Blame the Egyptian journalist for your ignorance

"In a longwinded answer to a different question asked of me by an Egyptian reporter concerning the film from Tunisia, Arab/African culture, and my familiarity with Arab films specifically, I said I had seen and loved Theeb, and Timbuktu, but admitted, "I don't know very much about, honestly, the Middle East, ...and yet I've played a lot of different people from a lot of different cultures. And the thing I notice is that we're all -- I mean there is a core of humanity that travels right through every culture, and after all, we're all from Africa originally, you know? We're all Berliners, we're all Africans, really.""