We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jehan Muhammad. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jehan below.
Jehan, we’re so excited for our community to get to know you and learn from your journey and the wisdom you’ve acquired over time. Let’s kick things off with a discussion on self-confidence and self-esteem. How did you develop yours?
I developed my confidence and self-esteem by knowing early in life what my strengths and weaknesses were and from positive words of encouragement from my parents and teachers. Before I started making music, I had several academic achievements in school from kindergarten to 12th grade. I was very quiet and somewhat socially awkward and had a select few friends but also very popular because I was always recognized for receiving good grades and excelling academically, like A Honor Roll, The Deans List, The Principal’s List, Who’s Who Amongst American High School Students, AG (Academically Gifted) classes since 2rd grade and fluent in Spanish since I was seventeen years old. I was a star student that all of my teachers loved and school mates respected. Receiving constant accolades from my teachers, peers and parents for doing well in school boosted my confidence significantly. I’m a very inquisitive person. If it’s something that I don’t know and would like to learn more about, I do research. I was a bookworm and used to spend a lot of time in the library after school reading educational books on topics that my teachers weren’t teaching. I was a real nerd when I was child. I used to read the dictionary and encyclopedias. By the time I was nine years old, I had a very extensive vocabulary equivalent to a college graduate. Having a yearn for knowledge and desire to learn new things has also maintained my self-esteem and confidence. Being self-aware and knowing what your strengths are is very important in the entertainment industry because you will come across some people that will try to lower your self-esteem because they see you as a threat. I see this happen often to women more than men. Some people are really intimidated by an assertive, intelligent, confident woman that speaks her mind, knows who she is and what she wants. The more intelligent and confident a woman is, the more difficult it is to control and manipulate her whether in business or relationships. Sometimes when people recognize your greatness early on, they’ll try to dim your light and lower your self-esteem by rejecting you and trying to make you feel like you’re not good enough and undeserving of success. I learned to not take it personal because those are people that have very low self-esteem and are extremely insecure with themselves, so they try to project their insecurities onto you. Anyone that tries hard to bring you down is already beneath you anyway. Some people are too narrow minded to understand your vision and value. That’s why you must really know yourself, your value and worth, what you’re capable of and have a lot of confidence in yourself. I know myself and what I’m capable of. I have a lot of hidden skills and talents that a lot of people don’t know about. Only people that actually know me well or take the time to get to know me, are aware of them. My parents are mostly responsible for instilling a lot of confidence in me by always using positive words of encouragement towards me since I was a child. They always told me that I could do anything that I put my mind to, so I’ve always believed that. Even when others didn’t believe in me and tried to kill my dreams and self-esteem, I still never stopped believing in myself.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m an artist and actress originally from North Carolina. I started rapping when I was a teenager and it’s been something that I love to do for a very long time. After doing it for nearly twenty years without any financial success, I decided to try something different where I could still express my creativity and use my passion which is writing, in a different form. I started working as a background actress in the spring of 2021. Two months after I started, I decided to make it my full time job. In 18 months I worked on over 30 productions in mainstream film and television. Acting really gave me the social life that I never had since I been in Atlanta. I never been into night clubs and parties so it was hard for me to make new friends and network with other creatives. Working in the film industry allowed me to find my tribe and meet so many talented people and celebrities. That’s what I like about acting in comparison to music. My music journey was always very lonely. I always wrote and recorded all my songs by myself. You can make a song by yourself but you can’t act by yourself. It requires other people to be in the scene with you. Acting allowed me to be around positive, supportive, artistic and creative people like myself. Even though background actors don’t have any speaking lines, you’re still there on the set interacting with tons of people, sometimes ten, sometimes 200. It really brought me out of my shell and gave me my life back after going through some very dark moments and the most painful, toxic and draining relationship of my life. It helped me heal in many ways.
