The "Face of Emirates": Who Actually Appears in the Adverts

Somewhere in the middle of almost every conversation I have with a woman preparing for an Emirates interview, the same question arrives, usually a little shyly: "And what about the ones in the adverts? The girl in the video on every flight — how do you become her?"

It is a fair question, and the honest answer surprises nearly everyone. The woman in the welcome video that plays at the start of your flight is not an Emirates flight attendant. She is a British model called Harriet Marshall, and she has said she would not take the job in real life because she gets motion sickness rather badly.

That single fact unlocks the whole subject. There is no Emirates job title for "the face of the adverts." What exists instead is three completely different things that the internet mixes together constantly — and once you can tell them apart, you can also see the one route that is genuinely open to you.

What people imagine — and what actually exists

The picture in most people's heads goes roughly like this. Emirates runs a casting. Very beautiful people are selected. They get photographed in the uniform, appear on billboards and in the safety video, are flown to events, and hold a glamorous in-between job that is part cabin crew and part model.

Almost every element of that picture is real. It is just that the elements belong to different jobs, held by different people, hired in different ways, and none of those jobs is a cabin crew role with a special name.

This matters practically, not just as trivia. If you believe there is a "brand face" position to apply for, you will spend your energy looking for a vacancy that does not exist, and you may hand money to one of the many agencies that promise access to it. If you understand how the three things actually work, you will spend that same energy on the one door that is genuinely open — and it is a door thousands of people walk through every year.

Three roles that get confused constantly

Here they are side by side. Almost every confusing article you have read about this subject is quietly sliding between these three columns.

Read the bottom row again, because it is the practical heart of this article. Two of the three columns are closed to you unless you already have a completely different career. The third is open to anybody who meets the requirements — and it is the only one that comes with a salary, a visa and an apartment in Dubai.

Brand ambassador: the celebrity contract

Emirates announced the Spanish actor Penélope Cruz as its brand ambassador in 2023, and the campaign began airing globally from June that year in both English and Spanish. In the films she moves through the parts of the aircraft the airline most wants you to think about — the A380 onboard lounge, the shower spa, the caviar, live football at 40,000 feet.

The scale is worth knowing, because it explains a great deal about why these productions are not cast from the crew roster. More than 160 people worked on the ground on those spots: 36 international crew and 125 local crew and cast. The director was Robert Stromberg, who has won two Academy Awards. Cruz flew to Dubai for a week purely to film.

This is not a job anybody auditions for. It is a commercial agreement between an airline and a public figure whose face already carries meaning in the markets the airline wants. No amount of grooming, height or charm moves you toward it, because it is not that kind of door.

"Face of Emirates": the Harriet Marshall story

This is the one that genuinely confuses people, and it is the closest thing to what most women are actually picturing.

In June 2025 Emirates launched a redesigned onboard welcome video, the one that now plays at the start of nearly every flight and has been seen by tens of millions of passengers. It is shot in a full cinematic style, with large-scale choreography, and it puts a single cabin crew character at the centre. That character is played by Harriet Marshall, a British model — not a flight attendant.

Her route in is the interesting part, and it is the opposite of glamorous. She recorded a self-tape audition. She was rejected. The director produced a shortlist, Emirates was not satisfied with those choices, and during the reassessment her audition resurfaced and she was cast. She has since said, cheerfully, that she would not want the real job, because she suffers quite badly from motion sickness.

So the woman who represents Emirates cabin crew to more passengers than anyone alive has never worked a flight, was turned down the first time, and gets travel sick. If any single fact should free you from measuring yourself against the woman in that video, it is that one.

Why adverts use models instead of crew

It seems strange at first. Emirates employs cabin crew from more than 148 nationalities, many of them strikingly photogenic. Why hire outside talent at all?

The clearest illustration is the Burj Khalifa advert, the one with a woman standing on the very top of the world's tallest building. Emirates did put out a casting call to its own cabin crew for it, and by the airline's own account there were willing and capable candidates. The person who actually stood up there was a professional skydiving instructor, brought in to ensure the highest levels of safety.

That decision generalises. A commercial shoot is not a beauty contest, it is a production, and productions need particular things:

• Availability. Crew are rostered months ahead across time zones. A shoot needs the same person for consecutive days, on a fixed date, in one city.
• Performance skill. Hitting a mark, matching a take, holding an expression through forty repetitions and taking direction is a trained craft, and it is not the craft cabin crew are hired for.
• Safety and insurance. Skyscrapers, wires, helicopters and stunts require certified specialists, not enthusiastic volunteers.
• Contracts and image rights. Using a person's face globally for years is a legal arrangement that sits outside a normal employment contract.

None of this is a judgement about how anyone looks. It is scheduling, training and liability. Understanding that removes the sting from it.

How real crew actually end up in campaigns

Now the part that is genuinely open to you. Emirates does use its own cabin crew in its content, and it happens through a mechanism that is unglamorous and entirely real: internal casting calls circulated to existing crew. That is how the Burj Khalifa shortlist was assembled, before safety pushed the final choice elsewhere.

Crew also appear in a wide band of content that never gets called "advertising" but reaches enormous audiences — behind-the-scenes films, social media series, recruitment material, training and safety content, event coverage. When Penélope Cruz filmed in Dubai, the crew members who met and interviewed her for the behind-the-scenes film were Doyle Kim from Australia and Alessandra Piper from the UK. Two real flight attendants, named, on camera, in a global campaign's supporting content.

They were not hired as models. They were hired as cabin crew, and then they were picked. That is the entire pathway, and there is no shortcut around its first step.

The events you genuinely get invited to

Part of the "brand face" idea comes from something quite real: Emirates does invite people to glamorous events. It is simply not a reward for being photogenic in a campaign.

