About six minutes into the conversation, actor Shuja Asad stops in the middle of a sentence. He’s talking about Joaquin Phoenix and wanting to bring a little of his seriousness to Pakistani television. Quite suddenly, he asks if someone can close the door.
The PR coordinator, hovering nearby with a tray of snacks, gets up and shuts it. Shuja waves at the food. “Eat, please,” he insists. He won’t touch it himself, though. Over the next 90 minutes, it becomes clear that this isn’t a one-off gesture. He always makes sure everyone else goes before him.
Shuja, 31, has spent the last two years playing men who are hard to love. There was the evil playboy in Ae Ishq-i-Junoon (AIIJ), the traumatised mountain villager in Khaie and the young man dealing with male assault in Tann Mann Neelo Neel (TMNN).
This year, ARY Digital’s Dr Bahu, directed by Mehreen Jabbar and written by Sanam Mehdi Zaryab, made him something we rarely get to see on Pakistani television: a heartthrob people could fall for without worrying. It didn’t last long, though, because in the episode that was aired after this interview, Salman Shahnawaz, the character Shuja plays, turned kind of villainish.
It’s easy to forget that the confidence of the actor with four overlapping hit projects — Ae Ishq-i-Junoon, Tann Mann Neelo Neel, Khaie and now Dr Bahu — is fairly new. Before it, there was a slew of rejections and typecasting and a feeling he was in Disneyland. So why does he still feel uncomfortable with fame and want to delete his Instagram?
