“I am not as old as sometimes I think myself to be,” Fawad Khan muses to me during our one-and-a-half-hour-long conversation. It’s a statement that stays with me later.

Fawad Khan — superstar, Pakistan’s favourite hero and indubitably one of the best-looking men in showbiz — is not old at all. Some would say, in fact, that he is at the pinnacle of herodom: suave, arresting, shedding the fripperies of college boy roles and flexing years of acting experience that add to his screen presence.

He may have not been seen in a full-fledged film or TV drama role since 2016, but Fawad has been visible in short spurts — the occasional cameo, the odd TVC — which have made one want to see more, much more of him.

This wish is about to get fulfilled with The Legend of Maula Jatt (TLoMJ), which stars him in the titular role along with a dazzling ensemble cast, about to release in cinemas.

Fawad Khan may not have been seen in a full-fledged acting role for years now, but he still has millions of fans and a single cameo appearance of his still throws Twitter into a tizzy. As he readies for the release of The Legend of Maula Jatt, how does the superstar keep himself grounded?

Coming back to the commentary on being old or not-so-old, Fawad Khan is most definitely an old soul. He’ll talk at length about the film industry of yore before digitisation took over. He’ll recall the “joy” of filmmaking back when only a limited number of takes could be shot on a film reel which would be seen on screen months later.

There’s an ageing ‘Yellow Pages’ dating back to 1997 curled up in a magazine rack in his home — Fawad tells me that he saw it in a bookstore and bought it because it brought back memories. He doesn’t like the internet much either, telling me that it only leads to him looking up information that is unnecessary and is a “waste of time”. The few posts that need to be uploaded on social media, usually announcing an upcoming project or a cause that he supports, are managed by his team.

His workspace is personalised, filled with books and artwork that he and wife Sadaf Fawad Khan have selected. It’s cheerful, comfortable, a place for work and for calling friends over, and not a showy celebrity meeting room at all.

Fawad is truly a far cry from the madding crowd of social media stars scattered around the world today.

And yet, this has not eroded his star power in any way. He has millions of fans. A single cameo appearance of his throws Twitter into a tizzy. And his carefully curated repertoire of work has a loyal following that is now waiting eagerly for TLoMJ to release.

I start off with the first question that comes to my mind: the movie has weathered such a long obstacle course, from legal complications to a Covid-19-induced lockdown. Does he still get anxious about its release, even though pre-booking of tickets in cinemas has already started?

“God forbid, no!” Fawad exclaims. “I think that there’s no stopping it now and October 13 is going to be a good day for us.”

Has he seen the complete movie yet? “I have seen it in pieces while going in for dubbing,” he says, “but after that a lot of changes have taken place as it has gotten finalised. So, no, I haven’t seen the final version. I’ll see it with everyone else in cinemas.

“Or maybe I won’t even see it then!” he laughs. “Maybe I’ll see it after I have heard the audience’s comments on it. I am excited, but I am equally nervous.”

Being ‘Maula’

This is a side to the actor that doesn’t always get seen. Fawad’s public appearances are few and far between. He rarely sits for interviews — my last on-the-record conversation with him was ages ago, and the only reason we are talking now, with my cellphone voice recorder on, is that an interview was inevitable with TLoMJ’s release merely days away.

His stance, from what I have understood, is that he prefers to let his work speak for itself rather than wax lyrical about it to the media. Regardless of his reasons, this distancing has lent him an elusive, superstar aura. Today, though, he has decided to speak about his upcoming movie and the others that will release soon afterwards and, also, about the anxiety and fear that plagues all actors.

At one point, he describes TLoMJ to be “the most ambitious project in recent Pakistani film history”, elaborating that it took about three years to shoot the movie in broken spells. However, the Pakistani box office has proven to be a volatile beast, with cinema-goers openly expressing their mistrust of local releases and many movies having recently flopped miserably. Does he feel that TLoMJ, a grand passion project with years of effort and a massive budget poured into it, is perhaps a tad too ambitious?

“That’s a question for the producer Ammara Hikmat and the director Bilal Lashari but, as an actor, I think that such movies need to be made,” he says. “The industry may be volatile, but there have been releases that have done well recently and there is also a lot of diversity.

