Usman Mukhtar: the actor who still wants to be a filmmaker

Wanting to be a director, becoming an actor instead

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Usman Mukhtar after multiple cancelled attempts to get him on the show — the drama airing at that moment, Hum Kahan Ke Sachay Thay, has him flying back and forth. Muzamil mentions a small straw poll he ran in his own office: the two dramas everyone is watching are Usman’s and Pariza. So this is the first thing to register about the conversation. Usman arrives as one of the most-watched faces on Pakistani television, and the first sentence out of his mouth is that he never wanted to be an actor.

“I’m an actor but dil se I’m a director,” he says. “I wanted to become a filmmaker. I wanted to become a director specifically. But director bante bante actor ban gaya.”

The instinct goes back to boarding school at Lawrence College, Murree. On Sunday town days the students could leave campus until maghrib, and Usman would walk down to a trick shop on Mall Road that sold witch and Frankenstein makeup kits. He would take them home on holidays, put them on, and pull faces into the old steering-handle handycam that someone had at home. “Thank god those tapes are not now available or to be found,” he says. The cricketer dream his grandfather quietly discouraged faded. Filmmaking did not.

His grandfather was a lawyer who stopped practising in 1977 to give free legal advice to people who could not afford it. His father was in business. His uncle was a professor. None of it pointed toward a camera.

The cement bowl, the UPS, and learning the hard way

Usman is generous about how amateur the early attempts were, and Muzamil lets him sit with the detail. Around 2004 or 2005, while doing a Mass Communication degree at Punjab University privately, he and his friends decided to make a short film in a jungle. They could not afford lights, so they bought the cement-mixing bowl bricklayers use, drilled a hole, screwed in a bulb holder and a bulb. They could not afford a generator, so they took a friend’s UPS from his house.

“We didn’t understand at the time that UPS means uninterrupted power supply,” he says. “Hum log to dou teen ghante baad pahunche. Hum logon ne jab plug kiya, voh do minute ke liye jali aur band.” Two minutes of light after a two-hour drive. He calls it the most hectic, irritating, annoying experience, and the one that pushed him to actually learn the craft.

The moment Muzamil keeps returning to is what happened next. By the late 2000s a small Islamabad scene was forming around short films like Spunk Khalid Burt, Soul Search, and Slackistan. The 101 system arrived. Cinema was reviving. And the institution at the centre of it was Kuch Khaas.

What Kuch Khaas, and Poppy Niazi, actually did

Usman is careful with the word he uses for Poppy Niazi, the woman who founded Kuch Khaas. “She was like a mother figure to all of us.” He repeats the credit twice in the same answer, as if he wants the record clean. “If not 100%, 90% of the people who are where they are right now from Islamabad are because of Poppy.”

The argument he is making is not nostalgic. Kuch Khaas, he says, was a centre for arts, culture, and dialogue that gave a platform to anybody who had a creative bone in their body. It told a generation of Islamabad kids — Shahana, Natasha, OB, him — that they were talented, that they could do it, that they should. It also gave them equipment. A Mac Pro to edit on. Decent cameras. Lights.

“I was a nobody,” he says. “I honestly, I was a nobody who just wanted to become somebody.” Kuch Khaas was the thing that bridged the gap between wanting and doing.

From there, the path opened. Usman started taking on drama work. He shot Janaan, then Parchi, doing cinematography on the same projects he was acting in. Parchi was particularly punishing — call times two hours before the actors, eighteen and nineteen-hour days, and one song that ran thirty-six hours non-stop. The whole film was shot in thirty-two or thirty-three days.

Why every Pakistani drama is about cousins

When Muzamil turns the conversation to the state of the drama industry, Usman does not perform diplomacy. He has read four, five, six scripts in the last year, he says, and most of them were about cousin marriages. “Two girls, one guy. Two guys, one girl. Cousin marriages.” He notes the irony that he is currently in a drama with a cousin plot. He is not exempting himself.

The point he wants to make is sharper than the formula complaint. It is about who gets to break it. Producers, he says, will not greenlight experiments. He has pitched ideas. Some are sitting in producers’ inboxes waiting on a maybe. The Islamabad producer, in his telling, says “thoda sa aur kaam karein is par, dekhte hain.” The Karachi producer at least gives you a clean yes or no by the end of the meeting. Both are difficult. Only one wastes less of your time.

When Muzamil pushes on why the audience tolerates the formula, Usman answers it from inside the constraint: “I am part of the industry. I am not the industry. I can’t change everything. But I have a choice. At the end of the day again, I’m an actor. It’s my job. It’s my profession. I have to pay my bills.”

This is the through-line of the whole interview. Usman is unusually clear about the gap between what he would make and what he is paid to make.

Going viral is the new audition

The conversation turns to a related problem: how people now enter the industry. Usman is careful not to insult TikTokers — some of them, he says, are very talented. But the mechanism has changed. “It is not about the talent. It is about aapka naam, aapki shakal, kyunki voh bikega. It’s all about what will sell.”

He gives a name. There is an actor called Fawad Khan — not the famous one, a different Fawad Khan from NAPA, who played a cop in Churails. Usman thinks he is one of the best natural actors working. “I don’t see him anywhere. Kyunki abhi tak uska koi clip viral nahin hua, usne koi TikTok nahin banaya. He’s not a number driver. Voh chup karke apna kaam kar raha.” This is the bit Usman is angriest about. The serious actor without a viral clip cannot get a part. The number-driver without much craft can.

Muzamil presses on whether that cycle can break. Usman is honest: he hopes so, but he is not confident.

Turkish dramas, twelve scenes a day, and being cut mid-take

The technical comparison Usman draws is to the Turkish industry. Ertugrul did not work, he argues, because it was a historical curiosity. It worked because the production was big, the cinematography was good, the scores were original, the grading was deliberate, the choreography was real, and the cameras were not basic.

