Why Pakistani actors can't pay rent on a drama paycheck

A walled-city boyhood and an unusually wide aperture

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the brothers the way most viewers first encounter them: a combined eight-and-a-half lakh Instagram followers, tens of millions of views, and a long, deliberate run-up that very few creators in Pakistan have actually put in. “Kehte hain dus hazaar ghante aapne lagaane hote hain,” he says, before turning to the older brother. Where were you born. Where did you grow up. What were the themes that pushed you into what you do now.

Sikandar’s answer cuts straight through several Pakistani class lines in a single breath. He was born inside the walled city of Lahore — Androon — to a businessman father who was also, quietly, a tabla player and theatre actor who never pursued either commercially. He decided in school that he wanted fame. “Mujhe Imran Khan ban-na tha, Shoaib Akhtar ban-na tha. I want to be a character.” He is also, in his own description, a half-hafiz: two and a half years inside a small madrassa of fifty or sixty students between ages nine and eleven, after which he sat his matric having effectively missed three years of mainstream schooling.

What follows is one of the more interesting biographical sequences on this show. Sikandar takes three months of drawing classes with a teacher named Tanzeel-ur-Rahman, scores high enough on a drawing test to enter Government College’s fine-arts program against twenty-two applicants for six to eight seats, and from there is told by his teacher Sir Irfanullah Baba that he should aim for NCA. He gets in. “Government college ne mujhe ready kar diya tha keh you are going to be in NCA.” At NCA he discovers design, theatre, film and camera at the same time, and lands on a self-description that sticks for the rest of the conversation: “I call myself a performer, not an artist.”

Muzamil flags something personal here — his own father grew up in Bhati Gate inside the same walled city, and is also a Ravian who went on to Government College. It is the first time, he says, he has had a guest who grew up Androon itself.

Two and a half years in a madrassa, and what was actually inside it

Muzamil pushes on the madrassa years because, by Sikandar’s own telling, they are unusual. Three years cut off from mainstream school, three years of rote memorisation, three years inside a single book. Does he look back and value them.

Sikandar is careful and honest. The madrassa was not the mainstream image of one. Fifty to sixty students, clean, contained, no abuse, no horror stories. But he memorised the Qur’an without translation. “Kaash maine us ko tarjume se us waqt parh liya hota,” he says — he only studied it with translation last year, in his thirties, and the difference is huge. The eleven-year-old version of him did not even have the vocabulary “experience” to assess what he was experiencing. He missed years six, seven and eight of schooling entirely; ninth was a direct admission on the strength of rote. He cleared matric science with six hundred and twenty-five out of eight hundred and fifty, on memorisation alone.

The point he lands on is not religious; it is developmental. The model would have served him better, he thinks, if he had walked into it by his own choice as an adult. Walking children into it at nine is the part he is uneasy about.

The twelve-year gap and the bullying that built the older brother

Moiz Nawaz is twelve years younger — born in 2003 — and when Muzamil pivots to him, Sikandar volunteers a story he says he has only worked through in therapy in Karachi. When Moiz was born, Sikandar was thirteen and angry. He had been bullied badly growing up Androon for being an arts kid in a neighbourhood where every boy’s father had a karyana shop and every son inherited it. “Unki jugatbazi, unka taunt karna, unka bully karna — it’s not easy to take it.”

Muzamil names what he is hearing: thick skin built by friction. Sikandar agrees, and credits his parents for the unusually wide window they left him — a father who is also a musician and never blocked him, a household where no one questioned why he was in NCA studying graphics rather than commerce. The bullying he reframes as fuel: “Mujhe kuch karna zindagi mein, inko dikhana hai. Not a big star, but kuch toh.” He took the family from inside the walled city to upper-middle-class Lahore. That is, in his telling, the metric.

Muzamil makes the larger point. A lot of Pakistanis from that background build their own ceiling. They build a self-pity loop. Sikandar’s frame is the opposite, and the word he uses is the right one: skill. “I always win with skill.” He was the funniest boy in the friend group at Government College, the kid the Beacon House and LGS boys came home with into Androon. His father insisted on dropping him at NCA on a bike. Sikandar wanted to be dropped a block away. His father refused. The lesson he extracts: there is nothing to be ashamed of, and the moment you stop fighting your own circumstances, you stop mocking other people’s.

