Sam Esmail

Sam Esmail (born September 17, 1977) is an American film and television producer, director, and screenwriter who runs the production company Esmail Corp. He is best known as the creator, writer, and director of the award-winning USA Network television series Mr. Robot (2015–2019), starring Rami Malek.

The family eventually moved back to Sewell, New Jersey, where Esmail graduated from Washington Township High School in 1995.

Esmail attended New York University where he studied film and computer science.

He graduated in 1998 from the university's Tisch School of the Arts.

While attending the school, Esmail worked in its computer lab before being put on academic probation for hacking emails there.

After graduating he briefly worked for an internet start-up, before founding his own ISP software company called Portal Vision.

At age 20, he raised US$6 million in venture capital funding during the dot-com boom but the software quickly became outdated when broadband internet began replacing dial-up.

He left his position as president and chief technology officer to briefly attend Dartmouth College's creative writing program.

Originally intending it as a follow-up feature film to Comet, Esmail began working on the technological thriller Mr. Robot in the late 2000s, inspired in part by the 2008 financial crisis and the Arab Spring.

He has said that the main character, Elliot, is a "thinly-veiled version" of himself; like Elliot, Esmail also suffers from social anxiety and is from Washington Township in New Jersey.

He was later inspired to take what he had written and create a pilot for what he imagined would be a four-or-five season show.

Esmail moved to Los Angeles in 2001 where he attended the AFI Conservatory.

He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in directing in 2004.

After graduating the AFI Conservatory in 2004, Esmail struggled to find work and held odd jobs.

His screenplay, Sequels, Remakes & Adaptations landed on 2008's Black List, a yearly survey of over six hundred production companies and film executives of the "most liked" motion picture screenplays not yet produced.

He worked as an assistant film editor for a few years and was eventually able to establish a career as a post-production supervisor of behind-the-scenes features and television specials; his work included helping to edit episodes of reality television shows for Lifetime and A&E and stand-up specials for Comedy Central, HBO's documentary series Tourgasm and HBO First Look, and "the making of" features for The Fast and the Furious franchise, as well as supervise the 2010 A&E documentary The Battle for Late Night.

When not working as a full-time editor, Esmail worked on writing screenplays.

Frustrated with his career, Hollywood, and its films, Esmail began writing his own feature films.

He wrote and directed the feature films Comet (2014) and Leave the World Behind (2023).

After this, he was able to find representation in Hollywood and began working more as a screenwriter; he wrote another screenplay that also landed on the Black List the following year and co-wrote the horror film Mockingbird with writer Bryan Bertino, which was released in 2014.

He wrote seriously for years before stopping to focus on his passion, directing.

He began writing his own feature-length directorial debut, Comet, which was released by IFC Films in 2014.

Comet premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival and had a limited box office release.

Mr. Robot

Having secured management from Anonymous Content, Esmail shopped his projects around to many different television networks and began developing the show with USA Network in 2014.

Mr. Robot premiered on the USA Network on June 24, 2015.

Esmail is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the series.

Beginning with season two, Esmail also directed all episodes of the show; in total he directed thirty-eight of its forty-five episodes.

The first season of the show was critically acclaimed and Esmail himself was nominated for two Emmys, among other awards.

The following three seasons of the show premiered in July 2016, October 2017, and October 2019, respectively.

He produced and directed the first season of the acclaimed Amazon Prime Video psychological thriller Homecoming (2018–2020), starring Julia Roberts and Janelle Monáe, and produced USA's Briarpatch (2020), Starz's Gaslit (2022), and Peacock's Angelyne (2022) and The Resort (2022).

Esmail's work often centers on the themes of alienation, technology, and American society.

Esmail was born to Egyptian immigrant parents in Hoboken, New Jersey.

He has an older sister and two younger brothers, including Samer Esmail who was a post-production coordinator for Mr. Robot and Homecoming.

His family is Muslim.

When he was five years old, his family moved to South Carolina and then to Charlotte, North Carolina.

As a child, Esmail was very interested in technology.

He acquired his first computer when he was nine and began computer programming a few years later.

He attended high school in Summerville, South Carolina, where he faced racism.

He said, "I used to hold Stanley Kubrick film festivals at my house in high school. These are not cool things. Back in my day, those are things that you would get beaten up for ... When you're a funny-looking Egyptian growing up in Jersey and South Carolina, it kind of gets rough."