“She is keeping it locked.

“I wasn’t going to hide it just because I’m on TV,” the Nigerian star told People. “I’m grounded in who I am.”

And to show just how much she is dedicated to keeping her virginity, she created a clothing line to promote abstinence. “I have a clothing company called Rock Your Stance, and we sell shirts that say ‘Keeping it locked till I get that rock’,” she said, adding, “Entertainment chose me. Before any of this happened, I sat down with myself and with God. I said, ‘I know why I’m here. It’s to make you proud.’”

Yvonne Orji went further to speak about her career as an actress, adding that her parents, like most Nigerian parents, wanted her to be a doctor.

“It sounded noble,” she said. “But then I took organic chemistry and I was like, ‘Well, maybe not.’ I ended up getting my master’s degree in public health and then working in war-torn Liberia to stall from crushing my parents’ hopes and dreams.”

She continued, “’It would take me eight years to become a doctor, but give me eight years to make it in entertainment,’” she recalled telling her family. “And I’m happy to say, I did it in seven!”She did it, and is promoting abstinence until marriage.

Orji emigrated to the U.S. from Nigeria at age 6. “It was the traditional immigrant story of my parents wanting the best for us and bringing us here,” she says. But life in Maryland wasn’t always easy.

“I was bullied because I have this thick Nigerian accent,” she recalls. “My mom would say, ‘We didn’t come to America for you to be popular.’ Which is fair, but as a kid, you’re just like, it would be really nice to have this thing that everyone else has.”

Later, after graduating with a master’s degree in public health from George Washington University, Orji says she shocked her family (who had always hoped she’d be a doctor), by announcing she wanted to move to New York to pursue stand-up comedy.

– NAN