Huma Qureshi on Advice She’s Glad She Ignored : 'So Many People Told Me Don’t Do OTT... Because Everyone Will Think You Don’t Have a Film'
The actor revisits the advice that nearly steered her away from streaming, the breakout she never saw coming, and the quiet rise of 'Maharani' into becoming one of SonyLIV’s biggest successes.
For Huma Qureshi, the worst advice came from several well-wishers at once. “Around 2019, so many people told me... don’t do OTT because people will think you don’t have a film. I just want to say, look where we are,” she says with a laugh. She says it with the insight of someone who has seen the industry rewrite its own rules in real time.
Pratik Gandhi agrees instantly. “That’s the one we’ve all heard,” he says, before unpacking the much spoken idea of overexposure. “I’ve never understood what overexposure is. What is the right level of exposure? Nobody knows. If you’re in every second film and they’re good films, that’s not overexposure. If they don’t work, that’s still not overexposure. It’s all subjective.”
For Qureshi, none of this caution aligned with her own career graph, especially because the role that truly changed her life arrived quite unexpectedly. “Gangs of Wasseypur was the turning point,” she says. She remembers shooting it like a group of kids on an adventure, too naive to grasp the size of what they were making. “I still remember seeing a hoarding and thinking, really? I’m the lead of this film?” She didn’t even call her parents to watch the film. “I was in just 20 minutes of both films. I thought, whatever, it’s an ensemble,” she says.
But the success of Gangs.. carved out a space she has spent the last decade expanding, most recently with Maharani, a show whose impact she believes is still underestimated. Season 4 is on its way to 10 million views, making it Sony LIV’s biggest show of the year, yet early on, she remembers it being dismissed. “When season one came out, we were ignored. It was heartbreaking. Maybe we weren’t considered cool enough. Maybe it felt too vernacular,” she says.
The audience, however, answered differently. Each year, Maharani has grown, deepened, and allowed her to evolve a character who speaks to the country in a language it understands. “I’m just grateful. Grateful I get to play someone who refuses to be boxed in. That’s every actor’s biggest fear,” she says.