While OTT might have all the interesting work opportunities and innovative storylines in the world, television is still a very lucrative medium, says actor Zayn Ibad Khan. The actor says that working on TV gives you a lot of financial stability, as the medium is well paying.
“When you do TV, it can make you so financially stable that you can even sit for a while with no work. But while doing a TV show, you don’t have a life of your own. You are working 15 to 16 hours on that show excluding travelling which is a total of 17 hours. You just come to the set daily, you are living the life of that show on a daily basis and you are getting 7-8 hours of sleep, which is nothing. After that, some actors do need time. However, I don’t need time, I just want to do as much work as I can do,” he says.
The actor is currently seen playing ACP Yash Vardhan Chauhan in ‘Aashiqana- Murder Ke Mausam Mein Pyaar’, which is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. However, he has been part of the TV show ‘Vidrohi’ in the past. “My last TV show was ‘Vidrohi’ for Star Plus and the character was totally opposite to what I have played before. It was an out and out negative character,” he says.
Zayn loves working in the TV industry. “It’s a lovely experience and I would like to name this experience a paid learning workshop. What happens on TV is that you are shooting for an entire month. There is a quote that practice makes a man perfect and, on TV, we are practising and doing scenes daily. We are constantly changing emotions. Like in one scene, I’m crying and in the next, I’m the happiest person in the world. We are shifting through a lot of emotions mentally as well as physically. We get paid for that. We are learning new things every day as we are shooting every day. There are no offs really when you are working in television,” he says.
Meanwhile, the actor says that he was offered the reality show Bigg Boss last year, but couldn’t take it up. “I was offered to be a Bigg Boss contestant last year for the OTT version, but I had already signed Vidrohi with Star Plus. We hadn’t started shooting for Vidrohi but I had signed it. In the TV industry, we believe the contract is just a mutual understanding between the two parties. This was the reason I said no to Bigg Boss as I am a man of my words. Since I had already committed myself to Vidrohi, I didn’t take up Bigg Boss,” he says.
Ask him if he feels that there is a difference between a TV and OTT audience, and he says, “Well, there is no vast difference between the people who watch shows on TV and OTT. In India, every home has a smartphone. They have access to all the applications like Disney Plus, Hotstar, Netflix and Amazon Prime. So, I think people are shifting to OTT now. The fact about OTT is that the younger lot connects with you because most of the fans and students or maybe I can say the younger generation is mostly connected to applications and all these platforms.”