Babil Khan’s new film Logout is about the dangers of social media addiction, greed for followers and its impact on one’s mind. While the actor plays the role of a desperate influencer, dying to reach 10 million followers, the real Babil Khan is nothing like it. In an exclusive conversation with SCREEN, Babil recalled a time when he threw his phone in the ocean when a brand called him for a shoot.
He shared, “I threw my phone once in the Andaman ocean.” When asked why, he explained, “Because somebody called me, I was like, ‘I am scuba diving, what do you want?’ He said, ‘You will have to come back, you have this brand to do.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I will just come, give me five minutes.’ And the next thing I did is just threw my phone in the ocean. I am not kidding. This is a true story.”
When asked if it had any consequences later, an unapologetic Babil questioned, “What consequences?” He said, “I live life on my own terms and nobody can stop me from doing that. I live it to the fullest. I live with full emotions. I cry, I feel the hate, I respond to the hate as well. I am a shy person, but I don’t shy away from living my life.”
Babil wasn’t always like this. Like many others, he too, was addicted to social media until he realised that “nothing was real.” He said, “I was loving it. I was like ‘Oh my God, so many people want me, like me’, but they didn’t.” When asked what made him realise it, the Qala actor credited his upbringing. He said, “My upbringing has been such that I have this habitual nature of reflecting on my actions. For some time, I believed all these people and love is for real, but then the same people flipped and then I realised, nothing was real. Some people would randomly comment, ‘Like for Irrfan’. I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean.”
Babil believes social media is making the new generations quite aggressive, who treat their phones like a “part of their body”. He said, “Social media is like a drug. It encourages you to be addicted to it because it gives you dopamine release. The more you are chasing it, the more you need it. It has almost become like a body part.”
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However, he said, it was not impossible to be away from the dark side of social media. The actor shared, “The way we use it is upto us. If you will see my Instagram, it has random stuff. Sometimes I am putting up a poetry, somedays randomly singing something. But, I am not addicted to it. I post my stuff and I leave. Because the more I will scroll, the more I will compare myself to others. And the more I do that, the more hate is building in me and the more hate is building in me, the more aggressive I get. That hate is a problem.”
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When asked if having followers helps him with roles, Babil shared, “It gets me brands, but not films. There is that culture that you do get films because you have followers and everything but I have not experienced it yet. I come from a family where I have to prove myself as an actor before I get on set.”
