Why Mustafa Babar wants to be an actor, not an influencer

A twenty-year-old who already feels old

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Mustafa Babar as a remarkable artist who has, more recently, become notorious — and saying out loud that the conversation is going to walk through what that experience has actually been like. Mustafa is twenty. He is still in university. And the first thing he says, almost as a throwaway, is that he already feels old in his own industry.

The reason is straightforward. The new wave of creators entering Pakistan’s entertainment space are sixteen and seventeen years old. When Mustafa is around them, he can feel the gap. He went to school at Roots IB on GT Road, and he is open about the fact that a certain perception forms around him on social media — that he comes from a particular kind of privileged household — that does not quite match the version of his life he actually lived.

He pushes back on it carefully. He will not deny that his family is in a comfortable place now. But the comfort was earned. He remembers his father working at a company that gave him a Suzuki “dabba” — a small boxy company car that changed colour every year, which Mustafa as a child would get excited about. He remembers his mother’s first Swift. His mother has been working for around twenty years. His father was a pilot, then became a lawyer, and now works at the UN. “Mere ghar mein itne bade inspirations hain,” he says, translating roughly to: there are enough big inspirations inside my own house that I feel I am not doing anything with my life if I do not at least match their calibre.

Why he walked away from 30,000 subscribers

Mustafa’s YouTube career started in 2018 with a channel called Achpal Blogs — a Pashto-rooted name, meaning roughly “our blogs” — that he ran with a friend named Usama. They were in A-levels. They made casual college vlogs, riffed on people, made memes, and the audience grew.

Then the work started getting professional. Money came in. And as he tells it, two creative people sharing a single channel began to friction against each other. “Agar main apne aap ko ek creative insaan samajhta hoon, toh mujhe apna ek creative space chahiye,” he tells Muzamil. He frames it less as a fight and more as a question of mental health. At some point he handed the channel over and said: take it, I can’t do this anymore.

He started his own channel from scratch in July 2019. He was seventeen, possibly eighteen. He had left thirty thousand subscribers on the table. “Koi itne aaram se apna channel chhod sakta hai itne subscribers mein?” — meaning, who walks away that easily from that many subscribers? He did. And then his interest in YouTube itself started to drop. Audiences were drifting. Netflix had taken the attention. But the deeper reason was strategic: he had begun to understand that staying on YouTube made the next career he wanted harder, not easier.

The bracket he is trying to leave

This is where the conversation sharpens. Mustafa is unusually clear about the box he is trying to climb out of. In the Pakistani entertainment industry, he argues, anyone famous can become an actor — fame is treated as a substitute for craft. But within that, there is a hierarchy. A model who moves into acting is acceptable. A TikToker who moves into acting is now possible, because TikTok stars have been cast in dramas built specifically around their TikTok personas. A YouTuber moving into acting is still stuck.

“Yeh toh ek comedian hai, yeh toh ek YouTuber hai, yeh kahan actor banega,” he says, mimicking the gatekeepers. The treatment, even commercially, is to file the person under “influencer” and keep them there. The role written for them is some version of the influencer-playing-an-influencer. That, he says plainly, is not what he wants. “At the end of the day, my goal is to be an actor.”

Muzamil pushes him on whether the modelling work fits that goal. Mustafa’s answer is honest. The modelling is an experiment phase. He wants the practical experience of being on a set — the tantrums, the waiting, the cameras, the discipline of staying on point. Modelling shoots now include digital campaigns and video, which is closer to acting than still photography ever was. He estimates the peak window of a modelling career in Pakistan at three to five years before agencies move to new faces, and he is not pretending it is anything more than a training ground.

The BTS video and the asymmetry of online outrage

The episode then moves into the first of the controversies that have followed Mustafa over the past year. He recreated a BTS-style look in a fifteen-second TikTok video. The video was reported as harassment and bullying of BTS members. He woke up to find his own name trending. People were telling him he had no right to look like them, that his ethnicity disqualified him, that he had an identity crisis.

He shows Muzamil the video in real time, on the podcast, and asks him to find what is wrong with it. It is a TikTok look. That is the entire premise of the platform. The actual content of the offence cannot survive contact with the video itself, and that is precisely the point Mustafa lands on: “Social media par aap jo bhi baat karte ho, this is a vibe of political correctness unfortunately. If I say my favourite colour is red, log kahenge you like blood, you want to murder someone.”

