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Amna Ilyas just wants to be memorable.

She’s ridden the ebb and flow of changing narratives in entertainment, selectively doing films, TV and even theatre. She has modelled full-time and, then, stepped away from the rigamarole to occasionally surface as a showstopper. She has also recently turned entrepreneur with her eponymous clothing label. But as she navigates the various paths that she has chosen for herself, her underlying aim is to be remembered.

Amna elaborates, “As an actor, for instance, I want to do a few honest performances rather than many unforgettable ones. I might just take on two roles in a year, but I want people to talk about them, rather than enact 80 characters that don’t even get noticed.”

Amna says this sitting across from me wearing a tangerine one-shoulder blouse and skirt. The skirt is pleated, falling in flouncy layers near her ankles and she wears an assortment of chunky bangles on one hand. She’s tall but, today, she particularly towers over me in her high, high heels. Getting noticed, I quip to her, should not be a problem for you at all.

Of course, we both know that Amna is referring not just to her looks but to the work that she does professionally. She has taken her time to figure out what she wants to do, and how she wants to do it. She has fumbled in the past — struggling with stereotypical roles, lacklustre scripts and even ending up at the wrong end of industry favouritism. Fortunately, it has all made her wiser, stronger, more sure about her career choices.

“I have been through some very dark times,” she accepts, “but at one point, I paused and decided that I wanted to change the narrative of my life. I wanted to do things that made me happy and that made me sleep better at night.”

Shop, Amna Ilyas

One of the things that makes Amna very happy right now is the response that she has got for her fledgling clothing label, Amna Ilyas. The brand launched quietly late last year, with an online store. She then planned out a pop-up exhibit in Karachi in January, and followed it up with a debut runway show at LAAM Fashion Week (LFW) in Lahore some weeks ago.

Most celebrity-run clothing labels in Pakistan tend to be side-hustles, only coming into the limelight when the celebrity isn’t busy with other preoccupations. Amna’s brand’s trajectory seems to be different, with a fashion week showcase and successive collections — an Eid-centric collection has just gone live on the website — being announced. She seems to be quite serious about this new venture.

“I am,” she nods. “I took a sabbatical in my acting career, waiting for the kind of roles to come my way that resonated with me. And waiting is a hard thing to do. It can get really frustrating. It was around this time that the idea of a clothing label came to me and I started fiddling about with different plans.

“A lot of my designer friends joke about aunties who have nothing to do at home, so they start designing. That is not the case with me!” She grins. “I have planned this label out very intentionally, and I am not doing this because I’m bored. I really feel that the brand’s ethos is an extension of my identity. All my life, I have worn clothes as a model, understood craft and fabric, worked with the country’s top designers. What else could I have done better?”

But does that mean that you are also designing the clothes, I interject.

“We have a small design team,” says Amna. “I started this brand with a friend, stylist Ehtesham Ansari. He is the brand’s creative director and, of course, he is more educated in terms of design, fabric, cuts and trends.”

She continues: “We also have two to three stitchers. We have all been working very hard. The LFW team reached out to me just three-and-a-half weeks before the event. For a while I wasn’t sure that, with our limited resources, we would be able to put together a line-up of 16 outfits for our debut fashion show. But then, I love challenges and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity.

“Most of my designer friends take three to six months to come up with a collection for a fashion show. Fortunately, we were showing in the high-street category and weren’t going to be delving into hand embroideries. Still, there was a lot of pressure. We came up with a concept, taking inspiration from the colours that fill up the horizon at sunrise and sunset.

“We didn’t sleep in the last week before the show! The whole team travelled to Lahore for LFW, and even our sewing machine went with us because we didn’t have a stitching unit in Lahore. Fortunately, it all worked out.”

So the response has been good? Amna beams.

“I opened the show wearing a red outfit and a customer reached out and bought it, just the way it was, with dramatic sleeves. It made me happy that there were people out there who appreciated cut and colour, as long as it was done right.” She adds, “Even when we launched online last year, one of the designs — a black co-ord set made from lightweight voile — sold out very quickly.

“And it has been so encouraging how so many of my friends from entertainment and fashion have been turning up to support me, from coming to the pop-up exhibit to celebrated designers such as Fahad Hussayn and Nomi Ansari telling me that they were there to help out when I was in Lahore for the fashion show. I thought that people would be sceptical about me suddenly wanting to design, but the love that I have gotten has made my heart so much bigger.”

The search for roles

Amna may have chosen to venture towards a clothing label at a time when her acting career was on hold but, as fate would have it, by the time she launched the brand, more interesting roles — the kind that she had been waiting for — had also started coming her way.

She played SP Saamia in last year’s Humraaz. Directed by Farooq Rind, the drama may not have gained popularity but Amna’s character stood apart, a lone policewoman in a drama-scape dotted with stocky male policemen.

She then proceeded to play Barrister Saman, a pivotal role in the currently on-air Aik Aur Pakeezah. With a script written by Bee Gul and directed by Kashif Nisar, the drama tackles cybercrime, its consequences and the legalities associated with it. Amna’s forthright barrister acts as the lone voice of reason in a society drowning in misguided notions of honour.

“In retrospect, all the insecurities and uncertainties of the past seem worth it,” she smiles. “When Farooq Rind offered me my role in Humraaz, he told me that the character in the script was of a male. If I came on board, he would change the character to a female and create a backstory for her and, if I didn’t, he would not change the gender and would not offer the role to any other actress.

