About six minutes into the conversation, actor Shuja Asad stops in the middle of a sentence. He’s talking about Joaquin Phoenix and wanting to bring a little of his seriousness to Pakistani television. Quite suddenly, he asks if someone can close the door.

The PR coordinator, hovering nearby with a tray of snacks, gets up and shuts it. Shuja waves at the food. “Eat, please,” he insists. He won’t touch it himself, though. Over the next 90 minutes, it becomes clear that this isn’t a one-off gesture. He always makes sure everyone else goes before him.

Shuja, 31, has spent the last two years playing men who are hard to love. There was the evil playboy in Ae Ishq-i-Junoon (AIIJ), the traumatised mountain villager in Khaie and the young man dealing with male assault in Tann Mann Neelo Neel (TMNN).

This year, ARY Digital’s Dr Bahu, directed by Mehreen Jabbar and written by Sanam Mehdi Zaryab, made him something we rarely get to see on Pakistani television: a heartthrob people could fall for without worrying. It didn’t last long, though, because in the episode that was aired after this interview, Salman Shahnawaz, the character Shuja plays, turned kind of villainish.

It’s easy to forget that the confidence of the actor with four overlapping hit projects — Ae Ishq-i-Junoon, Tann Mann Neelo Neel, Khaie and now Dr Bahu — is fairly new. Before it, there was a slew of rejections and typecasting and a feeling he was in Disneyland. So why does he still feel uncomfortable with fame and want to delete his Instagram?

Salman is the black sheep in a family of doctors, married off to Sania, an ambitious young physician (Kubra Khan). A deleted scene from Episode 10, which showed Salman helping Sania fix her sari, went viral in April. And once again the internet lost its head over a man being gentle on television.

“Salman has a lot of traumas,” he says, sounding a little tired of how the internet has distilled his character into one word. “I keep hearing people call him a green flag. It’s not that simple. He’s not a red flag either. He’s just human.”

He lists what he thinks people have missed about his character. That Salman lost his business two or three times before the show began. He had a panic attack. That his dislike of hospitals stems from the fact that his father spent years pushing him towards medicine and never forgave him for failing at it.

“He’s flawed.” Shuja then smiles as he adds, “But he’s there for his wife and mother. Nobody’s asking how someone is supposed to turn out fine after all that.”

BUILDING A CHARACTER

In listing these details, Shuja is also revealing his acting process. He doesn’t act only by instinct. Instead, he arrives on the set with a long list of specific questions. What are this character’s childhood traumas? How does he eat? How does he talk? Is this the first time he’s worn this suit?

“Even regarding an outfit, I’ll ask the director if he thinks he’s wearing this for the first time,” he says. “Dramas are a six-to-eight-month project. The more questions you ask, the better.”

He traces the habit to Khaie, which got him noticed before Dr Bahu. “That’s where I realised, okay. Keep your room for errors small, Shuja. Ask good questions if you want a real career.”

The questions stem from curiosity, but he admits they can be dangerous. After AIIJ, he met Mehreen for their first meeting for Dr Bahu and found that he was still struggling to look women in the eye. The playboy he’d just finished playing hadn’t let go of him and he was avoiding being misread.

“I’m unable to meet you in the eyes,” he told Mehreen, “so please don’t mistake it for not listening.” He still thinks he could play a better villain than the one in AIIJ. That character, Shehroz, came with a mullet and an actual piercing, both of which he kept until the drama wrapped up. “After that I needed to be Shuja again,” he says, as if putting on another costume.

Salman’s role almost went to someone else because Shuja nearly turned it down. In his first meeting with Mehreen, he says, he kept suggesting other actors. He wasn’t sure he understood Salman. “I wasn’t able to click with it,” he recalls.

Mehreen pushed back. He mentioned to her that he’d grown up mostly around women, his mother and two sisters, and knew which dramas they watched and what they talked about. She told him that was exactly why he needed to play Salman.

It’s worth remembering how recent Shuja’s confidence is. Before Khaie and before the ad that Fahad Mustafa happened to see, which got him cast in Pyar Deewangi Hai opposite Neelam Munir, Shuja spent nearly two years being turned away at casting calls over his teeth. He got them fixed in his 20s and took a marketing job handing out water plant brochures door to door because his mother told him to go and feel what real work was like.