The Pakistani shoot, by contrast, runs twelve scenes a day. The phone-call scene in The Guilty, the Jake Gyllenhaal film, was shot with the other actors performing live into the receiver every take. On a Pakistani set, Usman says, the AD reads the other line off-camera while sitting next to the camera. “Hello, side par AD baitha hua hai, voh baat kara hua hai ki aapne mere saath bahut bura kiya. Chalein, aapki line.”

The other detail he leans on is being cut mid-performance. “You perform a scene and you feel that this is a good scene. Then the DP dharmiyan mein he’ll cut you. Sorry, dobara karenge.” His response to that is one of the most direct lines in the conversation: “Yaar, respect the artist, respect the actor. Let him perform.”

He is also clear that most Pakistani crew learned on the job rather than at school. A lot of the directors used to be editors. A lot of the cinematographers were assistants to other cinematographers. He is not knocking the path. He is pointing out that the gap with Turkey is not talent. It is process, time, and money.

Item songs and the borrowed problem

Muzamil brings up the recent controversy around an actor who criticised item numbers and was then accused of hypocrisy for having performed in them. Usman names the import directly. “Item songs kahaan se aaye? Hum log apne neighbour country se inspire hote hain in cheezon mein aur voh item songs karenge to hum bhi karte hain.” He is unequivocal about why it is wrong: “Item songs mein sabse bada masla yeh hai ki you objectify women. And kis duniya mein yeh theek lagta hai kisi ko bhi?”

He admits he has done a song he is now uncomfortable with — Below High. He is not interested in defending the genre. He is interested in not normalising it.

The OTT trap

The conversation moves to the question of whether streaming changes anything. Muzamil’s frame is the Indian one: Sacred Games arrived, and the floodgates opened. He cites Mahira Khan and Sherry’s recent short as a moment of disruptive flavour on a national network.

Usman is more pessimistic. Netflix, from what he has heard, is not green-lighting much Pakistani content. Their technical guidelines are strict. Local OTTs — Cee Prime, Vidly, Nashpati Prime — exist but do not have the viewership to move the market. And the local OTTs that the big TV networks would build, he argues, would carry the same problem the networks already have: if they will not experiment on television, they will not experiment on streaming either. “Voh bas YouTube par unko jo ads hote bas they just to get with it, voh zara probably bana lenge OTT, but I don’t think content price kuch change aayega.”

The structural point Muzamil draws out is that the global OTT model worked because incumbents converted their existing networks into streaming. Pakistan does not have that. It has fifty new third-party platforms each holding one drama, asking the viewer to switch. Nobody will.

Islamabad versus Karachi, and being told “maybe”

There is a passage where Usman, an Islamabadi himself, is unusually candid about why disruptive work tends to start in Islamabad and commercialise in Karachi. The Islamabad producer hedges. The Karachi producer decides. Karachi people, he says, are very, very practical. “Hum log jo hain we are procrastinators. We sit, we think, we never really go and do things.”

He is including himself. Muzamil agrees, also as an Islamabadi.

The Anaa effect, and choosing not to do everything

Toward the end, Muzamil asks the question every guest gets in some form: do you feel you have made it? Usman says no. What he says he is happy about is narrower and more interesting. “I’m happy with the fact ki maine har jo script aaya, voh maine nahin kiya. Matlab even in time of need when I just was broke and didn’t have money.”

He is direct about why the maths makes sense to him. His monthly expenses, he says, are around fifty or sixty thousand rupees. He cannot see the point of stockpiling forty lakh in the bank. The work has to give him happiness. He concedes this is impractical. He concedes a family changes the calculation. He does not concede that compromising on the work is the right answer.

The drama that broke him commercially was not Hum Kahan Ke Sachay Thay. It was Anaa. He was pitched it as one of two parallel male leads, opposite Shehzad Sheikh and Hania Aamir, who were the established faces at the time. Usman and Naimal Khawar, the newcomers, were not expected to carry the show. Five episodes in, aunties were stopping him on the road asking for pictures with Altamash. The ending the writers had given Altamash and Eeza was flat. He and the director Shahzad shot a new one seven or eight days before the final episode aired.

Anxiety, Twitter, and being hated by people who do not know you

By the end of the conversation, Usman is talking about the cost of all of it. He has struggled with anxiety for a long time. New people make him awkward. He stays away from public events. He left Twitter because he found it toxic, and then came back because fake accounts in his name were tweeting political content he wanted no association with.

Muzamil draws him into the broader question of why Pakistani audiences dehumanise public figures — why people send him messages saying they want to strangle Aswad with their own hands, his character in Hum Kahan Ke Sachay Thay. Usman’s answer is plain. “When we’re on social media and when we don’t see somebody physically, we don’t really feel ki agla banda bhi insaan hai.” He is not lodging a complaint. He is describing the climate he works in.

The conversation closes with the question Muzamil asks every guest: what does Pakistan look like in 2050? Usman’s answer pivots, characteristically, to filmmaking. He talks about Unreal Engine replacing chroma keys, about the Mandalorian dome, about tracker cars that can be skinned into any vehicle in the world. He thinks AI will eventually do a lot of the acting too. Then he stops himself, looks at the pre-Partition architecture in Karachi he saw recently, and notes the opposite trend: the craftsmanship in buildings was higher a hundred years ago than it is now. “Kisne yeh socha tha ki buildings ab aisi banengi jab us zamaane mein itni khoobsoorat buildings banti thi?”

The implied argument is the one that runs under the whole interview. You cannot predict whether the industry gets better or worse. You can only choose, inside the constraint, what you are willing to make.