“There have been movies by Wajahat Rauf and Ehteshamuddin that have had socially relevant messages, a feel-good movie such as Quaid-i-Azam Zindabad and then Humayun Saeed’s London Nahin Jaunga which exemplifies how Six Sigma is evolving with every new project. The Legend of Maula Jatt offers a new kind of masala to the mix.

“I think that it has all the ingredients that the audience will like. Yes, not every filmmaker is able to take the kind of risks that Ammara and Bilal have taken but, every now and then, you need a dhamaka [explosion] like this!”

I have seen The Legend of Maula Jatt in pieces while going in for dubbing,” he says, “but after that a lot of changes have taken place as it has gotten finalised. So, no, I haven’t seen the final version. I’ll see it with everyone else in cinemas.”

As the titular ‘Maula’, Fawad faced challenges of his own. For one, he had to master Punjabi. “And I was working with Hamza Ali Abbasi, Gohar Rasheed and Faris Shafi, three actors who were completely at ease with the language,” he recalls. “Hamza is such a great actor, with so much presence, and he would be saying these complicated Punjabi dialogues in a deep voice. As his nemesis, I would be facing him, and I would be thinking that, had the dialogues been in Urdu, perhaps I could have held my ground more easily!” he laughs.

But Maula’s voice is quite deep too, I interject. Based on the small snippets that I have seen in the trailer, Fawad’s warrior hero bellows quite well. He smiles wryly.

“Yes, I don’t know where that deep voice came from. I was very worried about whether I’d be able to speak Punjabi properly. I owe it to Bilal, Nasir Adeeb saheb [TLoMJ’s scriptwriter] and my co-actors for helping out. Even during dubbing, we would discuss whether we had gotten a certain accent right.”

So now he can speak Punjabi fluently? “No,” he taps his head with his finger, “it’s like it was there earlier and now it’s gone.”

For a moment we delve into the quandaries of releasing a movie in heavy Punjabi even though a considerable chunk of the audience may not be familiar with the language. “It’s a visually magnificent film and, even if you don’t understand the dialogues entirely, you’re able to appreciate them through the speaker’s tone and the imagery. I think the audience will be engrossed even if they don’t know the language.”

Then there was the daunting task of wielding the gandasa, the iconic axe-like staff which is Maula’s weapon of choice. “It weighed about five, six kilos, which is not extremely heavy, except that I had to use it with force, and swing it around like Gandalf!” he laughs, likening the fiery-eyed brawling Maula with Tolkein’s historic wizard.

“It was difficult and I would come back bruised here and there. We had a team helping us out of course, and we tried not to get hurt, but it was inevitable.”

But it was all worth it? He nods. “Yes, it was all worth it.”

Maula is also quite the horse-rider — apparently so is Fawad now, to some extent. “I somehow fluked my way through it,” he says self-effacingly, “but now I do go horse-riding off and on.

“The shoot itself was quite challenging,” he continues. “The weather was very unpredictable. There would be hurricanes and parts of the set would fall off and then they would have to be put together again. You would step out, completely ready, and the skies would darken and it would begin raining.”

An international team was flown in for the movie’s action sequences and Fawad and Hamza — Maula and his nemesis Noori Nath — practised their fights for three to four weeks before shooting.

However, the biggest obstacle to being Maula was one that Fawad and his team hadn’t foreseen. In order to truly epitomise the bulky, brawling hero, Fawad gained about 20kgs in a bit more than a month. The first spell of shooting, largely consisting of action sequences, wrapped up and, two days later, Fawad felt a searing pain which started from his back and moved towards the front of his body.

“I read a lot of medical journals and it has made me a hypochondriac and, somehow, I suspected that something may have gone wrong with my kidneys,” he says. “A friend suggested that I should get a few tests done and it turned out that my kidneys had stopped functioning. Thankfully, no permanent damage had been done, but I had to rest in bed for a few months after that.”

He continues: “We hear about actors in Hollywood undergoing immense physical transformations, but there is always a cost to pushing your body that far. I learnt this the hard way. There are some choices that you should only take after thinking things through.