I don’t think you can compare acting to music because they are structured differently. The music industry is very divided in my opinion, especially hip hop and that’s one thing that I began to hate about it. It’s everyone for themselves. It’s even more divided if you’re an independent artist and don’t have friends that are artists and serious about making music. Everyone does their own thing and creates with their producer, engineer, band or whomever they work with. Unless another artist takes the initiative to reach out to us, then a collaboration will never happen. Some artists limit themselves to their crew and never embrace the idea of working with someone that hasn’t made it as far as they have yet, which is very ignorant and prejudiced because at one point they were a beginner also. If anything, they start to view that artist as a competitor and not a potential collaborator. There’s no competing in acting. Acting is more collaborative and gives a much stronger sense of unity and feeling of community. I don’t think anyone is judging or looking down on anyone else for not being as experienced as them and being a beginner. No one’s calculating who’s more successful than the next person. We’re all there together for the same reason. Whether you’re a principal or background actor, you still play a role in helping tell the story and bringing a vision to life and that’s the whole purpose. Everyone’s role is significant, no matter how big or small. You can’t film a mall scene, street scene, concert, or sporting event without people in the background setting the atmosphere and making it appear realistic. The film industry really feels like one big family. Everyone works together and is supportive of each other. We all know each other because we’ve all worked together at least once. Acting was very welcoming to me. I think people felt it was refreshing, impactful and groundbreaking to see a Muslim actress in hijab on screen. You’re more appreciated and valued for the fact that you showed up being your authentic self, especially since a hijab wearing actress never showed up in Hollywood before. I felt it should have been done much sooner than 2021. In acting, there’s a role and character for everyone. If it exists in the real world, then it can exist on screen. You can be a midget, amputee, eighty years old, morbidly obese, have piercings and tattoos, etc., there’s a character for you to play. If there isn’t one, then you can create one. Everyone is fully aware of who they are and knows that what they have to offer is different from someone else, so everyone is just there having fun together and being themselves. No one is comparing themselves to the next actor and creating petty beefs like in hip hop. Becoming a successful hip hop artist can be very difficult if you’re a woman, making positive music and don’t have a dedicated team behind you. If you’re a woman without a sexual image, people really don’t want to hear what you have to say and that’s sad but true. The successful male rappers that we consider the “gatekeepers” of hip hop, some are greedy, money hungry, sexist misogynist and will never give you any real opportunities or support you because they really don’t want to see a woman win at what they consider a male industry. Some feel like they can’t support more than one female artist. People really don’t see your value and you’ll end up wasting a lot of time and money putting out music that people never support, not making a living from your craft and stuck at a 9 to 5 job that you really don’t want to be at. After an extended amount of time, you get tired of dealing with all the politics in the music industry and people sabotaging you. It really starts to become exhausting, stressful, and depressing, and very expensive if you don’t produce your own music. As an independent artist, it’s very overwhelming for one person to do everything by themselves, being the artist, A & R, and manager while also maintaining a full-time job to provide for yourself. Last year, I finally gave myself closure and learned to not take it personal for not being appreciated or recognized for my music contributions as an artist. There are so many talented artists and musicians, male and female, worldwide that never get signed to major labels or given the opportunity to make a living from their music. Instead of wasting more money, time, and years of my life, I decided it was finally time to do something different that would fill a void in the film industry and create a new lane since no one else was doing it.
Writing has kept me sane and been an outlet for me my whole life. It’s my preferred method of self-expression and where I find solace and peace. I love to write poetry, songs, blog posts, letters, texts, etc. literally any and everything. I wrote my first short skit in 2021 which was something I did just for fun to practice with another background actress. After that, all of these ideas and characters began to come to me and I decided to write more of it. Even though I’ve been a writer my whole life, I’ve never written scripted dialogue for fictional characters, a plot, etc. so it’s a challenge but also very fun and exciting to develop the characters and build this world because it’s a new experience for me. I love to challenge myself. Once I get an idea and vision about something I become obsessed with it. I have a very broad and vivid imagination. Right now, I’m in the learning phase when it comes to a lot of things and doing as much research as possible about film and television because I’m still an amateur and have so much to learn. I want to make sure I’m doing everything correctly, like is the script in the correct format, etc. It’s not like writing a song so I’m trying to gain as much knowledge as possible while also learning from people that have been successful in what I’m trying to do. I feel that if I stay patient, humble, fully focused and dedicated that I can get there also. Some of the famous actors that I’ve worked with started off as background actors just like myself. Some of them also made the same transition as me from music to acting so we share similar journeys. Creating a series requires a lot more extensive work and dedication as the writer than auditioning for a role to play a character that someone already created for you. The hardest part is finding good actors that believe in my vision and funding for the production. I know to some people it may seem a bit overly ambitious on my behalf for someone with less than three years of acting and film experience and without ever taking any acting classes but I am completely confident in my vision and dedicated to bringing it into fruition. I feel like I’m the only person that can build this specific world, write this specific story and play my character. I’m all about embracing constant growth, competing with myself, breaking barriers, creating diversity and being innovative in all that I do. That’s what I look forward to doing with this new project that I’m working on. People that aren’t creatives and some that are don’t realize that things take time, especially in the film industry. On average, it takes one to two years after filming before a production is released to the public. I’m not allowing anyone to rush my process though.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The three most important qualities that have been most impactful in my journey are perseverance, self-reliance, and the ability to reinvent myself. Persevering through all the negativity from people that have tried to deter and distract me and kill my dreams over the years is what has gotten me thus far on my journey. Many people lose sight of their vision and goals because of relationships, negative family members discouraging them, addictions, mental illness, incarceration, etc. Everyone is not built the same to keep pushing and moving forward through adversity. I’ve had to overcome a lot of obstacles and hard times all by myself, recover from several setbacks, and remove a lot of negative, unsupportive people from my life including relatives to get to where I am today.
