Huma Qureshi on ‘Toxic,’ a Sign-Language Assassin Film She Produced Herself and Why She Won’t Play ‘the Impoverished Brown Woman With a Problem’

It is a warm May evening on the Croisette and Huma Qureshi is, by her own cheerful reckoning, in the middle of everything. She is at Cannes for the fourth time. She has been to Berlin twice, Toronto once, Busan. Venice and Sundance remain on the list.

This year she is here for the Red Sea Film Foundation Women in Cinema event at the Cannes Film Festival – which brought together participants from across the Arab world, Africa and India – and as an ambassador for BMW, whose carpet she walked. There is no film in competition. “Not with a film, unfortunately,” she says. “Another time, next year, inshallah.”

Related Stories

Critics’ Week 2026: Marine Atlan's 'La Gradiva,' Aina Clotet's 'Viva' Take Top Awards

Mick Jagger Set to Star in Alice Rohrwacher’s 'Three Incestuous Sisters' Joining Josh O’Connor, Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan, Jessie Buckley, Isabella Rossellini

The inshallah lands less like resignation than like the patience of someone who is building toward something. In the 14 years since Anurag Kashyap’s epic “Gangs of Wasseypur” introduced her to the world at this same festival in 2012, she has ranged across commercial Bollywood spectacle, streaming prestige and international festival selections with a deliberateness that is, she says, only partly planned. The rest is the logic of following what she actually wants to do.

Right now, that means more than she can fully talk about. There is the Yash-starrer “Toxic,” directed by Geethu Mohandas, in which she plays a character named Elizabeth. There is “Baby Do Die Do,” a Mumbai-set noir she co-produced with her brother Saqib Saleem through their banner Saleem Siblings – and in which she also stars, as a deaf-mute assassin, in a role that required learning sign language. There is the fifth season of “Maharani,” the political drama that became, she argues, one of India’s most-watched shows while the English-language press was largely looking elsewhere. And there are several more films she is not yet permitted to announce, waiting for the producers to move first.

“Tons of things,” she says, with the ease of someone who has made peace with holding a great deal in the air at once.

What she can say about “Toxic” is measured but not cautious. The pairing of Yash’s mass-market stature and Mohandas’s background in finely observed, intimate filmmaking is what drew her in. When Mohandas first brought the project to her, Qureshi remembers telling the director that this was her “Barbie moment” – a filmmaker who had built a reputation through smaller, precise films suddenly stepping into something on an entirely different order of scale.

“To just call it a spectacle film would be doing an injustice to it,” she says. “Although it has all those elements that a big blockbuster film has, it has a lot of layered storytelling, a lot of very interesting characters.”

The character she plays is part of what Qureshi describes as the film’s central organizing idea: that every figure in it carries some version of the toxicity named in the title, without the film appointing judges or victims.

“I just love the ambition of what we are trying to do,” she says of the film’s plans for a western theatrical release. “When we manage to do that, it will be amazing for all of us in the film, but it’s going to open so many more opportunities for films to have that kind of theatrical release as well.”

If “Toxic” sits at one end of the spectrum Qureshi now occupies, “Baby Do Die Do” sits at the other. The film is set in the criminal underworld of Mumbai, shot through with the atmosphere of classic noir, and directed by Nachiket Samant. A July release is currently being planned.

“It’s not just an out-and-out revenge tale,” she says. “It’s got many, many elements to it.”

To play Baby Karmakar, the deaf-mute assassin at the center of it, Qureshi learned sign language. The challenge she was solving was not just physical but structural: how does a performance register depth and complexity when the usual instruments are removed? The project also marks the first feature under the Saleem Siblings banner – a reflection of a growing conviction that waiting to be cast in the films she wants to make is a slower road than building those films herself.

“Maharani” – in which Qureshi plays a rural, semi-literate woman who becomes chief minister of a state – began, she recalls, in an atmosphere of skepticism. Nobody believed in it. The character sounded, to many, like a curiosity. What the show did, she argues, was address its intended audience without condescension, in a language they recognized, about questions that genuinely mattered to them.

“It’s arguably India’s biggest show that people watch,” she says. “When it released, a lot of English media kind of ignored it because they didn’t get it.”

She traces the show’s longevity to the specificity of its writing – the character never spoke above the audience she was trying to reach, and that refusal to condescend turned out to be exactly what gave the show its reach. Season 5, she says, will challenge whatever audiences think they have figured out about the character she has inhabited for four years. The biggest evolution, in her view, is still ahead.

The film festival circuit functions, for Qureshi, as something more than a promotional cycle. It is where she meets filmmakers who send her material to read not because she might act in it but because they want a perspective: what works, what fails to translate, what might need reimagining for a different culture. A filmmaker once sent her a script written for a white woman, she recalls, asking what might or might not land in India.

“I just really enjoy that kind of creative exchange,” she says.

What she is less interested in, when it comes to working in the West, is the casting archetype she has spent years watching get offered to South Asian actresses. She is specific about what she means.

“I also don’t like playing these kind of impoverished brown woman with a problem, kind of, who needs to be rescued, kind of part,” she says. “We all want to be playing characters that are authentic to us, but also sort of put a certain spotlight on our real experiences and challenges and capabilities.”

She has representation in the West – the specific agency, she says, is in flux at the moment of the interview, so she declines to name it. The intention behind it is clearer: she wants to work on projects that are, in her phrasing, “more territorial agnostic” – material that doesn’t require her to occupy a fixed ethnic function within a pre-drawn cultural map. The opportunity for that, she believes, is more real now than it has been, as the success of performers like Priyanka Chopra Jonas demonstrates what genuine cross-border commercial weight can look like.

“My learning has been not to be too attached to the previous version of yourself,” she says, “because that just makes you stagnant.”