In early 1937, the Egyptian press reported on a surprising development. The actor known as Kouka (née Nagiya Ibrahim Bilal) had been selected to play the romantic lead opposite African American star Paul Robeson in Jericho (1937), a British-produced film. Kouka had recently appeared in supporting roles in two Egyptian films: alongside ‘Ali al-Kassar in Bawab al-‘Imara (1935); and Umm Kulthum in Widad (1936). Egyptian media’s surprise extended not only the elevation of this supporting actor to leading lady and her casting in a British film, but also to the studio’s publicity campaign touting the Cairo-born actor as a Sudanese princess. Touching briefly on the racial politics of the plot—-in which an African American naval officer passes as a Bedouin-—and the circumstances of the film’s production in London, this paper examines the racialized and gendered media coverage of the film. The Egyptian press uses various colorist terms to describe Kouka’s physical appearance, but puzzles to make sense of the fictitious Orientalist narrative about the actor’s identity. This paper aims to unpack what the Egyptian media’s coverage of this incident reveals about contemporaneous assumptions about race, gender, and nation in Egypt as articulated in direct dialogue with British and American Orientalism and racism. While this paper focuses on Egyptian media representations of an Egyptian film star, I take a global cinema studies approach, questioning the relevance of the national cinema frame. Building on star studies scholarship about public perception and labor of women in Egyptian films, I examine media responses to a woman’s mobility beyond national cinema. This paper contributes to the limited but growing body of work that deals with race and minorities in Arab cinema. Further, this study offers insights into the marketing, reception, and consumption of foreign films in Egypt. Kouka’s image promoted by the British film company’s publicity department followed her back to Egypt—-for the rest of her career, she was frequently cast to play Bedouin characters.