Eman Ayaz, the actor believed to be playing Farah in the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, has said she found out – like the rest of us – that the project had been cancelled online.
“Last week I experienced the most devastating moment of my career,” Eman Ayaz said in a video shared on X. Her brother messaged her asking if she was okay, which prompted a puzzled response, so he sent her a link to the news and then she realised what was going on. “And that’s where I read it has been shelved forever,” Ayaz said. “I was just in total shock.”
Ayaz, 26 years old, does not name the project she was involved in, for NDA reasons. Nor does she mention Ubisoft or Prince of Persia or Sands of Time. But the timelines match up – Ubisoft announced it was cancelling the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake last week – and Ayaz has allegedly retweeted Prince of Persia content on her X account before, though I can’t find these tweets – perhaps they have been deleted. That’s what people on Reddit seem to suggest.
“We were all really looking forward to it being released this year”
In her video, Ayaz said this project was “life-changing” for her, because there aren’t many big roles for Canadian Pakistanis, who tend to be “unplaceable” from a casting point of view. She said she landed the job three years ago after a “rigorous” audition process and was planning to use its release to springboard a move to the US. This was her stepping-stone moment but now it’s not to be.
“I have dedicated the last three years of my life to this project,” Ayaz said; she even went as far as acting with a broken foot, apparently. “And I’ve waited and waited for the day it was finally going to be released and I could finally talk about it.” She filmed marketing material recently, she said, within the past couple of months. “We were all really looking forward to it being released this year, so it felt like emotional whiplash to find this out in such a random way.”
Because the project has been cancelled, Ayaz can’t apparently publicly attach her name to it. “It’s just as if it never existed,” she said, “which is a hard thing to wrap your head around when it’s been your life for so long. This project existed, even if the world never got to see it.”
Ubisoft announced the Sands of Time remake cancellation last week as part of major restructuring at the company, closing two studios, cancelling six projects, and delaying several other games. The Sands of Time remake was the only cancelled game named, and the blanket reason given for the cancellations was the games “do not meet the new enhanced quality [and] more selective portfolio prioritisation criteria”. The Sands of Time project had been struggling for a while, however, having been announced in 2020 and suffering multiple delays since then.
The restructuring knocked a third off of Ubisoft’s share price, and strikes are expected in France, where Ubisoft is headquartered, in response to a voluntary redundancy initiative.
