Saqib Saleem plays a crack reporter in Crime Beat, co-directed by Sudhir Mishra. Captain of Mumbai’s Celebrity Cricket League team and brother of actress Huma Qureshi, Saqib has also turned producer recently. A t2 chat.

Welcome to journalism. Is this your first role as a journalist?

Yes, and I have grown to empathise with journalists and journalism far more after doing the show. I play a crime journalist and, though I don’t get to deal with crime journalists in real life, I meet a lot of entertainment reporters. They are all looking for their story — what can become their headline tomorrow.

Yes, but crime journalism is a lot different from the entertainment beat...

Yes, it is a different ball game. You are sometimes risking your life for a story. And who knows how many people you have to meet just to corroborate your story! Playing this part made me realise what a journalist, especially a crime journalist, has to go through to put together his facts. It also made me understand the moral responsibility journalism has towards society. In a world where people are slinging abuses and hurling curses at each other on news channels for TRP and propaganda, it is the media’s responsibility to present facts not coloured by opinion. There’s a lot of good journalism that you still see in print media, but on television, I think we have reduced news to TRP-driven shows.

It’s always a bit of a task in this world, right, where before the newspaper gets to publish it, the electronic media has had 20 versions of the information out there? But one has to figure out what, when and how. That is very important for a story. And I think a print journalist has to work on that far more than the television journalist.

Tell us about your role.

The character I play has a very interesting arc. He shifts from bring a print journalist to a TV presenter. Going through that journey was very exciting. I got to play a lot of layers and show a lot of vulnerabilities and insecurities of this character.

The trailer reveals that the story you broke got printed with your editor’s byline.

Yes. That is a pivotal moment in his career when he decides to shift from print to TV journalism. This character starts as a stringer, without a full-time job. He is given a job by a big legal publication but on condition that he has to do some stories. And in the search for those stories, he comes across this Binni Chaudhary case where everyone tells him not to do that story. But the journalistic keeda in him doesn’t let him stop, and he starts uncovering one truth after the other. There are kidnappings, ransom calls, a scam... a lot of things in the plot.

Who is this Binni Chaudhary?

He is shown to be one of the biggest gangsters of the country, but some people mistake him for being a Robin Hood. He has been out of the country for 10 years. How he comes back, how his case opens, and how this journalist, single-handedly, gets to him even before the cops — that is what the story is about.

You have acted in quite a few genres lately.

I’m a greedy actor. I want to be given good opportunities that make me really chew into the part. I want impactful and meaty roles. I’m not very genre-specific. It has to be a good story that engages me. Whether it is Crime Beat, Citadel or Kakuda before that, I’ve always tried to do different things.

Before Comedy Couple (a 2020 film co-starring Shweta Basu Prasad), you had said in interviews that you were writing your own stand-up comedy material. Given the situation in the country, especially after the India’s Got Latent fiasco, are you still intent on doing stand-up comedy?

Aj kal jaisa maahol hai uss mein toh stand-up comedy kam hi karna behtar hai, mujhe lag raha hai. There is a moral responsibility of an artiste, especially a stand-up comic, to tread a fine line. Sometimes one does cross it to crack a joke or make people laugh. But I also feel the uproar that I see around is also not fully justified. There are far bigger, graver things that we are dealing with as a country, and we should direct our energies or opinions on those things. A lot has been said. I don’t want to add to the noise by airing another opinion.

As the captain of Mumbai Heroes in Celebrity Cricket League, do you practise round the year or just before the tournament?

We do a month’s crash course. We are all busy with our respective careers but that’s one thing that we are very excited about. A month before the tournament is all we get. To align everybody’s schedules is problematic. But we all love cricket, so we somehow put in that much time.

You are a wicket-keeper, right?

I keep, I bowl. I bat. I want to do everything on the cricket field. I’d like to call myself a complete team player who can do all the things that my team requires me to do.

What comes next from you after Crime Beat?

I’ve started a production company. That’s keeping me very busy. You’ll hear announcements very soon. I’m starting a series, hopefully, next month. As an actor, I want parts that I can sink my teeth into. I want to push my boundaries so that I can always show a different side of me as an actor when I come out with any show or film.

Will Saqib the producer be interested to cast Saqib the actor? Or is production too much to handle?

We have an able team to pull off production. I am primarily an actor who wants to produce and eventually direct films.

Sometimes, as an actor, you are looking for parts. And when you produce the show yourself, you are far more in control of how it shapes up. And you like that, because you want to be fully convinced about what you’re doing. Producing your own content allows you to do that. I’m still very new as a producer, so I’m still learning every day as to what works and what doesn’t. I feel there are a lot of talented people out there. I want to be a producer who empowers new and unique film-making voices out there.

Which would be the next genre that you’d want to take up?

I want to do an out-and-out romantic film — a love story for the ages. I have done rom-coms. I feel when we make love stories now, we make them very frivolous, very social media-driven. But today’s generation is also a lot about loving truly, madly, deeply. I want to find a story in that space for myself. I would want to do a Rockstar or a Tamasha — films that feel a lot more than just a boy and girl meet and separate because of some family conflict, and they come back together. There has to be more to a film about love than just a love story.