As 13-year-old Aizzah Fatima stands in the Starkville High School auditorium, ushering a production of “A Thousand Cranes,” she is just expecting extra credit for her eighth grade fine arts class.

She leaves with so much more — a life-changing experience that instills in her a love of the performing arts that continues today.

The play, based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata, follows a 13-year-old girl born in Hiroshima, Japan years after the city was ravaged by an atomic bomb. It details her battle with cancer, which ultimately claimed her life.

“Her wish is to live, so her friend tells her if she makes 1,000 paper cranes and makes her wish, it will come true,” Fatima said, getting emotional recalling the memory. “So, she starts making them, but of course she dies while she is making them and she never finishes and so her friends make them for her. It’s this beautiful story and I remember watching it and I was so moved. I had never seen anything like it.”

That moment at SHS set Fatima on an acting journey that most recently found her in millions of American living rooms in prime time.

After about a dozen auditions that didn’t pan out, she landed a guest role on the NBC program “New Amsterdam,” which aired Jan. 17.

“I have been auditioning for that since the first season,” she said. “I’d gone in about a dozen times or so for various parts. I was so excited to just get this one I got, which was very meaningful in a way. It was the finale.”

The show follows Dr. Max Goodwin, who becomes the director of New Amsterdam Hospital and turns it on its head by overcoming bureaucracy to provide exceptional care.

The role Fatima secured was of a doctor in a flashback to 1988. She has an encounter with a young Goodwin, which sets him on the path to becoming the caring individual he is.

In a way, Fatima was playing a role similar to the one Paula Mabry holds in her story.

Mabry, Fatima’s drama teacher at SHS, knew from the start there was something special about her.

“You can see a person when they’re in the 10th or 11th grade and know a lot about whether or not they’re talented at that point,” Mabry said. “Or if they have that factor that is going to make them memorable on stage. … She had it! You can see that when they’re that young even.”

Mabry recalled being overjoyed to see her on “New Amsterdam” and seeing the girl she had mentored living up to her potential because acting was not always the path Fatima saw for herself.

A ‘real’ job
Being from a family that immigrated from Pakistan, there were certain pressures that hindered her from pursuing it as a career. Acting wasn’t considered a stable career path.

“Honestly, it was just hard,” Fatima said. “It’s just really hard, being a child of immigrants, you’re just taught to do the responsible thing and get a real job. So, I think this whole idea of, ‘How do you make money?’ was because all I had ever seen was community theater and there is no money in that.”

So after graduating with a computer science degree at Mississippi State University, she moved to New York in 2001 and began working for Google as an ads engineer. But she couldn’t escape the feeling she had a different calling in life.

“I thought I was going to work in computers and for a while I was working at Google,” she said. “But I just had this love of theater that was instilled in me while I was in Starkville, with the drama teachers that I had there, Donna Luther Wright and Paula Mabry. … I just started taking classes on the side for fun. I took Intro to Acting and an improv class at New York University and that just kind of led me down this whole path.”

At first, she continued working at Google during the day and going to school at night to hone her talents. In 2014, she left Google to pursue acting full-time.

A long journey
It was not an easy road though.

She soon found that roles for people of color were few and far between. So she decided to make one for herself.

“I started auditioning for very off, off, off Broadway stuff, and to be honest, as a person of color, there really weren’t any roles meant for me,” she said. “I took a writing class and I developed a solo show. It’s a comedy called ‘Dirty Paki Lingerie,’ about the American Muslim Pakistani female identity, and it kind of took off around 2014.”

She has been touring with this show for almost a decade, and though she is considering retiring it soon, it aided in her broader discovery.

A film director attended one New York performance, approaching Fatima afterward and asked about turning her show into a feature film, which she jumped at the chance. She said she recently found out that Sony Pictures has picked the film up for distribution.

The exposure has paid off. A 2012 bit role in “The Good Wife” highlighted her acting credits until late last year, when roles became more frequent, all leading up to her biggest role yet in “New Amsterdam.”

In September 2022, she had a spot as a medical examiner on “Law and Order.” A few weeks ago, she appeared on “Blue Bloods” as a liquor store clerk.

With this hard-earned success, Fatima is confident in her career change. She still hasn’t forgotten where she started.

“I do have to say, I just accrued this love of the arts, and it all happened in Starkville,” she said.