The underlying claim is more interesting than the venting. Mustafa argues that the people most active in this kind of pile-on are often young, working through their own things, and that he was once one of them. He is not exempting himself. He is making the case that the platform structurally turns small disagreements into trending topics, because the reward for outrage is attention and the cost of outrage is paid by someone else.

Midsummer Chaos and what he thinks of his own acting

The conversation arrives at the show that defined the year for him: Midsummer Chaos. The project was made with his best friend, who directed it and self-funded it. Mustafa is careful not to oversell it. He says, without prompting, that it was a zero-budget project made by people his age, and that despite that it stayed trending on Twitter for a full month — a fact he thinks the conversation about the show often skips past.

He is also unusually direct about his own performance. “I used to believe ki meri acting bahut achi hai,” he says. He thought he could underestimate the Pakistani industry. He was wrong. When he watched the finished work back and read the critiques honestly, he realised he had been overconfident. The response, he says, is not to quit. “Aap workshops lo. Kuch ban jao.” He is taking the critique as a brief.

What he objects to is the personal layer of the attacks. The hate, he tells Muzamil, was rarely about the work. It was about him — his background, his family, his right to be in front of a camera at all. “Ek cheez hoti hai aap kisi ko tameez se samjhao ki yeh cheez theek hai, yeh cheez ghalat hai. Aur ek cheez hoti hai ki aap unko bully karo publicly.” He thinks public criticism, given calmly, is fair. He thinks the rest is not.

”I’m 20 years old. I have a lot of room for improvement.”

This is the most disarming stretch of the conversation. Mustafa describes being bullied through most of his childhood, up to around class six or seven, for not fitting the standard categories — not sporty enough, not academic in the right way, not the obvious captain pick. The hate online, he says, has not changed shape so much as scale. He has been receiving some version of it his whole life. It has made him more resilient than he otherwise would be, and it has also left marks he is still working through.

He says, plainly: “I’m twenty years old. I have a lot of room for improvement. Maine bahut ghaltiyan ki hain jo main maanta hoon.” He talks about wanting to do more than acting in his twenties — modelling for set craft, a business for commercial sense — so that by the time he commits fully to the screen, he has the emotional bandwidth to absorb the pressures of a public career without breaking down. He references actors whose lives ended early, and he is not romantic about it. He wants to arrive at the work as a more complete person.

Call-out culture, rehabilitation, and the missing publicist

The closing section of the conversation is where Muzamil’s framing and Mustafa’s experience converge. Muzamil draws a parallel to the way mob justice worked in pre-modern villages — the same single response to every offence — and argues that modern justice systems built rehabilitation in for a reason. When call-out culture flattens every offence onto one scale and the only available verdict is permanent erasure, it produces defensiveness, not improvement. People dig in. They get worse.

Mustafa agrees, but he is also honest that he does not know how to fix it. He suggests, almost in passing, that people who have been on the receiving end should sit on podcasts and talk through what they got wrong and what they would do differently — not to perform contrition, but to model the process publicly. He notes that very few public figures in Pakistan have the support structure to do that well.

This leads to a sharp practical point. The conversation closes on the missing role of the publicist. Muzamil sketches the difference between an old-school Hollywood publicist — whose job is to protect and shape an artist’s image and, in the process, give the artist meaningful feedback — and the Pakistani version of the role, which is mostly a manager taking a percentage of brand deals. Mustafa agrees from inside the industry. The managers he has dealt with are commission-focused. They do not protect image. They do not say “do not do this, it will hurt you.” The bigger actors have some version of real PR. The new lot, he says, are young and unguided, and the absence is doing damage.

Asked at the end how he feels about Midsummer Chaos now, Mustafa does not flinch. The hate hurt. The line that did the most damage was the “how dare you act” framing — the gatekeeping he had explicitly set out to push against. But sitting down and quitting, he says, would be the wrong lesson. The right lesson is the one he keeps coming back to in the conversation: learn from things that did not go the way you planned, give it time, and arrive again stronger.