Do we like Fawad Khan?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and decent on character, but the record is thin on big public stands, so no top marks.
Fawad Khan is one of the biggest names in South Asian screen. He's a Pakistani actor who broke out on TV and then crossed into Bollywood, and fans on both sides of the border still fuss over him. That fame is also why he keeps getting dragged into stoushes that have nothing to do with acting.
The biggest of those is India-Pakistan politics. After the April 2025 Pahalgam attack, which killed 26 people, his comeback Bollywood film Abir Gulaal was reportedly barred from release in India, citing government sources, and an industry union renewed its call to boycott Pakistani artists. He posted that he was “Deeply saddened to hear the news of the heinous attack in Pahalgam.” That didn't stop the backlash.
It's a bit of a lose-lose spot. One Khaleej Times opinion piece argued he was being judged on loyalty at home for working abroad, noting he had never claimed to be a political spokesperson. Where you land on his silence versus his statement depends on what you expect an actor to say, but neither is harm.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up in his own words or acts. He played a gay man in Kapoor & Sons, and the director said they joked about how audiences would react. In 2022 he became UNDP Pakistan's National Goodwill Ambassador, at an event that screened a climate film calling for phasing out fossil fuels. We found no record of him backing anyone who pushes harm, though his public statements are few, so that's a thin record rather than a loud one.
The one legal wobble was in 2019, when Lahore authorities filed FIRs over a polio team's visit to a household linked to him. His manager said nothing could be further from the truth, that he was abroad and that he fully supports the anti-polio campaign. The Dawn report doesn't say how it ended, and we couldn't find a later outcome, so treat it as an unresolved allegation he denied.
The most recent noise was in late 2025, when singer Humaira Arshad and others questioned his place on the Pakistan Idol judging panel. Asked at a Lahore film launch whether he'd ever sung a song, he joked that he hadn't. Fair enough, it's a telly-judge squabble, not a character issue.