“For a director of Farooq Rind’s stature to say this to me, at a time when I was struggling and waiting for opportunities, felt great. He had seen the theatre play that I had worked in about a year ago, and this was why he had reached out to me. Of course, I signed on to the role.”

And how did the offer for Aik Aur Pakeezah come to her?

“I wish that I could tell you a dramatic story, about how the role came to me, but actually it happened quite ordinarily!” she laughs. “I had worked with Kashif Nisar earlier in the web-series Teen Tara, which has also been written by Bee Gul and is currently streaming on an OTT [streaming] platform. He had offered me that role after a chance meeting at the airport. We were still waiting for Teen Tara to release when he called me one day and said that he was sending me the script for Aik Aur Pakeezah.”

Amna continues: “I read the first five episodes and I understood that Saman was a pivotal character. I was happy that such a script had come my way but I was also sad, simply because every scene made me so emotional. I called up Bee Gul and told her, what have you written, and that if I am feeling so distressed while reading the script, what kind of misery must you and Kashif have gone through as you knitted the story?

“Kashif told me that he would send me more episodes but I said that I didn’t need them. I was convinced that I wanted to play the role.”

Was there ever the fear — based on the past bad experiences, perhaps — that being part of star-studded ensemble casts in both Humraaz and Aik Aur Pakeezah might mean her role gets sidelined?

“There has only been one past bad experience, where my role was entirely cut out,” she says. “I had once been signed on to be part of just a song in a film. We filmed the entire song but, when the movie finally released, I was barely there. I heard that the movie’s lead actress had wanted me to be kicked out.” She laughs.

“I am now very careful before agreeing to any role. I get clarity from the producer and the director on where my character will be placed and the teams that I am working with now are very honest with their actors.

“For instance, with Aik Aur Pakeezah, I am so happy to be part of a project which is driven by these powerful female characters, from my role to the characters enacted by Hina Khwaja Bayat, Nadia Afgan and Sehar Khan. Sehar and I had some scenes together and we would end up crying before shooting. It was difficult, especially since my character was supposed to always keep things together, and not get too emotional.”

She muses, “An actor is like a plant. You give the plant water, sunshine, air, the right environment and it will flourish. Similarly, an actor flourishes when working with the right people.”

So, was she working with the wrong people in the past which led to her being unhappy?

“I think back then I was not aware of the kind of roles that would resonate with me. I had just made the shift from modelling to acting and I was running after acceptance, in a rush to prove to people that I could act.

“But it wasn’t easy. Stereotypical roles came my way very often. People would slot me into negative roles simply because I was thin and dark. There were times when I would get a phone call, everything would get finalised and then I would hear the news from somewhere else that some other actress had been cast in the role that I thought I would be playing. There were other times when I would feel disrespected because of the kind of roles that were being offered to me.

“I just felt that I deserved better. It made me very bitter and led me into making some bad decisions. I started picking up projects randomly. I would sign on to a slipshod script in a mediocre production just because it meant that I would get to play the lead. I was miserable, fighting for money, dates, wasting my time and energy, feeling like I was getting old.

“So, I just stopped and decided that I needed to design my life differently.”

Life’s many designs

This ‘design’ of her life has certainly changed.

Did she, during these difficult phases, encounter certain people within the industry who wanted certain ‘favours’ from her in return for work?

Amna grins. “Oh? Are we talking about the casting couch? A lot of times I think people are too scared to approach me. I am tall and, then, when I wear my four-inch high heels, I am even taller. My mother is a single parent and she raised us well, in a very dignified way and I know that I would not ever want to do anything that would break my peace.”

She adds: “Having said that, there have been times when people have made certain kinds of jokes or made offers. When you are part of an industry where everyone looks a certain way but you don’t belong to that type and you are waiting for work, people may read that you are desperate and try to cross a line.

“Also, I am being very upfront when I say that, a lot of times, I am described as ‘hot’, more often than ‘beautiful’. So, I do get a lot of attention [from men] and sometimes it does get difficult to navigate my career.” Amna can sometimes be disarmingly candid.

“However, I have never surrendered and done something that would not let me sleep peacefully at night. I hope that no one ever feels desperate enough to do something that they don’t want to do. We live in a dark world, but we all need to know how to refuse to be part of something that we don’t agree with.”

Right from her modelling days, Amna has been vocally critical about how notions of beauty in Pakistan tend to revolve around fair skin. Has people’s perception of beauty changed over time?

“To a small extent, maybe, because there are so many people trying to bring about a change in mindset,” she says. “Only recently, I was attending a Basant event in Lahore and this older woman came up to me and told me, ‘You act so well — your skin looks so fresh here but on TV you look like a Smita Patel-type’! I think she even mentioned the word ‘Tamil Nadu’. I told her, straight-faced, that next time I would make sure that my make-up was done right and my director must not have figured out the right lighting. I just found it so funny because I have now become immune to such ridiculous comments.

“At the same time, I am thankful that so many people are liking my work,” she adds.

What’s next for her? Does Amna Ilyas — confident, sure of what she wants to do, finally doing the kind of work she enjoys – have time for a love life?

“The concept of settling down does interest me and I have options, but I don’t have time!” she reveals. “Most of my family has moved abroad so it is just me and my mother here in Karachi, and I have to take care of her. Then, there is my acting work, my business, my website. I have not signed on to a new script yet because the offers that have been coming my way lately have not interested me. But I am considering roles. There is so much to do.”

There is so much to do. But no doubt, Amna will try to make sure that it’s all memorable.

Originally published in Dawn, ICON, February 22nd, 2026