Ahad Raza Mir is an actor that breathes his characters, which these days is Hamlet. In this Instep exclusive, he speaks about being the first Pakistani actor to play the Shakespearean tragic hero in a professional production in Canada and how it’ll impact his career when he gets back…

He’s now thousands of miles and a chilling drop of mercury away. It’s sub zero temperature in Calgary, where Ahad Raza Mir is right now, but we met up in sunny Karachi before he left for one of the most important performances of his career yet; he will be the first Pakistani to play Prince Hamlet in a professional production in Canada. He’s been rehearsing for six months and he’s carrying around a heavy leather bound book which looks like an anthology of Shakespearean tragedies but is in fact, his script. I’m curious to know why an actor, who rose to giddy heights of fame within a year, would take several months off his active career to do something completely displaced from the reality of who he is today. But I sense that he’s in absolutely no hurry to chase a sun that doth move. Fame, fortune and stardom, for Ahad Raza Mir, are means to an end. It’s his work and the journey that excites him and right now, that excitement stems from his return to theatre.

Ahad isn’t new to the proscenium arch; it was back when he was studying in Canada when he started taking interest in the performing arts.

"I was good at the business stuff but every day I was thinking about when rehearsals would begin, when the show would open so that was a very weird point in my life," he remembers studying marketing during the day but going to the drama department in the evening and spending every free moment taking part in their plays. This tug of war continued until he decided he had to choose. And one day he made that call to his father.

"‘Ok, great,’ is all baba said, as if he was waiting for me to make this call," Ahad smiled endearingly as he recalled the moment. And he made the call; performance was his true calling and he didn’t want a Plan B to fall back on if it didn’t work. It was ‘to be or not to be’.

"The second I put all my attention to performing, it was like all these doors opened. I was the only one working professionally in my program. In the morning I went to school and in the evening I was doing professional production. I answered the call and things picked up."

Ahad returned to Pakistan after having done over 100 plays in six years; he trained to be an actor on stage - singing and dancing his way through the experience – something that came in very handy when he started his television and film career in Pakistan.

"It’s funny when I first came to Pakistan and I was on set for Yakeen Ka Safar, I realized that I don’t have to play for a thousand people anymore," he remembered. "I can just be casual and the second I realized that, I understood what looks to give, how not to be predictable. Along the theatre training came an internalization versus oh, I came back after doing theatre. A lot of theatre people in Pakistan think that because they’ve done theatre, they can do anything. ‘TV? Not a big deal!’ I actually think TV is where it’s at because it’s not realism, it’s hyper-realism. Whenever I go to a new set, I feel like I don’t know anything. I actually think it’s difficult doing the film stuff."

And yet he did it so well. He took on a small role as the honourable Salaar in Sammi and then rose to heartthrob status as the award winning character, Dr. Asfandyar in Yaqeen Ka Safar, flying even higher as Flight Lieutenant Saad Khan in Parwaz Hai Junoon. It was a dream year for the young actor; did he imagine 2018 would turn out the way it did?

"I was hoping it did," he was honest to admit. "The journey so far has been fantastic but it’s also a little scary. The quicker you rise, the harder you fall. I started having big issues with social media and things like that."

Ahad continued talking about the challenge of finding a method to the madness that came with fame and stardom. I was intrigued to sense, contrary to most hyperbolic young actors today, his need for breathing space. A need ‘to thine own self be true.’ And so he resisted the pull of social media, stayed as unattached to Instagram as possible. He avoided making statements on Twitter, save for the one time he was pulled in to address the reaction to his Coke Studio debut, ‘Ko Ko Korina’ with Momina Mustehsan.

"I just feel like everything that happens with me, is good for me," he said, in retrospect. "In a weird way it was great and I took it as a challenge. I am not going to quit singing. I am going to try again and if I fail, fine, I fail. My training was in musical theatre. It almost felt like people were just looking for something to bring me down with. But in my opinion, the song wasn’t that bad; I say that as it was just a song. The amount of hate that built up, I was like wow! The weird thing is that people who don’t watch my dramas or films now know who Ahad Raza Mir is. I’d go to the airport and they’d be like, ‘I haven’t seen your drama but I’ve seen the song, it wasn’t that bad, I don’t know what happened, but good on you’."

