I never wanted to accept that. And so I have always fought against that in some way, shape or form and had - I've had people who have supported trying to get me in for things that were beyond the character description.

At the end of the day we're all spirits having a physical experience.

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 .

In my time at St. Mary's College, drifting out of sports because it was something that began to feel really finite. And I could see that I didn't have the passion to sustain a career in sports.

It was really a focus on how to in some ways keep moving in this direction towards something that allowed me to express myself in a way that sports didn't.

I got into [acting] so late because of sports. And then when I was in grad school, I sort of got lulled into basically forgetting I was black, in - meaning that everyone you play at a conservatory, 95 percent of the characters are non-black.

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.