Patricia Velásquez long ago made peace with the fact that she and Egypt will be eternally linked. It’s an amusing quirk of fate for the Venezuelan actor since she grew up not in the sun-soaked deserts of North Africa, but rather the lush greenery of Latin America and France. She is a woman of proud Indigenous Wayuu descent and of a multicultural childhood that took her all over the world. Just never that part of it. Nonetheless, because of a movie she did a quarter-century ago—because of The Mummy—when friends, family, and even strangers think of the Land of the Pharaohs, they think of Patricia Velásquez. They think of Anck-Su-Namun.

“Can you believe I still have not been to Egypt?” Velásquez muses when we catch up with her over Zoom ahead of The Mummy’s 25th anniversary. “But somehow I seem to be connected to it a lot.