Ayisha Issa
Ayisha Issa is an actor, born 1984.
A brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu explains a good deal of the early filmography. Issa is a Montreal actress and a serious martial artist who won at the IBJJF World Championships twice, in 2010 as a white belt and again in 2014 as a blue belt, and who once ran a dojo in Toronto. Her first credits are the ones that skill set gets you: Athletic Woman in Warm Bodies, a high priestess in Immortals, and Rayzah in Brick Mansions, a parkour action film that at least let her fight properly.
The Quebec work is where she stopped being a physical type. As Bouba in Unite 9, the French-language prison drama, she had a recurring character with an interior life rather than a stance, and it is the credit that changed what she was offered. Dark Matter followed, with Solara Shockley, and then Transplant, where June Curtis put her inside a mainstream medical drama, which is about as far from High Priestess Number Four as this job travels.
She has worked in games too, lending her voice to Ubisoft's Far Cry Primal and to Supermassive's The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan, neither of which is among the credits listed here. The through-line is a performer who can do the physical work and has spent a decade proving she is not confined to it.
Movies (6)
TV (4)
Where to start with Ayisha Issa
Unite 9 is the best of it if you can watch French-language television with subtitles: a prison drama with a large ensemble, and hers is one of the characters people remember from it.
For English-language work, Transplant is the most substantial, a medical drama with better writing than the format usually gets, and Dark Matter is the pulpier pleasure, space-opera television that finally handed her a proper character.
The action credits move quickly. Brick Mansions is where the martial arts training is visibly on screen, Polar is stylish, violent and extremely silly, and The Hummingbird Project is the change of pace, a small drama about fibre-optic cable and greed. Dark Match is the recent oddity, for anyone who wants wrestling and horror in the same film.