Photography: Fayyaz Ahmed | Styling: Sajid Wahab | Co-ordination: Faisal Quraishi
I ask him if it gets hard for his family when he becomes detached from them and utterly involved in a character. “I don’t really have the option of getting detached,” he says. “I have a responsibility towards my family to be there for them. I have to go home and spend time with my parents. I also just got married recently. There’s a lot that I have to take care of and it’s helped me become more mature, a better person.”
Has his wife been able to adjust easily to being an actor’s wife? “It helps that she knew what she was signing up for,” says Feroze. “I have also been completely honest with her; about my past, who I am, who I want to be. She knows how my world works and she understands.
I’m in this profession because I love to act,” he professes. “I’m lucky that I’m appreciated for the work that I do and I hope to keep doing more, doing better. Having said this, I have never aspired to be a star. It’s said that for every rise there is a fall but if you never accept that you have risen, how will you ever fall?”
“However, I may be working in this business but my family isn’t. It makes me very angry when a public platform refers to my family in any way, even if it is as part of a joke.” He is, of course, referring to the recent Hum Style Awards where a random comment about him and his wife riled him. “I don’t usually take to Twitter to express my views but I was very angry. A certain protocol and respect needs to be given to family.”
His tweets inevitably qualified as ‘news’ on the multiple entertainment blogs currently cluttering the internet. “The blogs often have a lot to say about me and I have stopped keeping track,” he shrugs. “Also, very few of them get the news right. A lot of times my words are sensationalised and end up meaning something else entirely. They’ll put my name in the headline just in order to get more hits or pick excerpts from my interviews and twist them in false ways.”
He has had one such experience recently, when he was asked about his past liaison with actress Sajal Aly and, while he replied that they were simply ’friends’, his words were reinterpreted to imply that they were much more. “Fortunately, my family knows that all this is just part of the career that I have chosen. Social media is like this. There are no ethics to it.”
And yet, while many of his friends may have occasionally faced a backlash on the net, Feroze has so far been fortunate. “Yes, but I can’t say that I like social media just because I haven’t had a bad experience from it. It could be my turn next. How do I know that I’ll always land on the green side?
“The only upside to being connected on the internet is that I can interact with my fans. They have given me so much love and the least that I can do is reply to their comments and post pictures every now and then.”
Earlier this year, he also gave his fans the chance to have an insider’s look at his wedding when he included bloggers in the guest list. The dholkis, dances and wedding receptions were all floated out on to Instagram in great detail. If he is so averse to social media, what made him decide to open his wedding up for online viewership? “It wasn’t my decision,” he grins sheepishly. “I hadn’t initially invited any bloggers and, on the day of the valima, the last day of the wedding festivities, I was actually gritting my teeth when I met everybody. I was so tired of it all. But the fact is, I have two sisters, Humaima and Dua Malick, and they are both famous. They had gotten dressed up for their brother’s wedding and wanted to enjoy every day and, somehow, the social media fraternity was suddenly on the guest list.”
Speaking of his sisters, I ask him how it has been for him, growing up with a star in the house, Humaima Malick? “It meant that I never really got star-struck once I had grown up. She would take me everywhere with her because she knew that I enjoyed it. I’m also a great talker and I would end up befriending everyone and handling an uncomfortable situation if there were any. I admire Humaima a lot. She’s a brilliant actress — and Maula Jutt is going to make that very clear to the world.
“It’s so funny, the worst rumour that I have ever heard about myself is that I’m Humaima’s boyfriend,” he laughs. “This is how ridiculous media and the internet can get.
“It’s why I don’t usually give interviews. I pray a lot, try to keep my family happy, work hard and am blessed with the love of my fans. That’s enough for me. I don’t need to explain myself to people who may just sensationalise whatever I have to say. I don’t have a filter that censors me from saying something else. I’m very forthright with my opinions and this can lead to false stories about me.”
This is when he glances at my cell phone and asks, “Will you be writing everything that I’ve said?”
For the record, I haven’t. There’s a lot more to Feroze Khan, the young boy who has matured into a man, who has a lot to say but doesn’t like to say it just so he can trend on the net the following day. He seems almost to belong in a book somewhere when he tells me, “I just really want to be good, good at my work, good to everybody around me, good at my faith.”
This interview, then, is just a glimpse of him till the day he decides to go ‘on the record’ with a lot more.
Published in Dawn, ICON, December 23rd, 2018