The Emraan Hashmi you never knew

Emraan Hashmi is a surprising guest. Surprising because when you meet the actor, you do not expect to find a person whose outlook so differs from his resounding body of work. Because the man who forged his career as B-Town’s eternal ‘serial kisser’, the man who first touched our consciousness not for his exacting acting but for the all-forgivingly sweet chi-chang at the BO in an out-and-out commercial pot-boiler — that man is consciously missing in the Emraan who is visiting us at DNA.

The Emraan we’re hosting is, by turn, passionate about his craft, and pensive about his choices, visibly turning inward, measuring every word uttered by some internal benchmark. This is a man who has walked the path less trodden, perhaps even at the very first instance, when his mainstream histrionics, all that sock-jaw sex and intrigue-heavy escapades ran away with the big numbers on the marquee. As we all know, Emraan is credited for bringing sensuality front and centre, smack-on-the-lips sudden, after decades of the big screen hiding behind flowers and doves cuddling to depict, well, romance-in-motion. This is a man who rates among his favourite films Leo Di Caprio’s Aviator: ‘I like the way Di Caprio’s shown the OCD disorder’. Who can understand nuanced brilliance (such as, that the confounding-to-many Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an intense love story). Despite all of this, his initial innings were roles shunned by the A-list actors, roles alienating the critics but embracing the front benchers. Luckily for him, if there is one sound heard over and above the cacophony of critics and co-stars, it is the ka-chang of the BO.

Now being considered well within reach of that elusive ring of top slot actors, that golden circle that grasps so firmly ‘the three Khans and Hrithik’ as industry insiders are wont to outline, but which, as we know is flexible, dependant on the wiles of the BO — expanding to encompass all the brave ’uns who can make the numbers crunch harder. Emraan knows this well. We talk of heroines, ready to work with him after refusals in the past. Whilst speaking of this vindication, there is a wry, if humorous note Emraan strikes: ‘They’d (heroines) rather do with the accepted emotions on screen, of love and comedy and funny films. I find those films kind of irritating. I like darker cinema, I like it. And that was the road I wanted to walk on. So, they, it took them some time to understand what I was doing and they understand it even more after an actor gives three hits, back-to-back and his films open up to Rs 10 crore at the box office. So, that you can’t argue with. Then, you can’t sit down and argue with a successful film. When the market and consumer is out there that want to watch it.”

Now, after Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, after The Dirty Picture, Emraan is perhaps finding the space he wanted to explore, that ‘darker cinema’. And Shanghai will allow him more of the same:  “Every career graph has a tipping point and when I do films like Jannat and Murder, these films are formulaic Emraan Hashmi films, but if you give them time and again to the audience, they will just get sick of it. It might be working right now, but you can’t constantly give them those formulaic Sufi songs, sex, serenading the woman, eroticism and immoral issues on screen. So, then you have people like Dibakar (director Dibakar Banerjee) who come to you with something fresh and then you can’t say no because you want to give the audience something new. So that they get a breather from what you’ve been doing and they see you in a different light…”