Asim Abbasi on Fawad Khan-Sanam Saeed’s reunion for Barzakh: ‘Thought he’d want to be hero; he said you haven’t seen Kapoor and Sons?’

Produced by Shailja Kejriwal and Waqas Hassan, the show will premiere on Zee Zindagi’s YouTube channel and ZEE5 on July 19. In an interview with Indianexpress.com, the writer-director talks about mounting Barzakh, getting Fawad Khan–who hasn’t been seen on an Indian screen since Karan Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil in 2016–why he thought Sanam Saeed was his “top choice” and what makes the two Pakistani stars stand apart.

Edited excerpt:

Fawad and Sanam are massively popular as a pair for doing a show that is quite the opposite of what this looks like.  Why and how did you imagine them for Barzakh?

Whenever I write, I try not to imagine actors simply because I feel it ties me up. If I want an actor and if they don’t have dates, then I will be upset. So, since Cake I have never really imagined any specific actor. But Sanam was someone I had reached out to earlier; we have a great friendship and I wish she could be a part of Churails as well. Sanam has this stoicism, but beauty and empathy in her eyes that her character here needed. So, once I had done the writing process and was thinking about casting, she was my top choice.

Fawad, I had honestly not thought of him originally because I thought this is an ensemble piece and all these characters have the same weightage and maybe Fawad is looking for a hero driven role, as some actors might be. I said this to him after he came on board. He was like, ‘Have you not seen the type of work… Have you not seen Kapoor and Sons? Why did I choose it? For the character!’

They were just really eager to do it. As an outsider, we put this weight on how they are going to react, what will they want to do. Fawad just loved the story and wanted to be a part of the ensemble and there was not this thing of, ‘Iska role zyada hai, meri ending kya hai.’ It wasn’t planned from my side that this is a casting coup of bringing these two together after a long time. They were well suited and hungry to do something that was different. It is serendipity that they have come together to play such vastly different characters.

How do you look at their rise over the years?

It is a balance between being relatable and a star. It is hard to grapple the mid-point, but both Fawad and Sanam do it well. There is something about them that always feels a little accessible and very authentic. But because they haven’t been in your face 24 x 7 with multiple projects all the time, they have this old charm (of stardom), where you’d wait for their projects because that would take time before you get to see them again. It is that mix that makes them very appealing.

Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed while shooting for Barzakh. (Photo: Asim Abbasi/Instagram)

What does the title Barzakh mean, and what was your writing process like? 

Barzakh literally means purgatory. But it has its root in Persian and Arabic and also means a veil between two different worlds. So Barzakh was also my working title, but a long time ago it was also called The Valley. I wrote this in COVID, and there was also a lot of research in terms of the myths and folklore and understanding the connectivity between Persian and Indian mythology; what Hinduism says, what Zoroastrianism says.

At the core of it is a dysfunctional family; we are exploring a father’s relationship with his son, grandson, we are exploring a man coming to the end of his life and reflecting back, the loves he won and lost. From this prism of a dysfunctional family, we go broader and look at it through a lens of magical realism, through a lens of supernatural. We never go to horror or dark and creepy. But itis mostly about explaining emotional catharsis by understanding how souls work– or at least guess that.

Was magical realism the starting point of the story?

It was early on, but I wouldn’t say it was the first conversation because I tricked Shailja by saying I am writing a story about a dysfunctional family and by the second conversation I had started telling her– maybe the bride is dead? But I didn’t know it would be such a huge component, that developed as I started researching.