"It was disappointing," he confessed, "but it was fine. The only time my heart did break a little bit was when we were shooting in Shogran and I think some ‘fans’ - I wouldn’t say fans – they noticed that I was shooting and a voice came from behind – ‘Ko Ko Korina’ – and I was doing a scene and I stopped everything and said I’ll go cry for three minutes and I’ll be right back," Ahad smiled while narrating this incident.

The space between an actor and his audience increases when he goes from theatre to television and furthermore to cinema but in Ahad’s case, mostly because of the social media invasion, things went the other around. He suddenly had no space and no privacy. Talking to him, I sensed an actor that belonged more to the Victorian Age than the Millennial, desperate to hold on to his sanity and peace of mind.

"The role of an actor here has been warped," he explained his outlook. "I have my own opinion; everybody has their own. They believe social media is part of the game, I don’t think social media following should reflect on my popularity. Don’t pay attention to me, pay attention to the Asfandyars, the Jameels. They should be the focus. I feel like we’ve become too attached to social media. People posting BTS pictures or screenshots of a drama… I think there should be some professional decency for the audience. Look what happened with Aangan. They just kept posting pictures after pictures and I thought that the mystery would disappear and it did. That’s why it just disturbs me how important people think social media is."

Social media also invaded his personal life; his onscreen pairing with co-star Sajal Aly became stuff dreams are made of. Ahad was quick to admit that he didn’t mind the obsession people had with their relationship because he felt, in a way, they did appreciate him and her as actors independently and just loved the way they looked together.

I wondered whether he ever worried that peoples’ obsession with ‘Sahad’ as they were popularly referred to, would overshadow Ahad Raza Mir as an independent actor.

"I think it does concern me," he admitted. "I think the couple and the two actors go hand in hand; there’s nothing we can do to break that. The best work I am offered, coincidentally is with Sajal. I’ve had the opportunity to potentially work with other people but when our stars aligned, I’d ask who’s opposite me and they’d go ‘Sajal’. I’ve come to terms with the fact that people like the couple and I like the connection with the actor. Working with her is fantastic because she’s fantastic. And I think when people watch us they see that connection, they see how we work and I think that’s the thing to remember. There’s nothing wrong with working with the same person over and over again. But there’s a point where you have to take a step back. The concern you bring up is valid that at what point does Ahad and Sajal dissolve and it’s just ‘Sahad’. So yes, that is a concern 100 per cent."

That concern is going anywhere, anytime soon as Ahad and Sajal continue to besot fans in the ongoing Aangan and have also signed up for Farhat Ishtiaq’s next play, which they have already shot for.

I wonder whether his next role is also going to be intense and brooding as were Saad Khan and Jameel and of course, as complex as is Hamlet. ‘One may smile, and smile, and be a villain’ and while his characters are not entirely negative, they do exhibit shades of grey. Intense and brooding…is that anywhere close to who Ahad actually is?

"I don’t think so; I try to do what’s right," it’s almost as if he’s thinking out loud when he responds. He elaborates that he just absorbs the role he is playing; he becomes possessed by it. "I am obsessed," he admits. "And I find sometimes it’s affecting my personality. One day - I’m never rude to my mom - this last role I did was a little weird and I was talking to her and getting agitated and she said, ‘what’s wrong with you’ and I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong’." What’s wrong is that he couldn’t step out of character.

And the character he’s obsessed with these days is Hamlet, one of the most complicated Shakespearean characters ever written. I feel shades of Hamlet overpower Ahad as he speaks of the rational versus irrational, the suspension of disbelief, which allows a Pakistani actor with a Canadian accent to enact a tragic hero from 16th century England. But Ahad feels we need to expose ourselves to the world to liberate ourselves from what we’re stuck in. And he’d like, in some way, to bring the production of Hamlet to Pakistan.

"I think it’d be an exciting thing for the audience here to see," he says with a spark in his eye, "because the theatre that I’ve seen in Pakistan – I’d be very blunt about it – is not on par with the way things are happening in the UK, in the States or Canada. I think our films and TV are getting there fast but not theatre. So I do want to bring it (Hamlet) here in some way. I think seeing that is going to be a different experience all together. Seeing your own actor (me) doing sword fights, full speed, they’ll go ‘wow, he can do it that means we can all do it’. I mean, I’d take this as an example to show people that we are limiting ourselves. We can do so much more."