The fame plan, the theatre years, and a film that hit him sideways

By 2015 Sikandar has graduated NCA and walked into advertising. He is also a working stage actor. He commutes from Township to DHA Phase 6 for a nine-to-six, then to Johar Town in the evenings to do theatre, then back to Township. The acting was never recreational. He had wanted to be Imran Khan. He had wanted to be Shoaib Akhtar. He had wanted, more than anything, to be a character.

The shift came from a Yashraj Mukhopadhyay-adjacent Hindi film he watched in his early twenties — a film, he says, that “opened my heart actually” and told him not to do what he loved but to do what he needed, and to not kill his soul in the process. He read up on the framing. He started reverse-engineering. What can people pay me for. What other skills do I have. That is the spine on which the advertising company gets built. That is the spine on which the acting becomes the side bet rather than the bread and butter.

Muzamil presses on the rationale: a decade of advertising, with acting visibly secondary. Sikandar names the constraint without dressing it up. Coming out of a fourteen-lakh NCA degree in 2014, you cannot tell your parents you want to be an actor. Especially not in a country where, as he is about to lay out, the cheque takes six months to clear.

What a Pakistani drama actually pays

This is the part of the conversation worth sitting inside. Muzamil names the gap directly: drama is the most glamorous industry in Pakistan, the place where television fame still gets minted, and almost nobody outside it understands the economics. So what are the economics.

Sikandar gives the numbers. A struggling actor or a newcomer starts at roughly three thousand rupees per shoot day. From there it scales — six thousand, ten thousand — and varies by project. The seven-or-eight-slot soaps take sixty to ninety days of an actor’s calendar. The cheque does not arrive on completion. He frames the timing carefully: a drama that starts in August might issue its first cheque the following February or March. “Aap ghar nahin chala sakte us se. Woh pocket money mein leke ja rahe ho.”

There is no association. There is no fixed newcomer rate. There is no enforced payment schedule. The actor’s leverage is zero.

Where does the actual money come from. Sikandar and Moiz answer at the same time. Dramas make you a household name. Ads pay your bills. “Drama aapko fame de raha hota hai, ads aapko paid kar rahe hote hain.” Sikandar runs an ad agency and has booked the other side of that transaction. He knows the numbers cold.

Acting craft in a country that does not need it

Muzamil moves to a question he says he has held back for years. Did Sikandar learn how to act, or did he end up there the way most Pakistani screen actors do — through TikTok, lip-syncs, expression videos, viral reels and then a drama call.

Sikandar takes the question seriously. He started theatre at Government College in 2011, did four years of NCA, did twenty to twenty-five plays before he ever stood on a set, and then, after moving to Karachi, went to NAPA — the National Academy of Performing Arts — specifically to study craft. He is a fan of Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Irrfan Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui. He wanted to know what the National School of Drama in Delhi had actually taught them. He names Stanislavski. He names his NAPA teacher Sir Ziauddin Mohyuddin walking into a class and asking who knows what Stanislavski’s method is and getting zero hands.

Then he tells Muzamil what happens to that training once you walk onto a Pakistani drama set. The actor playing opposite you is not there — they are shooting somewhere else that day. The lines are read into a wall. The close-up is lit, the camera is rolling, and the scene partner is a piece of furniture. “Woh craft, mujhe lagta hai 0.1% bhi use nahin ho pa raha.” Five years of method acting study is essentially decorative.

He names the real bottleneck without flinching. “There are very few directors in Pakistan.” Worse, there are very few writers. The supply of good scripts in a calendar year is maybe five, and those five go to the people with legacy contacts and PR. “Hum shoot karna jaan gaye hain. Likhna nahin jaante.” That, he argues, is why Netflix and Amazon have not commissioned originals here. The economics are a downstream symptom; the upstream cause is writing.

The collaboration problem nobody will solve

Muzamil turns the screw a little harder. If the dramas pay nothing and the scripts are missing, the obvious move is for the new generation to make their own. The production skill is in the country. The distribution is on the phone in your hand. Why is nobody experimenting.