“I will never do this to myself again,” he asserts. “Others can, should they want to. But I have a family to take care of.”

Had he ever tried to transform himself so completely for any other role in the past? “I did, for Khoobsurat,” he says, referring to the movie which skyrocketed him to fame in Bollywood. “I had wanted to be at my very fittest for the movie, and so I hit the gym regularly. But I had four, five months to work on my appearance back then. With Maula, I jumped from 80kg to about 100kg in a matter of weeks!”

Do Maula’s looks change later in the movie, in the scenes which were filmed once Fawad had gotten better? “No, my appearance remained the same for the next two years or so. It’s easy to gain weight, it’s difficult to lose it,” he grins.

The trailer hints at a layered, visually sophisticated movie but, sifting beyond the violence and passion that seems to be inherent to the story, are there also lighter moments to TLoMJ? “Yes, but they are mostly between Faris Shafi and Ali Azmat’s characters. They are amazing.”

It’s an amazing movie, isn’t it, I tease. “Yes, the amazing Maula Jatt,” he quips back. He further elaborates: “Everyone — Hamza, Mahira, Humaima, Gohar, Ali, Faris — have done such brilliant jobs. This movie is a reboot of the original Maula Jatt and there are layers to the characters. Noori Nath is Maula’s foe but there is also a backstory which explains what makes him the way he is, and why he is out for revenge. Noori’s character graph is particularly interesting. Maula has shades of his own.”

Will we be seeing plenty of the Fawad-Mahira romance, made eternal ever since the two entranced audiences in Humsafar? “There is romance, but the movie does not hinge on it,” he says. “I feel that it comes at the right time in the story and adds some much-needed elements to it.”

Beyond Jatts and Naats

I switch tack: will more of the two actors’ infamous chemistry be seen in the upcoming Neelofar, the movie which will mark Fawad’s debut as a producer and which features him and Mahira in lead roles?

“Mahira is brilliant in it. And yes, Neelofar is centred on a one-of-a-kind romance. Not that every movie doesn’t have its unique elements,” he adds, “but Neelofar tells its story in a very different way.”

When will it be releasing? “We’re looking at either the end of this year or the beginning of the next. It’s still getting finalised and we’ll only release it once we’re completely satisfied. I do want to talk about it more, but perhaps closer to its release.”

During the course of our interview, Fawad has told me about how he tries to stay true to the acting profession by asking for a retake if he isn’t satisfied with a scene. I am curious: is he even more particular as a producer, especially since he’s also simultaneously acting in the movie?

“You know, I had told my team not to make me act and produce together,” he says. “It can be difficult. As a producer, I’d like to think that I looked out for my team as far as taking care of all their needs was concerned, from food to their stay. Whatever comforts I like to have available for myself, I tried to arrange for them.”

But what about wanting to get a scene just right, no matter how many takes? “In that sense, I am a very difficult producer,” he smiles. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to work with myself!”

There’s also another movie of his which is primed to release in April next year — Faisal Qureshi’s directorial film debut Money Back Guarantee, a comedy with a huge star-studded cast. I observe that his upcoming movies all have such diversely different genres, ranging from heavy duty action to a sweeping romance to a laugh-a-minute heist story. Was it refreshing shifting to the comedy genre?

“Acting in a comedy is the most fun way to work,” he says. “You have to cry constantly in a tragedy — sometimes you have to sit on a grave and cry! And in a romance, you have to be tragic and emotional. But when you come back home after working in a comedy, you’re in such a good mood. If I could, I would love to keep working in comedies all the time.”

Of course, right before his cinematic releases began lining up, Fawad was seen in Disney’s Ms Marvel. His cameo may have been small but it was very well-noticed. Within hours, fans had come up with edited videos celebrating his appearance in an acting role after such a long time. How was the experience of working in Hollywood?

“Filmmaking is the same everywhere, more or less,” he muses. “Digitalisation has made the process of making a movie the same everywhere. The cast and the crew are relatively relaxed, because they know that they can shoot a scene many more times if they are not satisfied with the initial takes.

“In Hollywood, perhaps the pressure is a bit more, because they have huge crews and they are travelling to far-off places, which means that they can’t shoot a scene again and again. The economies of scale there are very different from that in Pakistan.

