On one of the roads connected to Secretariat Chowrangi on New M.A. Jinnah Road in Karachi, sits a house as old as time. It is like a superficially maintained distant memory from a great grandparent’s sepia-toned photo album, where the oil paint peels off walls in chunks, the windows are barricaded with long-rusting iron bars, and the dank smell of seepage from concrete walls invades the nostrils.

In one of this house’s cramped rectangular room swayed Sonya Hussyn, belting left and right hooks on her trainer’s punching mitts.

Winded and perspiring, Sonya’s feet skidded on the ground as she rocked and reeled from her temporary opponent. The trainer urged her to throw punches directly at him without holding back — he could take it, he told her. She met his terms, blow after blow.

Her gaze pierced into the man as she tuned out the assemblage of the production crew who had lined themselves in the crevices of the cream-coloured walls.

As she demonstrates with her new film Daadal, the actor is particularly into playing edgy characters. But what impact do her roles have on her personality in real life?And could they be a reason there are so many stories about her di! cult nature on sets?

The young actress (she’s 27 and not 29, as one article incorrectly stated) was getting pumped up for a fight scene in Daadal, her new film running in cinemas right now, where the actress plays a vendetta-driven contract killer with a penchant for boxing, who hails from a fictitious version of Lyari.

Before long, Sonya was dashing up the staircase lit by garish red bulbs, tearing into goons.

A kill here, a kill there, bodies fell back and toppled over, while the cinematographer and steadicam operator (Asrad Khan and Faraz Alam) tried to frame the shots without capturing the shadows of the crew sitting in the veranda below. By the time it took to rehearse a shot, the sequence was “in the can” (ie. done and over with).

Daadal’s shoot — like most of director Abu Aleeha’s works — was on a tight schedule, but Sonya wasn’t worried…too much.

Even though she plays the lead (the character’s name is Haya Baloch), Sonya only had a 15-day schedule for Daadal.

Her last film with the director — Lockdown, co-starring Mirza Gohar Rasheed — filmed during Covid-19 and still unreleased, was shot in just five days.

The short schedule for Daadal was a necessity. The film, while expensive, is not as extravagantly budgeted as your regular rom-com drama. This also means that a lot of scenes had to be ticked off in one day.

“It becomes challenging when an actor has to live the 22, 23 year journey of a character in a span of days,” Sonya tells me when we meet for the fourth time.

The conversation, now happening in a posh restaurant in Clifton, runs for three hours. For a person who doesn’t talk much, Sonya can talk up a storm. The recording, mostly her unvarnished opinions — which anyone with a sense of logic would agree with — clocked in at 55 minutes.

The Sonya sitting in front of me, chicly dressed and cheery, is not the same Sonya who was whacking goons on our first meeting, or punching the living daylights out of a punching bag as she broke down in tears on the rooftop of a rickety house in Jamshed Quarters, or slamming a goon’s head into Neha Laaj’s SUV.

Neha is Daadal’s producer, and the head butt left a visible bump in one of the doors.

“Barra maza aaya. Karnay ko milta nahin hai na! [It was a lot of fun. We don’t get to do it often],” she laughs out loud.

“As an actor, your thirst for a good role is quenched when you get to play a character like this,” she tells Icon.

Of course, Aleeha telling her that the role was conceived with her in mind, helped. “It’s such a compliment when someone tells you that,” she admits.

Sonya, the eldest of four children, calls herself “an accidental actor”, who was studying physiology at St. Joseph’s College when auditions for a news anchor’s job — which she botched big time — led her to acting gigs.

It becomes challenging when an actor has to live the 22, 23 year journey of a character in a span of days,” Sonya tells me when we meet for the fourth time. “As an actor, your thirst for a good role is quenched when you get to play a character like this.”

The year was 2011, and her family didn’t own a television. “[Since] we didn’t have a TV set in our home, people get offended when I tell them that I haven’t watched any of the classic dramas such as Tanhaiyaan.”

Not having television also meant that she didn’t watch any Bollywood films either. The question often leads to the collective refutation from Mansha Pasha and Sonya, when their show, Mohabbat Tujhe Alvida (2020), was ridiculed by fans for being a rip-off of the Anil Kapoor- Urmila Mantondkar-Sri Devi Bollywood hit Judaai.

Sonya’s acting debut came in late 2011, with the Mohammad Ahmed written drama Dareecha. She was encouraged by her father to pursue acting so that she could eventually get an anchor’s job.

“Obviously, that didn’t happen,” Sonya quips. The actress wanted to be an anchor because she realised that media was the key to changing society for the better.

“From the start of my career, I haven’t done the seedha wala kaam [regular type roles],” she begins. “Other than doing stories and characters that stand for or highlight something, when I go to set, I also want to feel challenged [that, as an actor I should feel] that I can’t do this, and then push myself to overcome that challenge.

“You sleep well after delivering an emotionally satisfactory performance,” she adds genuinely happy, when we discuss Daadal’s best, and perhaps most difficult, scene: a long cathartically toned monologue of the character, where Haya explains her backstory and motive to someone off-screen.

