‘Fortunate’ Hamza Haq reprises starring role in ‘Transplant’
Actor Hamza Haq had always liked performing. But it was his first job, while he was still a university student, that sealed his fate. “I sat in an office and looked at Excel documents all day,” he recalls. “They gave me 40 pages of information about payroll and they said, ‘I need you to consolidate this and compile an Excel spreadsheet.’”
Haq was working for the cargo security unit at the Canadian border service agency in his adopted country. “I did the job in about two-and-ahalf weeks, and they said that was actually a six-month-long project. So I told my superiors I needed an office to pray in, so they gave me a corner office ... so having a corner office, I closed the blinds and slept all day. I felt so bad. I was surrounded by people who were counting down the years to retirement,” he says.
“I felt like I was working in my grave .... Those people have a great work-life balance. I don’t have a great work-life balance. I work all the time and that’s to the detriment to those I love, but if I wouldn’t be doing it I wouldn’t feel as fulfilled as I do now.”
That job in Ottawa was so cloying that Haq decided to chuck it all and head for Los Angeles to see if he could make it as an actor. That was a seismic change for Haq, a devout Muslim who was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents. His father, an engineer, worked in Saudi Arabia for 25 years but decided to move to Canada so his children could attend university.
When Haq confided to his parents that he wanted to be an actor their reaction surprised him. “My dad said, ‘Let’s not talk about this dropping-outof-school business because a degree in my household is not negotiable.’ He said, ‘If you’d told me earlier, I would’ve sent you to a school in England or Los Angeles or New York and you could’ve gotten a degree in acting.’ So my father has been very supportive in this goal because he didn’t have the luxury of choice growing up. He just wanted us to be educated.”
He’s the youngest of four and Haq’s mother wasn’t so flexible. “My mom comes from a more scientific and military background ... so hers is a more traditional approach to education. We were all supposed to be doctors or lawyers or engineers, but that entire thing is based around stability — not that she thinks acting’s a low-brow profession — it’s just that she just wanted to make sure that I survived.”
Haq has survived all right. In fact, he may not be a doctor, but he plays one on NBC’s “Transplant,” which recently returned from hiatus and airs at 10 p.m. Saturdays. Haq plays a Syrian doctor who has fled his war-torn homeland for Canada, where he tries to apply his skills in an alien environment. It’s a juicy role that Haq won, then lost, then won again. When he first read for the part, he was cast. “Then there was a conversation about how they should do their best to find a Syrian actor,” he says.
“I lost the part, and I was written out. And then they did a Canada-wide search for somebody of Syrian descent who could do the part. I always say I’m very fortunate that they didn’t find him because he’s out there, but it was a four-month turnaround period that they needed to find this guy. They just couldn’t find him, so they asked me to read again. I read, and I got the part again.”
This proved doubly fortunate because, though he’d starred in the Canadian series, “Mistakes Were Made,” “The Indian Detective” and the hit “This Life,” Haq had decided to quit acting.
“I was in one of my existential crises and I’d quit the industry for about six months just to focus on myself,” he says. “And I thought I was doing it to better my career: ‘You need to slow down, you need to take better care of yourself’ and I thought, ‘OK, you’ll come of out this a better actor.’”
But, once again, destiny intervened. “Within that sixmonth period is when I found out I was going to become a father and realized that that break was divine intervention to prepare me for one of the most important things I was going to do in my life: it was to just be a better man for somebody else.”
His daughter is 5 years old now and while he’s not married to her mother, he says, “There were a lot of times out there for me to be a good man, and I wasn’t living my life to the potential I could have and maybe that was harmful or damaging to those around me. And I could be better. And in the wake of finding out that somebody was going to be looking up to me as an example there was a lot of things I had to address and rectify, and it was a growing process. I continue to work on it, and it’s just a wonderful north star, this journey, because at one time I just wanted to be the best actor, but that pales in comparison to my desire to be the best man that I can be for my child.”