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-a-half 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-out-of-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 returns after a short hiatus on May 28 and will air at 10 p.m. ET. 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 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 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.”
HBO traces the life of George Carlin
A documentary on the controversial comic George Carlin premieres on HBO Friday, with Part 2 airing on Saturday. The show, titled “George Carlin’s American Dream” will also stream on HBO Max. Carlin’s comedy was so on-target that it still resonates with us today. The documentary will chronicle his upbringing in New York, his confrontation with drugs, battles with the law and his 36-year marriage to his first wife.
When I spoke with Carlin shortly before his death in 2008, he told me, “I began to realize how I do this (comedy) and got way, way better at it ... I began to realize that the problem for most comedians was that by making fun of segregationists or racists they were placing themselves at the center of the problem. I realized that he (the comedian) had a side to take, that he was against that, so he was FOR something.
“I saw it in myself. The solution is to really be outside this thing, because if you think there's a solution, you’re still part of problem. I say if you say ‘there are no solutions,’ you can get outside of it by maybe 100,000 light years and view it and say, ‘Isn’t this a delightful comic dance!’ People like to think of it as a human tragedy. It's a joke, folks, ‘cause we're here for absolutely no reason.”
Documentary prowls our prehistoric planet
Naturalist David Attenborough will not be stalking the steamy jungle or the tracing the icy wastes of the north pole, this time he’ll be where every 10-year-old boy would Love to be. Attenborough will be traveling back 66 million years to see what life was like when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. “Prehistoric Planet” is the latest animated documentary to explore the ancient world where we’ll meet two new dinosaur species and learn more about these exotic creatures that prowled this long-ago terrain. The series premieres next Monday on Apple TV+ and will stream each night through May 27.
Composer Hans Zimmer will, once again, trace the proceedings with a haunting score. Known for his soundtracks for “The Lion King,” “Rain Man,” “The Dark Knight” and “Dune,” Zimmer tells me he always longed to be a musician, though it troubled his mother, who wanted him to choose a more stable career.
But he was stubborn, he says. “I wrote music for a small movie in England called ‘A World Apart,' a really great movie, and Barry Levinson’s wife saw it. And she bought Barry the CD and he temped the music into ‘Rain Man.’ And Barry showed up one day in London and said, ‘Look, I'm a Hollywood director and I'm doing this movie with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, would you like to do it?’ Barry was very unsure because he thought I was only interested in doing these European art movies and thought I wasn’t going to say yes to him. I came over, did ‘Rain Man’ and left, thinking that would be it. And got a nomination for it straightaway. So I came back for that week, and met Ridley Scott, and he offered me ‘Black Rain,' and I met the Zanucks and they offered me ‘Driving Miss Daisy.’ And now I was busy! For years I was saying ‘I live in London.’ Then I realized I’d spent three days there.
Buffalo soldiers celebrated on the History Channel
The History Channel is fixing to tell the real story of Black heroes who helped America stretch its Western boundaries and protect the nation on foreign soil. “Black Patriots: Buffalo Soldiers,” premieres on May 31, the day after Memorial Day. The one-hour documentary follows these peacetime regiments whose bravery and resilience paved the way for other African Americans to join and succeed in the military.
The film is narrated by actor Blair Underwood, the son of an Army colonel himself. Underwood says his father’s service was critical in his development. “I was an Army brat so we moved every two years,” he tells me. “So I think part of going in and out of different communities and schools and neighborhoods — being the perpetual ‘new kid’ on the block — that forced me, in a way, to really study and analyze the community I was stepping into, and out of, and back into another one,” he says.
“I grew up kind of shy, but I think it does one of two things: it either makes you introverted or it makes you extroverted. It makes you learn. You develop a skill of how to reach out to people, to introduce yourself. Because otherwise I found I would kind of recede into the woodwork. I see both sides of it. My older brother would always tease me for being shy. ‘Stop being so shy. Speak up.’ And I could because he was older, and he would take the lead so I could just take that position.”
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