He’s just really fun to be around on set, and you’ll see it in his character. His character is a storyteller. He’s always the center of attention. It’s kind of a role that was custom-made for him, so that’s great.
Cary Elwes is such a wonderful human being. He’s so personable and full of joy. He’s an incredible person to work with.
Most of my work is with Christian Cooke. You may not have heard about him yet, but you will. He’s an incredibly talented actor from the UK. He did Magic City. He and I got to work together a lot, and there’s this amazing conspiracy that we’re in to take the work all of the way, to take the scene as far as possible, and we’ve got this freedom between the two of us that we trust each other implicitly and we know that we’re both going to push this material as far as it goes, and that’s what we’re there to do. Every day showing up to work and knowing that we were going to challenge each other to go deep and find the truth and push the envelope, that was one of the most rewarding experiences.
The first season of The Art of More is available for streaming on Shomi.