“In Hollywood and Bollywood, the process of filmmaking never stopped once it began. In Pakistan, unfortunately, there was a drought in the middle and everything stopped. We’ve had to learn to walk again and, finally, I think that we’re almost running now. Once we do, there won’t be much of a difference in the process of filmmaking in Pakistan or anywhere else.”

And will we be seeing him on TV again? He smiles and mumbles, “It takes the life out of me.” He elaborates: “Acting on TV is a really tough job. Cinema acting is too. Maybe if a good script comes along someday, you never know…” He trails off.

Life lessons

I revert to the “drought” that he had mentioned, which engulfed local cinema and affected the careers of many actors and filmmakers, including Fawad. His current lot of movies would have released long ago had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic. Working professionals everywhere, including actors, felt unsure about where their careers were headed in a new, socially isolated world order. Had Fawad also experienced these qualms?

“A lot of changes took place because of the pandemic and some were for the better, some for the worse,” he says. “I started preparing for TLoMJ back in 2016 and, from then till now, I haven’t seen my work. Sometimes, it did get frustrating. When I am in this profession, some of my professional work should be visible at least. I wondered if I was even good enough for it. Everything has its [shelf] life and I didn’t know if my time was up or not.

“I’ll give a crude example: when a man is given a death sentence, then a swift death is the easiest. If the wait for the punishment keeps getting prolonged, then it could either teach you restraint and patience or you could end up getting more and more sick every day. It’s the wait that will kill you, that’s what they say. So there were moments of reflection that I won’t talk about in detail but, ultimately, I came to the conclusion that what will come, will come. Life moves on.

“And for many, life is much more difficult than this. We are fortunate people. We live in a bubble, we go out and enjoy ourselves and not only do we have the basic necessities of life but we also have luxuries, in a country where we don’t deserve luxuries. This hits home especially now, when we are hearing tragic stories every day, of how a father of six had to save either his child from drowning or the cow that was feeding the rest of his family, of how entire families have lost their homes.

“All I am saying is that, yes, mental pain is real and while entertainment is not a necessity, it is a luxury that keeps life from getting drab. Still, the insecurities we suffer are nothing to cry about. You cry when you sleep at night hungry, when you’re literally scavenging and scrounging for food. We have to count our blessings.

“I can’t speak for my whole fraternity but I feel that, even if I am not successful, what’s the worst that would happen? People will say that Fawad Khan is not a good actor? I hope that if that happens, I am able to find some other way to carry on.”

Coming full circle to TLoMJ, he says, “But I do want this movie to be successful, because of all the people who have invested in it. I hope that they gain tenfold from it.”

Even in his moments of reflection, Fawad never succumbed to going on a signing spree, agreeing to whatever role that came his way in order to remain visible. Most of his peers confess to agreeing to mediocre roles just to remain relevant and Fawad’s reticence is something that is largely admired about him — several times, actors have cited him as an example to me during interviews. How does he manage this?

“I just try to not get consumed with the thought that I need to be seen, even though I might want to sometimes,” he says. “It’s scary. I have often wondered what draws people towards idolising a celebrity, what drives them crazy. I remember a time when I myself had Michael Jackson fever. The History DVD had been released and there were videos of fans crying and I’d be watching it at home, crying as well! It’s important to remember that one day you may be up there,” he motions with his hands, “and the next day you’ll be down there. I think that it’s made me more prepared.

“Also, here’s the layman’s expression: I am very lazy. I’d rather do one good project and reap the benefits of it,” he smiles. “There’s life outside the sets and I’d like to live it.”

There’s a lot of wizardly wisdom in his words, quite like Gandalf who he had mentioned to me earlier. And I think that perhaps Fawad has managed to somehow achieve the tenuous balance between the razzle dazzle of celebrity life and the down-to-earth quietude necessary for running a home and raising children — Fawad has three.

He’s a superstar, no doubt, but his feet are firmly on the ground. “This is how I save myself,” he tells me at some point. In a fickle world where success can be temporary, it’s a good strategy, even if you’re a superstar. Even if you’re Fawad Khan.

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 9th, 2022