The three-to-four-minute-long scene, where Sonya sits a few feet away from the camera, while looking straight past it, is the highpoint before the intermission. It was emotionally gruelling work that necessitated an entire night’s work, I’m told.

“We started after Isha and ended near Fajr,” the actress recalls.

Mostly scenes that drive emotions are shot at the start of the shooting schedule, while the action sequences are left for the tail-end. For Daadal, Sonya requested that the emotional parts be shifted towards the end because it would give her the “time to live Haya.”

Scenes such as this one require closed sets — ie. only the most essential technicians are allowed — “but even that means that there are 30-35 people around you,” she says.

To attune herself to the raw emotion she needed to convey, and feel comfortable with her surroundings, Sonya came to the set as the crew was setting up the lights. And although shot and cut from at least three angles, it was a one camera shoot, I learn.

“I wish that they had more [than one camera], because then the artist wouldn’t have gone through such an emotional trauma,” she exclaims.

Multi-camera shoots — a practice in the golden age of PTV — would help actors a lot by taking away the mundaneness of opening master shots, close-ups and medium shots that require several takes and eyeline cheats from actors (more often than not, the actor who is not in the frame steps away, and a crew member stands-in for them, while the other actor performs for the camera).

For an actress such as Sonya, who is into edgy characters, it would be a sigh of relief.

Sonya has played a broad spectrum of characters, from the girl-next-door to the independent young woman, to people afflicted by disabilities.

The intense actress tells me that she played the role of a schizophrenic in the serial Saraab, and the long shooting spell eventually took its toll. “It took me four months to get out of that role. I wouldn’t leave the room,” she recalls.

She is getting better at sliding in and out of roles now, she confesses.

“[This is the reason that] I cannot do two projects at the same time. Never!” she exclaims. “Switching from character to character takes time,” she says, in awe of actors who can switch on the fly when it comes to acting. It is also one of the reasons why she prefers that all of her dramas and films are shot in one-go — and why she feels she cannot do theatre.

“I’ve been trained for television and theatre takes time.” Also, she adds, repetition of performance is just not her thing. In fact, she can’t even do the same type of roles, even in serials.

“If I have done one type of character, I refuse doing something similar the next time. It feels as if I am getting free money to do nothing.”

Bringing the topic back to Daadal, Sonya tells me that she wasn’t emotionally ready to play Haya.

“I was at a very happy place in my personal life when I started Daadal, and that disturbed me, because I couldn’t get into the character. So I took five, six days’ time away from the film. I fought at home so much during those days [to get into the aggressive mentality],” Sonya adds laughing.

“I may have a bad side to me — there is a bad side to me,” Sonya adds, with an impromptu double-take.

“Shamoon [Abbasi], [Adnan Shah] Tipu, Rizwan [Ali Jaafri], Maira [Khan], Mohsin [Abbas Haider] — we’re all bad [characters in Daadal]. We all have that bad side, but that doesn’t mean that we’re black or white. We’re grey,” she elucidates.

There is a gangsta’ in every one of them, Sonya says, adding that “there is also a bhai [gangster] inside Neha as well.”

It takes guts being a woman and undertaking a film like this, Sonya agrees.

Sonya’s last film was Chaudhry — a doomed version of the life of the super cop Chaudhry Aslam that bombed at the box-office (the production had a gazillion problems).

In the past, I’ve heard a lot about Sonya’s difficult nature on sets. However, she considers it a compliment.

“As an actor, one is never fully satisfied,” she tells me. “When you’re playing a character from [the director’s] point-of-view, you only get a certain degree of margin to play it the way you want,” she elaborates.

Sonya says that the fights she has on sets stem from a sincere place: she wants to do her best work. However, most of the time, the character doesn’t turn out as promised, or the director or the writer wants the character to do scenes that would go against its sense of reasoning.

The producers on television don’t have time for workshops, and sometimes it takes four or five days to understand who the character is, because of this lack of preparation, she says.

One other aspect she recently stood up for was timely clearance of payments. As everyone working in television knows, networks are notorious for late payments; Sonya’s issue, however, originated from the sets of Tich Button.

“Let’s not get into that,” Sonya says, closing the chapter on her alleged beef with producer Urwa Hocane.

“[Delayed payments] are an issue that everyone from actors to spot boys to make-up artists face. Everyone makes their bread and butter from their jobs. It’s our right. One is not in the wrong to ask for money that’s due to them,” she says.

“If the television industry doesn’t evolve, I might just stop working,” she says, fed up with the arguments and the lack of genres and roles she can explore.

Thankfully, Sonya is in a position to pick and choose projects, and doesn’t need anyone’s approval or validation, she says. “If you want to work with me, it’s okay — if not then that’s okay as well.”

Sonya has two films in the works, and two very different serials — one helmed by Adnan Sarwar, another by Anjum Shehzad — for the about-to-be launched Green Entertainment channel.

“With time, people also begin to trust you more. When the pressure of pleasing people lifts, that is when you can truly show your versatility.”

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 30th, 2023