Basil Karapetian

Basil Karapetian runs the Nefertiti Hotel in Cairo, the establishment where Jonathan Pine works nights. Fussy about propriety and appearances, he presides over the lobby and its guests with the anxious authority of a man who believes order can be maintained by manners alone, oblivious to the currents moving beneath his roof.

Chahidi plays him as comic relief who never quite curdles into caricature — a hotelier whose vanity and decorum feel entirely real against the encroaching danger around him. He's a small, human counterweight to the espionage plot, and his obliviousness gives the opening episodes their sense of a world about to be punctured.