STAR: Sajal Aly has won the award for Best Female Actress at HUM Awards three times.
This year has proved to be quite a memorable one for Sajal Aly; She appeared in two much-discussed drama serials: Yaqeen Ka Safar and O Rangreza, both on premier entertainment channel HUM TV. Sajal has been working steadily since her breakout in Mehmoodabad Ki Malkain (a family drama on the private TV channel ARY Digital in 2011) and she’s racked up a long list of accolades along the way, including winning two nominations at the prestigious Lux Style Awards 2018 for Best Actress category and bagging Best Female Actress Award at HUM Awards, not just once but thrice.
It is strange to see her on the television screen in difficult roles, that defines her intense small screen prowess, where in real life she is indissolubly refined, kind, polite and real. Well a lot of actors are in some sort of character in interviews, but the Sajal I meet is, I think, the Sajal you would meet at home. She is simply relaxed and very, very cool as she passes on a soda can and asks me to catch it instantly.
The 24-year-old’s eyes caterwauls as she moves from one project to another; completing her shoot for Aangan (Courtyard in English), an upcoming period drama serial on HUM TV starring alongside Ahad Raza Mir, Mawra Hocane, Ahsan Khan and Sonya Hussayn among others. As the first teaser of Aangan was released, there was deluge of love and appreciation from the fans of the young actress, sharing their videos dubbed with Sajal’s Aagan’s dialogues.
She laughs with gracefulness, even though her eyes are full of mischievous shine, that she then tempers with a deeper reflection or two.“Chammi is a larger than life character. She is the representation of the perseverance, heart and heart-breaking positivity. Every character in the play is equally important. Usually it happens that in a drama its one lead and the story revolves around that particular character, but in Aangan every character has its own journey. It’s about everyone involved and follows multiple beautiful characters. What makes it interesting is that it focuses on the partition of a family. The real ‘drama’ is seeing the physical and emotional divide of a country,” says Sajal
Written by Mustafa Afridi, Aangan is set in 1940s touching the base of pre-partition era. Where viewers have already set a benchmark of a period drama with Daastan that was aired on HUM TV, in 2010, and featured Sanam Baloch and Fawad Khan as the protagonists. Is there any similarity between Aangan and Daastan? “Well except the timeline, there’s no similarity between the two,” says Sajal. “Why would we want to repeat the same thing? Even the shots we’ve taken are very different. You can sense that from the teasers,” she added.
The first teaser showed some intense chemistry between Sajal Aly and Ahad Raza Mir’s characters as Chammi and Jamil to which Sajal responds, “We’ve shot teasers for each character, not just me and Ahad. There are about eight teasers in total. I never wanted my teaser to come out first. But then the team decided to roll out the play with me and Ahad’s character. So here it is. You see we still have individual teasers to come out yet.”
Almost a decade now since we’ve been seeing Sajal brightening up our television screens and portraying characters we can relate to in our everyday life. “For the past couple of years, I have been stressing more about me being relatable to the characters I play on screen. As an independent individual I have a certain set of principles that I follow in my life, taught to me by my beloved mother and the environment we live in; I tend to look for those principles in a script.” says Sajal Aly.
Sajal Aly did Zindagi Kitni Haseen Hay, a Pakistani film in 2016, and then a Bollywood film, Mom (2017) alongside Siri Devi. So can we look forward to Sajal taking over the cinema screens yet again? “Yes. There are few things in the pipeline. But for me script is the most important thing. I’ll only go for it only if the script I’m offered is as strong as the characters I portray in my serials. I wouldn’t like to do something conventional – a deep rooted, strong character is all I’m looking forward to,” says Sajal
Sajal is currently shooting for her upcoming drama serial Alif alongside Hamza Ali Abbasi, Kubra Khan and Ahsan Khan.