He collected small humiliations during that time and talks about his early 20s the way people talk about a difficult training period.

He still describes himself, half-joking, as a boy who used to watch dramas, wondering whether he’d ever get to play Faysal Quraishi’s son or Sheheryar Munawar’s brother. He is still something of a fanboy and gets visibly overwhelmed recalling the first time he met actor Javed Sheikh. He remembers doing a commercial with Shaan Shahid, thinking to himself in disbelief that he was finally standing next to Pakistan’s action hero. He calls the industry his Disneyland.

THE COST OF FAME

Ask him about fame and he brings up a worry right away. “It’s very hard to go out with your family,” he says. Someone is always taking a picture, or worse, not taking one and just watching him.

He brings up a recent article. It paired a badass photo of him wearing sunglasses, hand in his pocket, with a quote he’d given about not being the best-looking man in the industry. Without context, the quote came across as arrogant. Mehreen texted him asking, “Why would you say that?”

Negativity attracts attention,” laments Shuja Asad. He sounds tired by the pattern he’s describing and is still figuring out how to cope with it. “Nobody reacts to something positive.” He is quick to point out that he has played a mountain boy (Khaie) and a poor kid from the streets of Lahore (Tann Mann Neelo Neel) and made both work, as if to pre-empt the assumption that his casting has anything to do with his looks.

“Negativity attracts attention,” he laments. He sounds tired by the pattern he’s describing and is still figuring out how to cope with it. “Nobody reacts to something positive.” He is quick to point out that he has played a mountain boy (Khaie) and a poor kid from the streets of Lahore (TMNN) and made both work, as if to pre-empt the assumption that his casting has anything to do with his looks.

He says he stopped reading reviews about a year-and-a-half ago, because caring what strangers think started getting in the way of his work. “If I start caring what 10 people think of me, it affects how I tell a story,” he asserts. “I’m a storyteller. That’s my job.” He still reads messages from fans, and still replies to some of them himself, but he has drawn a firm line around criticism from strangers online.

We begin to talk about an actor who spent years being typecast and being trolled in Pakistan because of her complexion before finding real recognition working abroad. It is proof to him of how much damage the industry’s obsession with looks can do.

“We don’t even realise it,” he says. “When people see someone famous, they can’t handle their own insecurities and they want to say something. That’s on them. Not on us.”

He feels the same way about his family. He posted a photo with his mother and his wife, and the comments turned into unwarranted remarks. “If anyone talks against my family, they won’t be spared,” he says vehemently. For one brief moment during our conversation, the easy tone drops. “I’m very protective of my sisters, my wife, and my mother. I’m their protector.”

KEEPING HIM GROUNDED

If there’s one thread connecting who looks out for Shuja, it’s the women around him. He describes his mother as having “played a very fatherly role” and she continues to give him feedback on his work.

His manager, Samra Muslim, sounds like a stern aunt who doesn’t let him get away with anything. She held him back from photoshoots and press until his work could justify them.

Recently, at a shoot for a commercial, where the crew thought he was being difficult, she pulled him aside. “She told me she didn’t like seeing that attitude in me,” he says. “I thought about it. When I talked to my wife, she agreed with Samra completely.” His wife, for her part, has never complained about his hours, he says. “Her only real request is more time with me.”

It’s Samra, more than Shuja himself, who decides when he’s ready for attention and when he isn’t. “No PR can help you,” he quotes his manager, “until your work is good enough to deserve it.” For three years, he recalls, she kept him at arm’s length from his own success, careful never to let him get too comfortable with praise. The one time that discipline slipped, he says, was after the Hum Awards, when she ran over to hug him.

Ask him where the Pakistani drama industry is heading and his excitement is palpable. He believes that the industry is about to reach a level of success it hasn’t seen before. He points to the sheer range of content with smaller, harder projects like TMNN and the Aik Aur Pakeezah sitting alongside mainstream hits like AIIJ and Meri Zindagi Hai Tu, both finding audiences beyond Pakistan, in India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Turkey. He thinks the industry has started taking real risks with subject matters, citing TMNN’s tackling of male assault.

