My paper examines the actor ‘Adil Imam as a symbol mobilized in contentious politics during Egypt’s Revolution, between the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 and the demise of Muhammad Morsy’s presidency in 2013. During this period political fortunes and alliances shifted wildly. Key symbols appeared to have been shattered, their fragments reassembled by political bricoleurs in new combinations and for unfamiliar purposes. ‘Adil Imam, a dominant commercial media star (in cinema, television and the theatre) during the 1970s and 1980s, remains a potent force in cinema and television today. Early in 2011 I found Imam disgraced in a graffito in the lower-class neighbourhood of Bulaq Abu-‘Ila and denounced in revolutionary blacklists as a Mubarak-regime collaborator in Tahrir Square. Nonetheless by July 2013 he was a prominent as ever, appearing triumphantly as the star of al-‘Arraf (the oracle), a popular Ramadan dramatic serial that functioned as an allegory of Mubarakian paternalism. How do we understand these starkly different symbolic mobilizations of ‘Adil Imam? Because Imam’s legacy is disputed, his image can be productive in contentious political performances. I approach him in several ways. First I examine Imam ethnographically as a symbol for people who never wavered in their support for him or the politics he represented by the time of the Revolution. The ethnographic component of the paper draws mostly on the experience of living in Cairo during the first two years of the Revolution; I have known some of my informants for up to three decades. Secondly, I analyse the articulation of Imam-as-a-symbol spatially, relating the significance of where discourse about him emerged in actual urban space (on a wall in Bulaq, in Tahrir Square demonstrations), with virtual representation of the city in Imam’s performances. Finally, the revolution-era significance of Imam crystalizes in the historical-literary context of his performance oeuvre. Whatever people (or publics) make of Imam in the context of the Revolution emerges through the ways they draw on his legacy; the “performance of Imam-as-a-symbol” by people draws on the history of Imam as a performer. More generally the symbolic use of Imam illustrates the way people draw on personal media archives constructed from public culture for political and other social performances. A symbolic bricolage can only be understood by reference to sedimented cultural resources that shift, but not necessarily as rapidly or dramatically as the political alliances of a revolutionary situation may lead us to believe.