In this day and age and this economy it’s wise to develop as many skills, talents, education and information as possible. The more skills that you develop the more versatile you are and the more opportunities you attract. I’ve been overlooked by people in the music industry that heard my music and knew what I was doing for many years. I didn’t just pop up overnight as an artist. I’ve been releasing music online for the past ten years and even prior to that I was releasing music physically in my hometown that wasn’t on the internet. For many years, several people have told me that they loved my music and thought I was dope and talented and not to give up. I kept receiving a bunch of compliments from people for 15+ years but never any lucrative opportunities, and we all know compliments don’t pay bills. That’s when I decided to take matters into my own hands and reinvent myself and try something different where I could still be creative and have fun. Reinventing yourself, starting over and trying a different path can sometimes work in your favor and lead you to an even bigger blessing than what you originally hoped for. Someone had to be the First Hijab Wearing Actress on Disney, Netflix, BET, and in major Hollywood films and I guess that person was supposed to be me. Making history to be known forever as a pioneer and the first Black Hijabi Actress to appear in a Marvel Movie and DC Comics movie, I feel is an accomplishment that will always outweigh anything that I could ever do musically. I am completely grateful and glad that I went with my intuition and followed my instinct to try a different path.
There aren’t many celebrities where I’m from. It’s a big deal for my family and people that I grew up with seeing me in major box office movies and on TV. A lot of them have never been outside of North Carolina their whole life. To say they know Jehan Muhammad is something probably inspiring to them and hijab wearing women as well.
Being self-reliant has allowed me to create my own lane for myself in the film industry where one really didn’t exist. There’s a lot of snakes in the music industry. People will sell you dreams and tell you what you want to hear with no real intentions of honoring their word or following up with any actions, and then disappear and you’ll never see or hear from them ever again. Their only goal is to waste your time and leave you waiting on them to make themselves feel important and needed. It can become very disheartening and frustrating, especially when you’ve worked hard nearly your whole life towards manifesting something only for someone to waste your time and play immature games with you. I’ve never been the type of person to sit around and wait on people. I take the initiative to do things for myself and by myself to create my own opportunities. Sometimes rejection is protection. People that never honor their word in business are unprepared, unprofessional people with poor communication skills that you wouldn’t want to do business with anyway. I invest the time and effort myself into making things happen on my own regardless of who is or isn’t on board with me. One monkey doesn’t stop the show. The thirty major productions I worked on as a background actress, I booked all those gigs myself without an agent. Never place expectations on people and expect anything from anyone because people will usually leave you disappointed. You really can’t sit around waiting for a team to help you or for people to support and believe in you. You will wait forever. In the meantime, you have to do things by yourself until help arrives. You have to become your own biggest fan and cosign yourself. One door closes and another one opens. I never view anything as a loss, only as a lesson and redirection to a bigger blessing.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
I’m looking to collaborate with other actors for a project that I’m developing. I also would like to do skits that aren’t relative to my own project. I’m open to any and all film collaborations including lead roles, supporting roles, writing shorts and skits, and directing. I have fully focused all of my energy now on acting, directing and writing with no plans of recording any new music. I can always be reached through my website jehania.com and Instragram: @jehanmuhammad333
Contact Info:
- Website: jehania.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/jehanmuhammad333
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/jehania333
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jehan-muhammad-679515b5/
- Twitter: twitter.com/jehania
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@jehanmuhammad
- Other: jehania.blogspot.com
Image Credits
Jehan Muhammad