The Emirates Group runs more than 2,100 open days and talent events across 150 cities. On top of the standard open days, the airline has held invitation-only events in Dubai — five-star affairs designed for people already living and working in the UAE who are interested in joining the cabin crew community.

So the invitation is real, and the venue really is impressive. But it points in the opposite direction from what people assume: these are recruitment events. You are invited because Emirates wants to hire you, not because you have already been chosen as a face. If you have been picturing an invitation that arrives after you become famous, turn the picture around — the invitation comes first, and it is available now.

It helps to know which event is which, because they are not interchangeable and people turn up to the wrong one:

Our guide to the Emirates open day covers exactly how to get into one and what happens inside.

What actually gets you noticed

Here is where the misunderstanding does real damage. Women preparing for Emirates often invest heavily in looking like a model, on the theory that beauty is the currency. The airline's actual standards are about something narrower and much more achievable: consistency, grooming and presentation you can repeat every single day in uniform.

That means neat, secured hair; clean, defined makeup within the published standard; skin, nails and hands in visibly good condition; posture; and a uniform that fits properly. It is a maintenance standard, not a beauty contest, and it is deliberately reachable by ordinary people — which is why crew come from 148 nationalities rather than from model agencies. The details are laid out in full in our cabin crew grooming standards guide.

If you want a concrete version of "consistent", this is what it looks like in practice — five things that must be true on a random Tuesday, not on your best day:

1. Hair that survives a twelve-hour duty. Secured, off the collar, and still correct at the end. If it needs fixing every hour, the style is wrong.
2. A makeup routine you can do in fifteen minutes. Defined and within standard, repeatable when you are tired, in a hotel bathroom, in a different time zone.
3. Hands and nails in constant good order. These are the most photographed part of the job because they are in front of passengers all day.
4. Skin managed as a routine, not a rescue. Long-haul air is punishing; the people who look consistent are the ones with a boring daily habit.
5. Uniform that genuinely fits. Altered properly, pressed, correct shoes. Fit reads as competence long before anyone registers a face.

The women who get picked for internal casting calls are, overwhelmingly, the ones who look exactly like their own best normal day — not the ones who look most like a magazine.

An application photo is not a casting photo

A small, specific mistake worth naming, because it costs people their application.

Emirates wants a very particular kind of photograph with your application: a plain, honest, well-lit picture that shows you as you actually present in a workplace. Candidates who submit heavily retouched, artistically lit or model-portfolio-style images tend to hurt themselves twice — the photo does not answer the question being asked, and the gap between the picture and the person at the assessment day is itself a problem.

A casting photo sells a look. An application photo verifies a person. They are different documents with different jobs, and this is one of the places where believing in the "brand face" myth actively backfires. We cover the specification in detail in the Emirates cabin crew photo guide.

The route that really works now

There is one genuine shift worth knowing about, and Harriet Marshall's own story demonstrates it: she was cast off a self-tape, through a social-media-driven audition process, not through a decade of agency representation.

Visibility is now a real, if unpredictable, mechanism. A great many working Emirates crew maintain accounts that document the job, and some of them become the airline's most-watched content by accident. That visibility occasionally converts into being asked to appear in official material.

Two cautions, though, and both are serious. First, this follows employment; it does not replace it. Second, airlines have social media policies covering uniform, aircraft interiors, passengers and confidentiality, and breaching them is a disciplinary matter, not a growth strategy. Build visibility inside the rules, after you are hired.

Five myths worth dropping

The fourth row deserves emphasis. Because so many people believe the myth, there is a market in selling it back to them. No legitimate route to Emirates campaign work runs through paying a third party for access.

If you want both: a realistic plan

Suppose you genuinely want the job and the camera. That is a perfectly reasonable ambition, and there is a sequence that serves it.

1. Get hired as cabin crew. This is not step one of five, it is the gate. Everything downstream requires a staff number. Start with our guide to becoming Emirates cabin crew and check yourself honestly against the requirements.
2. Pass probation and build a clean record. Internal opportunities go to crew in good standing. Attendance, grooming and performance are the filter, and it is applied before anyone looks at a photograph.
3. Make your grooming genuinely consistent. Not spectacular on one day — reliable on every day. This is what makes you an easy, low-risk choice for someone assembling a shoot.
4. Watch for internal calls and answer them fast. They circulate to staff, they are often time-boxed, and most crew never respond at all. Simply replying puts you in a surprisingly small pool.
5. Say yes to the unglamorous content. Recruitment films, training material, event coverage, social series. This is where crew actually get seen, and it is where the people who later appear in bigger productions were first noticed.

Notice that steps two through five are all things you do as an employee. That is the shape of the real path, and it is why the first step carries all the weight.

An honest look at the odds

I would rather be straight with you than encouraging. The number of people who appear as the lead figure in a global Emirates campaign in any given year is, roughly, one. The number who appear in the airline's wider content — behind-the-scenes films, recruitment material, social series, event coverage — is far larger, and those are the realistic targets.

Meanwhile the airline hires cabin crew in the thousands; it set out to recruit 5,000 in 2024 alone. Put those two numbers next to each other and the sensible strategy becomes obvious. Chase the job, which is achievable and comes with a salary, a Dubai apartment and a visa. Treat any camera work that follows as a bonus you are now eligible for, rather than the thing you were aiming at.

And if the honest answer to "why Emirates?" turns out to be "because I want to be in the advert" — that is worth knowing about yourself before the interview, because you will be asked, and the actual daily job is long-haul flying, not photography.

Frequently asked questions

These come up in nearly every conversation I have about this topic. The thread running through them is the same: separate the celebrity contract from the acting role from the actual job, and the picture stops being confusing.