Our Favourite Villain Mums This Ramadan

Mothers, mothers, mothers. They come in all shapes and forms. The ones who enforce curfews like a sergeant’s military regime, the ones who believe a well-aimed slipper is a licit parenting technique, the ones who micromanage your love life as though it were a national security matter – and of course the ones who, on multiple occasions, kidnap a child(ren) and simply… claim it as their own. Motherhood, as Ramadan television has taught us, is a spectrum – and somewhere along that spectrum sits the gloriously chaotic category we like to call the villain mum.

She gaslights with the confidence of a corporate lawyer and manipulates entire family trees about a particular aunt she does not like. And, yet, somehow, you cannot look away, in fact you wait patiently for her scenes. If Ramadan dramas have proven anything, it’s that nothing moves a plot along quite like a mother with a grudge and a perfectly timed side-eye.

So, in honour of Mother’s Day – and the maternal figures who made our jaws drop, our group chats explode, and our blood pressure spike – we’re turning our lens towards our favourite villain mums of the 2026 Ramadan screen. The ones who made motherhood look a little less nurturing and a lot more… strategic.

Riham Abdel Ghaffour as Nargess — Hekayet Nargess

Riham Abdelghafour's Narges in Hekayet Narges is proof that the scariest villains don't need knives – just a working knowledge of gaslighting and the confidence to convince her husband that the infertility was his fault. Based on a true story that still makes headlines, she plays a woman who kidnapped children, built a family from other people's trauma, and delivered a glare so devastatingly unhinged that it crashed Egypt's socials and secured permanent real estate in our nightmares.

Sawsan Badr as Ward — Sawa Sawa

In Sawa Sawa, Sawsan Badr’s Ward takes “overprotective mother” and pushes it into alarming territory: keeping her son, Dr. Fawzi, locked inside the house for ten years while convincingly performing the role of a woman who simply… does not have children. Which, oddly enough, feels very on-brand for this Ramadan, where mums either seem to be acquiring children under questionable circumstances or denying their existence altogether. Ward, commits in full-scale production, complete with isolation, control, and a psychological fallout that lingers long after the credits roll.

Sawsan Badr as Samiha — Monalisa

Sawsan Badr's serving villain after villain this season. Samiha in Monalisa loves three things: her sons, her prayer beads, and money, although not necessarily in that order. She's the kind of mother who'll smile at you warmly while mentally calculating how much you're worth, the kind of mother-in-law who makes you feel seen and assessed in the same glance. Every word she speaks is pre-negotiated in her head before it leaves her mouth, every sympathetic look a down payment on a future snappy light.

Haidy Abdelkhalek as Nabila’s Mum — Ab Wa Laken

Some grandmothers bake cookies. Haidy Abdelkhalek's character in Ab Wa Laken bakes resentment, serves it with a side of screaming, and wonders why everyone's lost their appetite. She's so aggressively awful that her granddaughter's imagination recasts her as a cartoon witch. She fuels her daughter's worst instincts, terrorises every room she enters, and generally conducts herself like someone whose happy place is everyone else's misery.

Hanan Youssef as Nahed — Kan Ya Makan

Hanan Youssef's Nahed in Kan Ya Makan treads the villain spectrum carefully. A mother meddling in her daughter's divorce like a part-time job with infinite emotional dividends. She leans hard on the classic "I just want to help you get your rights" script – a sentence that has launched a thousand family feuds and zero successful mediations. She consults no one. She questions nothing. She simply knows what's best, with the unshakable confidence of someone who's never once been wrong (in her own head).

Hagar Ahmed as Nabila — Ab Wa Laken

Hagar Ahmed's Nabila in Ab Wa Laken – a divorced mother who took "it takes a village" as a personal challenge to burn hers down. She turns co-parenting into psychological warfare, feeding her daughter lies about her father in bedtime stories, all while her own mother's snarly comments echo in the background like a generational soundtrack. Add a lawyer who seems personally committed to making a bad situation worse, and you've got a woman so deep in her own victimhood she can't see she's become the villain she's warning everyone about.

Noha Abdeen as Nagwa — Sawa Sawa

Noha Abdeen’s Nagwa in Sawa Sawa is a character that doesn’t just toe the line of villainy, she obliterates it. Neglectful to a fault, she leaves her son to be cared for by his half-brother, effectively outsourcing responsibility while she spirals elsewhere. A pathologically intrusive persona – eavesdropping on conversations, spying on phones, inserting herself where she absolutely shouldn’t be, while effectively, abandoning her child for her selfish needs.