# 10 Psychotherapist Turned Actor on Fitting in, Coming Out & Creativity During COVID | Nuno Queimado

Our guest today is Nuno Queimado, a professional actor and acting teacher.  But his journey to get there was far from linear. Nuno made the difficult decision to pursue a degree in psychotherapy, rather than the more traditional and personally appealing path of becoming an engineer. As part of his training to become a psychotherapist, he of course had to undergo psychotherapy himself.  Through the experience of having his own therapist and learning to process his deeper emotions, feelings and experiences, he uncovered a life changing desire: he wanted to be an artist, and specifically, he wanted to do musicals. He shifted courses quite dramatically and moved to London where he joined a theater group and learned musical theater.  Despite being several years behind his peers, he went all in and eventually made it, and in 2018 he landed the Alternate Lead role of Hamilton in the critically acclaimed and multi-award winning Broadway musical, Hamilton, which (up until the pandemic) he has been performing in London's West End. On today’s episode, Nuno shares about how growing up in Portugal and learning to be a social chameleon left him feeling lost and disconnected from his own experience.  He shares his story of coming out o the closet as a gay man and how his work now centers around the power of creative expression to spread love, joy, empathy and connection.