What frustrates him about the industry, though, is more personal. It is what he calls the unnecessary competition inside the industry, actors and producers alike constantly measuring each other’s looks and talent against one another, a habit he thinks the business would be better off without.

Instagram is the one thing he’d happily give up. “So many times, I’ve asked my manager, please, let me shut down my Instagram.” He wants people to meet Salman from Dr Bahu, or Shehroz from AIIJ, or Barlas from Khaie, before they meet him.

He believes that watching a mountain boy from one drama turn into, as he puts it, “a pappu [cute] Burger Boy” (as he refers to himself) with a new watch, new apartment and new car, all posted in the same week’s scroll, somehow undoes his on-screen work. He brings up Michael Jackson’s refusal to give interviews.

“He wanted to be a mystery,” he says, “because he wanted his work to be seen, not him.” He says, more than once, that he thinks he was simply born in the wrong decade, that he belongs somewhere in the 1980s, before anyone needed to post anything.

BEYOND SALMAN

The three overlapping projects that led up to this year were AIIJ, TMNN and Paradise. They were shot in different parts of the country, sometimes with a political protest thrown in, which became hectic, leaving him eating badly and gaining weight.

“That was the toughest stretch,” he recalls. “I thought, okay, I’m done. I started eating so much. I’d come home at night and just eat.” He talks about the emotional toll more than the physical one.

For example, his morning started with playing a scene where his mother had died. Hours later he was acting in a romantic scene and then fighting with an on-screen father in another. “By the time you get home at night, there’s nothing left for your family.”

Ask who he wants to play next, and the answer seems to surprise even him. Not another villain — someone bright and heroic. “Almost Superman-ish.” Not a man with powers, but a man who’s better than the people around him and still flawed. He’s thinking of Christopher Reeve, whose Superman he grew up watching. He talks about the actors he admires, such as Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Timothée Chalamet and Tom Hanks.

There is also, he says, a part he isn’t sure he could pull off yet, which is a character with a physical disability. Almost immediately he remembers a co-star from TMNN who played a character with special needs and told him how exhausting it was.

In the meantime, he’s doing the unglamorous work a lot of actors his age in Pakistan skip. Dance classes, sessions with a speech therapist and acting workshops, arranged through his manager. He didn’t get into Napa because his A-levels were incomplete. He calls the rejection fair, and speaks about Zia Mohyeddin, the school’s late founding director, with reverence.

“Even now,” he says, “if I get a chance, I would still want to go.” He also wants to take a short acting course abroad for four to six weeks, whenever his schedule allows it. He recently turned down ARY’s Laila Majnu, but the news that he’d signed on spread anyway. He won’t say what’s next, but does concede that it will look nothing like Salman from Dr Bahu.

EVER THE UNDERDOG

He is, by his own description, an underdog who intends to stay one a while longer.

“I don’t mind being an underdog,” he says. “I want that dark horse energy. No controversy, just good projects.” He says he’s glad fame took a while to arrive, and is happy he wasn’t handed this kind of attention in his 20s, when he wouldn’t have known what to do with it.

He brings up a trip to Houston last October, for the Hum Awards, as the first time he really understood how far his work had reached. The love from overseas Pakistanis and Indians, thousands of miles from home, took him by surprise.

Past all of it, what he actually wants is a farm, cattle, a pickup truck and a cowboy hat. And children, which he doesn’t have yet, despite Instagram pictures with his nieces and nephews that have convinced half the country otherwise. “I love kids,” he says. “They’re so pure. No filter,” he says simply.

Near the end of the interview, almost as an aside, comes a detail that seems to catch him most off guard. We end up talking about my teenage daughter, raised on Netflix, who usually doesn’t watch Pakistani dramas and has started watching Dr Bahu. Shuja Asad goes quiet for a second. “Alhamdulillah [Praise be to God],” he says. “Imagine.”

It’s a small moment, but a telling one: a man used to fame and strangers’ admiration briefly stops on hearing that he is being watched by a teenager who wouldn’t be, in regular circumstances, watching him at all.

The writer is a people watcher and is particularly fascinated by pop culture. X: @Shahrezad

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 2nd, 2026