You are an American, so you're hurt that other American citizens have been hurt, but you end up having to shoulder the shame for something that you don't even believe. There's a lot of years where Muslims have dealt with having to make themselves very small and not disrupt the flow and not - make sure that you're not noticed because, you know, deep down inside people are not really excited that you're around .

There was things just like not being able to date or - I'm talking like 15, 16 - like just certain things that my friends started to do. Like, they started to get phone calls from girls or like, you know, go and hang out 10, 11 at night, kind of going to the movies. There were just certain things that - it's not that I couldn't do all of those things. It's just that every choice was really deliberate and conscious and thought out and sort of balanced against the religion in a way where I felt - I wasn't necessarily trying to convert at 12 like [my mother] was.

My parents were kids when I was born. My mother was 16. My father was 17, and they got married in high school. And they split a few years later. When they split was when all that was happening also, and he - they were just coming into themselves. But they remained friends.

How do I transform and be believable as Krogstad in "A Doll's House" or Sir Peter Teazle in "A School for Scandal".

I think in some ways, I would go back home, and I didn't really quite fit in and couldn't - didn't have a person to bounce those experiences off of. So I felt a little bit trapped within me, and it made me feel lonely because I really couldn't - the things that were exciting to me, I couldn't really share those with another kid and that other kid understand that.

This is 2003, 2004. And then I started - after the Patriot Act, I would always get my financial packages in the mail and they would just be opened. And it was like, what is going on here?

When you graduate is when you start to find yourself looking at the information in the audition breakdown and it says tall black African - or African-American built such and such. And you start seeing these character descriptions and seeing that, oh, you're only going in for the ones that are described as your look.