Faiza Saleem gets away with being very, very rude.
She refers to actress Hania Aamir’s dimples as ‘khadday’ and asks Abbas Ali Jafri if he has hair lice. She sits across Yasir Hussain and Bilal Abbas Khan and recounts their bad career choices. She’s offensive, inappropriate and quite proud of it too. And she manages to do it all because she’s delivering her wisecracks while ‘in character’ as a rotund, sarcastic, obnoxious ‘Dadi’.
Dadi is quite the YouTube star. Bespectacled, her head covered and with a silver pandaan by her side, she’s prone to wiggling her eyebrows lasciviously and switching from flirt to a bad-mouthed thug in a matter of seconds. The famous guests that she invites for short snippet interviews are in for a tough time in her hot seat.
“She’s my favourite amongst all the characters that I have played so far,” Faiza tells me. “If I were to say all the things that Dadi says, people would stop talking to me. But Dadi is my alter-ego. I can be completely rude and it just gets laughed off.”