Congratulations to Br. Walid Amini ’04 for winning Best Lead Actor (Breakthrough Performance) at the Monaco Film Festival in May 2012 for his role in “The Black Tulip.”
Walid and I were fellow pledge brothers in the fall of 2001. Though he did not live in the house, his consistent visits to help and participate in fraternity events cemented his status as a supportive brother. It was clear that Walid’s enthusiastic personality and movie star good looks were matched by his academic intelligence. Aside from being a highly accomplished pianist, he put forth every effort into his studies – keeping up a 4.0 GPA and strengthening the house average – and eventually graduating with a BS in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota before moving on to work at Honeywell.
On the side, he would work various modeling and acting jobs in the Twin Cities. A fellow actor myself, I was surprised and fortunate enough to have worked alongside Walid in a McDonald’s commercial some years back. I was cast in a principal role (McDonald’s employee), but suffered minor car troubles on the day of the shoot, which delayed my arrival to the location. Upon arrival, I was informed that I would play a customer instead and that they had to do a last minute recast in the event that I wasn’t able to make it to set at all. Any disappointment melted away when they introduced me to my replacement – none other than Walid – whom I had not seen in years! It was such a fun experience reconnecting and sharing a little camera time with each other that day.
Since then, he as moved out west to pursue a career in modeling and film, landing roles in movies like Charlie Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks, and television shows like NCIS and Lie To Me amidst various independent films. More information can be found at his IMDB page:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2390533/
Congratulations to Walid on his recent award and we wish him the best of luck in his future projects and continue to look forward to seeing him grace the big screen.
Nik VanDenMeerendonk, MN ’05
Secretary
Alpha Delta Phi MN Alumni Board
