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When the writer-director Nida Manzoor began dreaming up Season 2 of \u201cWe Are Lady Parts<\/a>,\u201d the comedy about an all-female Muslim punk band, one of her earliest ideas was a song: \u201cMalala Made Me Do It,\u201d a neo-Western hype track celebrating the activist Malala Yousafzai<\/a>. And then she had another idea: Maybe she could get Malala, whom she had met briefly at a talk, to star in the video.<\/p>\n She wrote Yousafzai a love letter. To Manzoor\u2019s surprise, Yousafzai, who loves comedy, responded. And this is why, in the second episode of the new season of \u201cWe Are Lady Parts,\u201d which premieres on Thursday on Peacock, Yousafzai appears on a horse, resplendent in a white cowboy hat, while the band irreverently sings her praises: \u201cNobel Prize at 17\/the baddest bitch you\u2019ve ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n Directing her idol brought on some fan-girl panic. \u201cI was, like, totally not cool,\u201d Manzoor said. \u201cBut it was joyful to work with her.\u201d<\/p>\n Joy has been an animating force for Manzoor, 34, the assured and wildly original creator of \u201cWe Are Lady Parts<\/a>\u201d and \u201cPolite Society<\/a>,\u201d a martial arts film about a teenage girl rebelling against her sister\u2019s arranged marriage. In a moment where nearly everything onscreen feels like a reboot, a reprise, a retread, a spinoff, Manzoor\u2019s works (an urban Muslim musical comedy, a surreal teenage eugenics-addled action caper) reliably feel like nothing else, each a microgenre unto itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI like to just make the genre smaller and smaller and be the only one in there,\u201d Manzoor said one morning in early May, speaking on a video call from her home in Bristol, England. She wore a blazing orange sweater over a bright green shirt and her affect was by turns giddy, introspective, confiding, resolute. Her work resists generalization \u2014 Manzoor resists it, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She grew up as the middle child in a Pakistani Muslim household, first in Singapore, and then in London. Her parents were liberal with screen time, and she absorbed it all \u2014 Singaporean comedies, Bollywood movies, Hong Kong action flicks, British and American films and television. She saw plenty of people who looked like her onscreen, but never in the Western shows she loved. Planning on a career in law, she studied politics at University College London, but the pull of film was undeniable. After defending her career change to her parents, she found a job as a runner at a postproduction house in Soho.<\/p>\n Soon she began making short films, including \u201c7.2<\/a>\u201d and \u201cArcade<\/a>,\u201d both high-stakes stories about teenagers that mingle action and comedy. Rachael Prior, the head of film at the British production company Big Talk Pictures, saw \u201c7.2\u201d (imagine \u201cKill Bill\u201d set in a snobbish high school) a decade ago.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt was like a complete shot of adrenaline,\u201d Prior said. Most short films show potential, but here, Prior thought, was a fully formed artist. \u201cShe felt like a unicorn, to be honest,\u201d Prior said. She pushed her company to work with Manzoor and has since remained in her professional life.<\/p>\n If Manzoor\u2019s aesthetic was fully formed, her politics were still nebulous. The heroines of \u201c7.2\u201d and \u201cArcade\u201d are young white women. \u201cI thought I still had to center whiteness because that was what I was seeing,\u201d Manzoor said. But some of her early meetings and offers were radicalizing. She felt as though she was being asked to either efface her identity or allow it to be exploited, rubber-stamping other writers\u2019 works that depicted Muslim women, typically Muslim women experiencing trauma.<\/p>\n \u201cThat galvanized me, like, Oh no, wait \u2014 I do want to talk about my personal identity as a woman of color,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t want it to be just trauma victim stories.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In 2018, after directing other people\u2019s shows (\u201cEnterprice<\/a>,\u201d \u201cDoctor Who<\/a>\u201d) and seeing some projects stall in development, she was invited to make a \u201cblap,\u201d<\/a> a comedy featurette for England\u2019s Channel 4. Having been inspired by several punk musicians of color whom she had met in London\u2019s art scene, she created a short version of \u201cWe Are Lady Parts.\u201d<\/p>\n Anjana Vasan, an actress also raised in Singapore, starred in the short and later in the series. Though she was not raised in a Muslim household, she felt immediately drawn to Manzoor\u2019s characters. \u201cI really do think that she loves women,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd she writes them in the way we see ourselves, in our vulnerability, messiness, idiosyncrasies and silliness.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Following the blap, \u201cWe Are Lady Parts\u201d was commissioned for six episodes. Manzoor began writing them, which also meant writing the band\u2019s music, which she composed with her sister, brother and brother-in-law. Those giddy, impudent numbers include \u201cBashir With the Good Beard,\u201d \u201cVoldemort Under My Headscarf\u201d and \u201cAin\u2019t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me.\u201d<\/p>\n A punk aesthetic meant that the music did not have to be particularly sophisticated. But Manzoor wanted it witty, angry and unapologetic. Punk is a visceral form and she was excited for numbers that would require the actors to use their whole bodies \u2014 even in head scarves, even in a niqab. To put Muslim women in a punk band would challenge the stereotype that Muslim women are submissive, quiet, humorless. And in the four-member ensemble, plus the band\u2019s manager, Momtaz, Manzoor could show that Muslim women weren\u2019t a monolith, that they could be as varied in their affects and strengths and dress and desires as anyone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s a serious political point, which Manzoor tends to make in unserious ways. \u201cSilliness is hugely important to me,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd sometimes it is the most important thing because there\u2019s something really dehumanizing about showing Muslim women as not funny.\u201d But the push-pull between seriousness and silliness is something that she often struggles with (\u201cI torture myself in some way,\u201d she said), as do the other writers on the show. They\u2019re aware that there are so few representations of Muslim women, which makes any representation unusually sensitive.<\/p>\n Some of those writers felt pressure to be more political, which led to charged conversations and a major Season 2 plot point that finds the band rebelling against the strictures of a record deal. The lead singer, Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), pushes for a more explicitly political sound, but Bisma (Faith Omole), the bassist, insists that their \u201cjokey, winky\u201d style is political, too.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are political just by existing, just by taking up this space, we are political,\u201d Bisma says. And by existing, they can provide an example to others.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Juliette Motamed, the actress who plays Ayesha, the band\u2019s drummer, wishes that shows like this had been available when she was growing up. \u201cIt\u2019s something that I could have really used as a kid,\u201d she said, \u201cand something that might have made a lot of things make sense to me much earlier on.\u201d<\/p>\n The first season of \u201cWe Are Lady Parts\u201d won a Peabody Award and a BAFTA for best comedy writing. Manzoor has since been flooded with other offers, not all of which she finds interesting. \u201cI just am led by feelings, which sounds horribly cringe, just led by what excites me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n She has a few projects in development: a dark sci-fi TV comedy, a spy action movie with a few weirdo twists. But she joked that maybe she could take it easy. \u201cMaybe now I can retire,\u201d she joked. \u201cI have Malala in my show. I can stop.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n