Transplant
Season 1 SABC3 (*193) 21:00 Drama
Keeping secrets at work is a bad thing because somehow they always come out and there’s trouble. Rather than tell anyone that she’s dating a hospital security guard, Dr June Curtis (Ayisha Issa) has hidden it and it’s stressed her to no end, says Ayisha. “She’s a trauma surgeon. She can handle stress. But it’s her heart that she’s worried about as she’s kind and caring, and she doesn’t want to get anyone into trouble, not least her love interest.” And while the Canadian actress can sympathise with her character, Ayisha is quick to say that “I’m tougher. I can handle anything that’s thrown my way.”
The 37-year-old has trained in martial art Brazilian Jiu-jitsu for over 20 years. She holds a brown belt and says that it’s the best thing she’s ever done. “I won my age category twice at the International Brazilian Jiujitsu Federation World Championships (in 2010 and 2014),” says Ayisha.
She also owns a Jiu-jitsu training dojo in Toronto called 4Points. “We called it that because there are four points or phases of Brazilian Jiujitsu – Survival, Defence, Control and Offense,” explains the actress.
Ayisha is also a stuntwoman and was cast in various roles for the 2019 X-Men sci-fi movie Dark Phoenix. Her stunt work got her noticed by videogame studio Ubisoft, who hired her to not only voice characters in their Assassin’s Creed franchise, she also did the motion capture work for the characters’ movements.
She says that the two worst jobs she’s had was working as a model and as a hotel clerk. “I was too bulky for modelling, and at the hotel some guy got out of hand and I got fired for beating him up,” says Ayisha.