Babil Khan Interview on Irrfan Khan: He was good at sitting with himself, his darkness, and his anxiety

Carrying a liveliness that is often mistaken for being performative, Babil Khan’s personality is a mix of vulnerability and childlike enthusiasm. It comes alive in his upcoming ZEE5 film, Logout, where he plays a social media influencer who is willing to trade anything in order to reach the milestone of 10 million followers. Unable to stay even a minute without checking his phone, Babil’s character, Pratyush, practically lives in the digital world.

Babil, the person, is entirely different. He says he doesn’t have that kind of unhealthy attachment to his smartphone. “I have almost zero minutes of screen time.



You can check. Smartphones make me anxious,” he says. How does he take a break? “I just go scuba diving at times,” he smiles.

The actor believes that he is not a “scrolling guy”. “I would rather flip the pages of a book,” he says, adding how he has seen the declining attention span in people around him. However, he has managed to stay unaffected.

“I was fortunate enough to grow up in a household where films were being watched all the time. So, scrolling the phone while watching something is out of the question,” he says. Babil also joined the bandwagon quite late.

He got his first smartphone around 2022. When he was fourteen, his father, the late actor Irrfan Khan, gave his old Blackberry phone to Babil. “He wanted to know where I was because I used to run away,” he recounts his ‘adventures’ with a laugh.

“But that phone stopped working in two days for some reason and then he gave me a basic dabba phone.” Babil feels that it was simpler back then when the only attribute of the phone was communication. “But smartphones have also changed the game.

We can make films on it now. So, it is all about striking that balance,” he feels.The actor also had to find a balance in handling media attention and his growing popularity.

He admits feeling overwhelmed at first in the presence of cameras and lights. “If you see my videos from the past, I always look scared,” he says. “I was not media-trained at all.

And that fear became a problem because it started affecting my authenticity and self-worth. I started depending on others' opinions of me to believe in myself.” He would also think of how his father interacted with the media and sought to be like him.

“He (Irrfan Khan) was so good at being able to sit with himself; sit with his darkness, sit with his anxiety, sit with his pain, sit with everything,” he says with some contemplation. “That’s what made him real because he didn't care. He did not depend on anybody else to love himself.

” On a lighter note, Babil adds that he would have loved to see Irrfan navigate social media. “He would say, ‘Now you can just post something on Twitter and there’s no need to give interviews. The promotion is done’,” he recounts.

“I can say something like that only after I do 150 films, I guess.”Babil has earlier starred in two films, Qala (2022), his debut in Anvita Dutt’s feminist-psychological drama and the coming-of-age comedy Friday Night Plan (2023). Along with that, he was also part of the web series, The Railway Men in 2023.

In the course of these years, the actor has found some fame in trying to carve out his own personality. His interactions with the paparazzi became viral along with some of his free-spirited conversations with new-found admirers. However, it just takes one online moment to invite memes and trolling.

For Babil, that started with a video during an event where he was seen repeatedly apologising to a female celebrity for coming in front of her while she was getting clicked. Babil sees it as part of the vicious social media cycle. “They also have to run their pages.

They are getting views and it’s great that they are able to build something at my expense,” he says. “There have also been times when people have messaged me saying, ‘Sorry, I had to do it for my page’. It is a completely different reality.

” Having said that, he was also affected by it at first. “This happened when I was giving myself too much importance. So, it was like life teaching me a lesson,” he says.

“I realised I shouldn't take myself too seriously.”.