Actor Olivier Lafont’s tryst with mythology

We all know Olivier Lafont. We may not recognise the name but we certainly recognise the face. The French actor and author, a Mumbai resident since 2002, has acted in over 70 ad films on television, has acted in a few plays and is known for writing the award-winning feature film Hari Om. You know him as Father Samuel from Guzaarish, or Suhas Tandon from 3 Idiots.

Lafont is also an established writer and his first full-length novel Warrior, released last week. The book is an action-packed adventure story rooted in mythology. It was shortlisted for the Tibor Jones South Asia prize. “Warrior is set in India. Parts of it will be very familiar to Indian readers, while other parts will give Indian readers something I think they’ve never seen before,” he says.

His first published work Purgatory: Gun of God, was a novelette set in America and themed on what’s becoming the author’s favourite genre - fantasy. In fact, his first introduction to India, was through the mythical tales of Amar Chitra Katha at age 7. “I’ve always been into fantasy and mythology. I think my father, who is a historian and was himself passionate about Greek and Roman mythology, must have inspired my interest in the subject. Now, as an adult, I consider fantasy a really magnificent palette, creatively, to work with and tell the stories that are interesting and that matter to me,” he says. 

A French polygot, Lafont has a degree in English Literature, is proficient in Spanish and is fluent in Hindi too. “I didn’t know any Hindi at all until I came back to India from University. I then taught myself to read and write the language,” he says. “I think the story would read beautifully in Indian languages. I hope my book will be translated, though! I’d love to see Warrior in Hindi.”

The story for Warrior was actually sparked during the writing of a script of a feature film in 2001, before Lafont had even moved to Mumbai. “I wanted to write something epic, something that touched on my earliest love for Indian stories. I remembered what really impacted me about the Mahabharata, which was these really intense dramas of feuding families, cousins who had grown up together and were now waging war against each other - and all against this epic backdrop where gods and demigods and rakshasas become involved with this cataclysmic war. I wanted to write a story about a man coming from a shattered family, but that would also have that scale and tragic majesty and the urgency of a world heading to ruin. So I created Saam, and I wrote Warrior.” The script remained in the back drawer as Lafont’s move to Mumbai found him immersed in film work. It surfaced recently when he decided to turn it into a novel. As Lafont says, “the ideas that really matter and are most interesting to me tend to come together and kind of haunt me.”

Having also written screenplays, the actor-writer prefers novels because they allow for an open-ended exploration and cultivation of a world; there is utter freedom, and no limits.

Lafont’s book is one of many that are coming into the market purportedly feeding a growing desire to read about mythology and its retellings. He considers this trend to be the result of an expansion of different media that has allowed this long-standing interest to be explored and to flourish in many new forms, be it television, animation, games, merchandising. “There is a massive number of avid and discerning readers and the literature scene in India is a huge, growing market,” he says.

Warrior has been released by Penguin India.