“What I believe will make my acting career successful going forward is hard work. I like to challenge myself. Then it’s the people I meet and choosing the projects I want to work on correctly. There’s a lot of characters I can play.”

I dont see myself only as a Somali character. I think of myself as an actor, and if the job fits me and I like the story, I will go for it.

I left Somalia when I was seven years old, but I witnessed a whole year in a war.

I was lucky enough to have parents that took me out from country to country and go to school and learn how to be a better person.

The line was originally, ‘Captain Phillips, get a load of me: fancy-free on the seven seas,’ but I ad-libbed.

It is weird. A lot of people try to ask me political questions. Im not a politician.

When you work with a great director, you realise you are far from being a director.

I just want to keep acting and better my craft and see how far it goes.

There’s few things that get you over your own crap more than working hard.

lf. I wasn’t going to try too hard to conform, and I knew that it could possibly not work out.

You can march to your own beat. It’s so hard sometimes in our country because conformity is the way things are pushed.

Sometimes you’ll put something in and it will just die so hard that it’ll almost kill the movie.

I love factoids. It’s hard for me to keep those out. It just takes realizing that it’s stopping the character.

Writing is hard work, and if anything’s true about the process, it’s that fact that a good story is hard to find and even trickier to get on paper.

And be connecting in other countries with other people, did open them up and empower them and their sense of being. Whether it affected their writing, it’s hard to tell.

I take pride in my sports knowledge. I take pride in everything I do. It’s part of me.