Dawn Images

Warning: this article contains spoilers for the show Zanjeerain

What do actors do? Well, professionally speaking, they act. They bring stories to life by pretending to be someone they aren’t and sufficiently good ones can make you temporarily believe it’s all real.

Some people apparently din’t get the memo that this was temporary, because actor Anayah Shahid called out people watching her latest drama Zanjeerain for sending her hate over her role in the show.

In the show, her character Shirin is the head of the household staff of Sar Buland Khan (Danyal Zafar), a tribal chieftain. Over the last few episodes, it was revealed that she had tried to poison Sar Buland’s older brother Sherdil Khan (Ahsan Khan).

She does this at the behest of Sohrab (Reza Ali), Sar Buland’s cousin and right hand man who wants to usurp power by finishing off Sar Buland’s branch of the family.

In the last episode, Sohrab’s sister Bano discovers the plot, threatens to expose it and gets shot in the ensuing tussle with Sohrab. Shirin helps him cover his tracks.

Now while that’s the kind of twist that would make fans emotional — something Zanjeerain has made a name for (RIP Mudassir) — it surely has nothing to do with Shahid, who had to post a story explaining how acting works.

She addressed her message to “all the people cursing me, dragging me and writing passionate essays on my morals based on a fictional character’s decision” and ‘thanked’ them for their concern.

The actor said that if her acting ruined someone’s day or raised their blood pressure a bit, then the performance clearly worked “a little too well”.

She signed the message off as “the employee of the script,” which she is since the decisions she’s talking about aren’t actually hers.

What we can’t figure out is who is watching dramas and movies and thinking the characters are anywhere close to representative of the actors playing them.

How would that even work if someone plays different characters in different projects, which one is supposed to be them being themselves?

We can’t believe we have to say this, but don’t believe everything you see on TV and please understand that actors are just acting — it’s literally in the name.