Jordan is many different things and there's many different parts of it. We don't ever really get to see a modern Arab city, a part of the Arab world where people are seemingly living their lives like everywhere else and also just a part of the Arab world that's surprisingly Americanized, with fast-food joints everywhere and shopping malls. Over the 30 years I've been traveling there, I really saw it grow and become modernized and much more Americanized in a way that surprised me as an Arab-American.

From as early as I can remember, I wanted to have something to do with the acting business. I was a TV junkie as a kid and I think, because I grew up in a small town where I couldn't imagine myself staying there and couldn't see myself being any of the people that I was surrounded by in this town, I just knew that I wanted a different kind of a life, but I didn't know what that meant and I didn't know how.

Keep doing what you're doing no matter what anyone says. Defy your own doubt.

I discovered myself in the back-and-forth and in the hyphenated Arab-American way, and one of the things that I discovered was that I really didn't fit in anywhere. So in the US, I was considered an Arab - because I grew up in small-town Ohio - and in the Middle East, I was considered the American.

I was really inspired by my own experience, and specifically my own identity crisis but larger than that, I also wanted to explore the trend of reverse immigration, of the immigrant returning home after being in a host country or an adopted home for 20 years, and finding themselves at various levels of discord with the home culture. I wanted to explore people building lives across multiple geographies. I think that's, something that we're experiencing more and more as travel becomes easier, as people are traveling more for work. People can work from anywhere.

An interesting thing that I've learned is that "no" doesn't always really mean "no," it just simply means "not now."

When you step in to act, you just zoom way in on the longest possible lens and you're just totally in the point of view of your character and you have to forget about everyone else. You don't care about what anybody else is, what they want or what they're trying to do. You're just concerned with your circumstances, what you're trying to get out of someone or some scene.