As a young actor, Turhan Bey enjoyed a series of roles in popular movies. Though the actor primarily played smaller parts in flicks like Shadows on the Stairs (1941) and Footsteps in the Dark (1941), it wasn’t until Bey began working with Universal Studios that he was finally able to spread his wings and play the sort of meatier roles he had been looking toward.

At the beginning of the 1940s, Bey worked on the horror film, The Mummy’s Tomb (1942). Bey starred as Mehemet Bey and acted alongside Lon Chaney Jr., who starred in the film as Kharis.

While looking back on his career, Bey admitted that The Mummy’s Tomb was his favorite film he had ever worked on. “I guess it’s my favorite because it was a part closest to my own nationality,” said the actor during an interview for Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946, written by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas. “It was a young Egyptian who believed in something which we couldn’t comprehend with our five senses... If I could have picked my roles, I would have played these kinds of heavies, people who have a mental quirk or who, for some reason or another, are acting against the positive side of the plot of the picture.”

Director Harold Young also enjoyed the addition of Bey to the cast. “He really was something,” said Young. “Ernie Westmore was the makeup man at Universal at the time...We restyled his hair and made a test of him. The women were crazy about him.”