Baltimore Sun

Haq feels ‘fortunate’ to have won ‘Transplant’ role twice

- By Luaine Lee

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 says. “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. 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, 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.”

Haq is the youngest of four, and his 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 lowbrow 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 returns after a short hiatus on May 28. 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 Canadawide 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 fourmonth 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 had 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 six-month 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 now 5 years old, and while he’s not married to her mother, he says, “… 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.”

 ?? YAN TURCOTTE/NBC ?? Hamza Haq plays a Syrian doctor who has fled his war-torn homeland for Canada in “Transplant.”
YAN TURCOTTE/NBC Hamza Haq plays a Syrian doctor who has fled his war-torn homeland for Canada in “Transplant.”

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