'WE LEAVE OUR EGOS AT THE DOOR'

Inside Liam Findlay's Yas Island playbook: Disney Abu Dhabi, 'Stranger Things' and UAE's pop-culture boom

- BY MANJUSHA RADHAKRISHNAN

Liam Findlay, CEO of Miral Destinations, doesn't bother with breakfast. Not because his schedule is packed, but because he wakes up in motion - ideas first, food later.

"I normally wake up with too many ideas in my head and don't have time to have breakfast," he laughs as he settles into our conversation. Intermittent fasting may be wellness culture's favourite fad, but for Findlay, imagination is the real fuel.

And Abu Dhabi has been dining well on it.

Over the past seven years, he has quietly - and at times audaciously - rewritten the entertainment DNA of the UAE capital. He has helped turn Yas Island into a global family destination, launched world-class attractions such as Warner Bros. World and SeaWorld Abu Dhabi, expanded Ferrari World and Yas Waterworld, and set in motion a Harry Potter-themed land. Most recently, he delivered two headline-making coups: a Disney experience coming to Abu Dhabi and a fully immersive Stranger Things: The Experience.

He says it with the calm of someone accustomed to steering billion-dirham dreams: "We're creating legacy. This is going to be a destination they'll talk about for the next 20, 30, 40 years."

If Findlay's children weren't impressed before, their father's cool quotient skyrocketed this year. Stranger Things: The Experience, which opened just as the show approaches its final season, is an IP coup for Miral - and a deeply personal one for him.

Stranger Things experience

"This is the first teenage-adult show we really watched together," he says. "Seeing it through their eyes is special, but they also get to see what my childhood was because Stranger Things is so much about that."