Kubbra Sait on how ‘Foundation’ marked ‘monumental growth’ for her life and career

Starring in the book-to-screen adaptation ‘Foundation’, actor Kubbra Sait gets candid about playing intergalactic extremist Phara Keaen alongside Leah Harvey and Lee Pace, and the gory prop she kept as a souvenir

A far cry from her terrifying character in Foundation, Kubbra Sait is a bundle of energy, smiles and anecdotes as she speaks of her work on the Apple TV+ latest sci-fi adventure series that is an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s famed books of the same name. “It’s always interesting to get into a world that is unknown to you; as an actor, you’re constantly stepping into minds and psyches you’ve never experienced,” she says over a video call from her Mumbai home, “What you see on screen is drawn from the real world anyway; it was exciting to perform these lines that were conceived in the 50s.”

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The series follows a thousand-year saga of The Foundation, a band of exiles who discover that the only way to save the Galactic Empire from destruction is to defy it. The show taps into some wild but probably not impossible themes of genetic dynasties, time travel and intergalactic politics. The show stars Jared Harris as Harry Seldon, a mathematician and developer of psycho-history, Lou Llobel, his protégé who has left behind a life of prayer, Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin a famed warrior who has a connection to the future, and Lee Pace as a series of genetic clones who rule the universe as Empire.