Moiz cuts in. “Collaborate Muzamil bhai kaise karenge.” It is not a rhetorical question. Sikandar answers it. Pakistani creators do not behave like a sector. If you approach another creator to collaborate, you receive an invoice. The conversation routes through agencies that exist to extract a margin rather than to build a roadmap. “Talent management nahin hai Pakistan mein,” he says. There is no single agency willing to sit a creator with three lakh followers across a table and lay out the next eighteen months. In the absence of that structure, every creator optimises locally, and the sector never compounds.

It is one of the most useful diagnoses in the episode. The drama industry is not held back by capital or by talent. It is held back by the absence of a coordination layer.

Toxic soaps, Faraar, and the YouTube math nobody is running

Sikandar puts a number on the bad equilibrium. A high-quality Pakistani drama costs seven to eight crore for twenty-five or twenty-six episodes. A toxic soap — the seven-or-eight-PM bedroom drama Sikandar refuses to take roles in anymore — costs two to three crore. The high-quality work, he names Faraar, a political drama shot across fifty-two locations, lands at two to four million YouTube views per episode. The toxic soaps land at fifteen to twenty million. A girl gets killed, a man is styled to look powerful, the writing is built for outrage, and the views show up.

Muzamil does the YouTube math out loud. Faraar’s first episode is at seventeen million views. The series averages around four million. Pakistani CPMs sit near nine hundred dollars per million. That is roughly thirty-six hundred dollars per episode in pure AdSense, before brand integration. He keeps pushing. NCA produces forty film-and-TV graduates a year. BNU produces more. “Kahaan hain wo bachche.” Why is the indie web series that breaks this cycle not already on YouTube. Sikandar’s answer is that the writers are not writing for the platform, the producers are still chasing the Netflix dream, and the green-TV-style players who are producing original work for YouTube are the exception, not the rule.

Reels are not an exit strategy

The conversation lands, finally, on Moiz. Twenty-three years old, a millionaire by content terms, currently weighing whether to finish his degree at BNU or pivot to NCSA in the United States for music. Sikandar wants him to finish. Muzamil agrees with Sikandar and explains why, in a way the older brother visibly appreciates. University in Pakistan is not for the degree. It is not for the job. It is for three to four years of character building between eighteen and twenty-two that you cannot get back. “Career aapka khud se aata hai. It’s just for the exposure. It’s the character.”

Moiz pushes back gently. He has the reach. He has the contacts in Karachi where he has been living for six or seven months. He can place a song, direct a music video, walk into a drama as a lead. “Aap kisi ko bata den keh kahaan lagengi woh script.” Muzamil hears him and reframes. At Moiz’s stage, the question is not whether he can get a fifteen-lakh-a-month reel-and-partnership setup running this year — he obviously can. The question is what gets built on top of it.

Sikandar and Moiz then make the most important point in the episode out loud, and Muzamil agrees with both of them: reels are not an exit. They are a brand-building layer. The exit is the IP. “You should have some product in your hand. Uska viewership ke saath link nahin ho.” Sikandar’s exit is his own entertainment IP — a soap, a series, high-budget content he writes, produces and acts in. Moiz’s exit is music: not the singles, but the producer chair. Muzamil draws the Friends analogy: Jennifer Aniston is the public face, but the people who built the show kept compounding behind it.

The brothers describe what they have already done with this in mind. They have hired teams that almost no other Pakistani creator has — including a team whose only job is to scroll, study trends, and feed the pipeline. They are writing a vertical sitcom. The writer is ten episodes in. They are treating the Instagram numbers as a brand layer and the next product as the actual asset.

Pakistan in 2050, and the case for getting back to work

Muzamil ends by asking each of them where Pakistan sits in fifty years. Moiz’s answer is short and structural: in Pakistan today, one in ten families has a creator. In fifty years, he thinks, every family will. Sikandar’s answer is closer to a manifesto. “I am very positive about Pakistan now, because negativity se kuch hota nahin. Just do your work. Just learn skills. Don’t look at politicians and what is happening and what has happened in the last three or four years. Apne kaam ke saath loyal ho jao.” His ask of the country is small and pointed. Let people work.

Muzamil closes on the same note he opened on. The brothers are once-in-a-generation talent, built without a silver spoon and without an industry handed down to them, and the only takeaway he wants left in the room for a younger viewer is the one neither brother said out loud. Hope is the input. Strip the hope out, and the effort stops. Strip the effort out, and the conversation about success is moot.

He thanks Sikandar and Moiz. They mention the series that is coming. The episode wraps.