Mena Massoud sent in an audition tape and then heard nothing for half a year. While it sat unwatched, he was bussing tables and sleeping on a borrowed air mattress in a friend's closet. Not long after, he was Aladdin, in a film that took more than a billion dollars worldwide.
In episode two, he sits down with Jazz Lintott to talk about what happened next, which is the part of the story that almost never gets told. The assumption that a hit on that scale sets a person up for life. The distance between how a career looks from outside and what it actually pays. The slower stretch that followed, and what it took to keep going through it. He is equally open about the work since, including the desert shoot for Daniel and a role he had been circling long before he knew it existed.

Why This Matters: Success is usually presented as a finish line. Mena's account of the years on either side of Aladdin is a corrective: the reward for one good break is the chance to keep doing the work, and that is a very different thing from being set for life.