Abhay Deol’s lessons from life

It’s ironical that Abhay Deol who is probably considered as one of the most unconventional actor in Bollywood today made his debut with a commercial flick — Socha Na Tha.

An out and out entertainer, Deol’s first film failed to work at the box-office but today the actor credits all that he is to his failed movies. “Socha Na Tha, my debut film got people talking about me  even though it didn’t work at the box-office. It was an attempt at the box office and clearly, it didn’t work. What is funny is that before doing all these roles that supposedly are different, I attempted to do commercial cinema. The failure was disappointing and the phase after that was really bad. But I had the courage to see through it and today I am happy with the way things have turned out.”

Ask him if he has been typecast as the ‘hero who doesn’t do the usual stuff’ and he retorts that there might have been such a phase before Dev D, but not anymore. “It’s not like I don’t get offers for commercial films — they come and go. In between, there were not too many people offering me ‘normal’ roles.” Ask him what he means by ‘normal’ and he says, “I can’t play the larger-than-life hero. I am not your typical hero who will beat up 10 guys. That doesn’t happen in real life and I like films where the protagonist is vulnerable to the extent of being naive. There lies a certain amount of strength in that too.”

Deol says that he is probably drawn to such films because he was exposed to world cinema from a very young age.
“In fact, I completely stopped watching Hindi films at one point because I couldn’t relate to anything that was happening on screen. I started watching Iranian and Spanish flicks and realised how wide the horizon for films really is. If you compare the two, Bollywood and Hollywood are quite similar. So it was actually world cinema that exposed me to a diverse range of films,” he says.

Ask him which he would think is more important between critical acclaim and box-office success and he says one could lead to another. “Film making is first a business and then a creative outlet. So, of course, money is important too,” concludes Deol.