A COMEBACK WORTH THE WAIT
RAHUL DEV’S IN A CHARMED PHASE OF LIFE, WITH A SERIES OF WELL-RECEIVED WEB RELEASES
Rahul, whose favourite designer is Rajesh Pratap, loves aesthetics and can’t wait for all of it to find their way into his work too. “I choose the curtains at home. I love earthy clothing and prefer brushed cotton, brushed khadi and linen. But all this is not happening in my work. It has started, but I want more!
Rahul agrees that cinema today is changing. “Movies earlier used to be regressive and stereotypical. I am not saying this for every film. However, some stereotypical films would run and how! But Google made the world smaller and we got exposed to Chinese, Korean and Iranian films, as the audience got sharper,” says Rahul, pointing out the sea change in audience perceptions. Now, films and content have become more competitive than ever
More than two decades ago, auteur Mukul Anand had discovered the Delhi-based model Rahul, trained his skills and put him through acting courses. For his debut, the filmmaker even cast Rahul as a villain in Dus opposite actors Sanjay Dutt, Salman Khan and Vinod Khanna. But Mukul died of a cardiac arrest on location for the film, and the film was shelved.
A little later than expected, Rahul did finally debut— against Sunny Deol, however, in the 2000f i l m Champion. And, the industry found a new villain. The model got his big break in cinema with all its commercial trappings. Champion gave him 12 nominations, 6 of which were for the category of a newcomer. “But all those awards went to a genius called Hrithik Roshan who was just brilliant,” says Rahul with a smile. “But I still won 3 best villain awards.”
THE SUPERB VILLAIN
Rahul remained for years to come in the role of ‘villain’. Even as he flourished in Bollywood under the tag, he was cast as a villain in 2002Telugu film Takkari Donga opposite Mahesh Babu, which also starred Bipasha Basu and Lisa Ray.
But he looks back at the opportunity rather fondly. Elaborating on how he got the role, he tells us. “I was once in a ‘Gibberish Class’ conducted by the master actor Paintal Saab,” says Rahul. “He’d performed a beautiful story of a child and a butterfly and I enacted a man tied to a railway track, who escapes death. I had to speak gibberish there and not use any spoken word from any language. That performance not only got me a memento from Paintal saab but also helped me get cast in the Telugu film.”
Rahul had a lot of fun with Mahesh Babu during his Tollywood debut. “When I was cast for the film, I could at least speak Hindi,” remembers Rahul with a chuckle at what is coming.
“But neither Bipasha nor Lisa could speak Hindi as Bipasha had just come from Kolkata and Lisa had come from abroad. Mahesh and I had a lot of fun laughing at the gibberish they spoke.”
After Takkari Donga, Rahul did 30 films, in Telugu and Hindi. But then many of those films started seeming rather the same to him.
“They just needed a well-built man, and the focus was on my body and not so much on my acting,” sighs the actor in recollection, who believed even then he had so much more to offer to the industry.
TURNING COP IN REEL LIFE
After losing his wife Rina to cancer in May of 2009, Rahul went into hibernation, but only after he’d completed all the projects he’d signed earlier. Now, a little over a decade since, he has gotten back with renewed vigour.
His recent OTT escapade, Raat Baaki Hai, in which he plays a cop Rajesh Ahlawat, has proved his beliefs, showcasing his acting skills. But a modest Rahul merely credits his director Avinash Das for the nuanced subtlety in his performance.
“Avinash allowed me to change the way I spoke and use the lingo I wanted,” he elaborates. Rahul also played cop roles in many offbeat films, too, such as Kalpana Lajmi’s 2003-film Kyon and Kushan Nandy’s
2003-thriller 88 Antop Hill. Incidentally, his late father Hari Dev was a cop who had won the gallantry award twice from the then President V.V. Giri and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. “I’ve seen my dad at work. But he hardly came home. During the riots in
1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, he didn’t come home for 17 days. I saw him unshaved for the first time then and I knew that I didn’t want to be a cop,” recollects Rahul. “Both my brother and I are well-educated, but we didn’t want to be in the IPS or IAS. Our father didn’t tell us to be cops either,” recollects Rahul, adding that’s a legacy he would follow with respect to his son — of not telling him what to do so that he charts a path of his own choosing.
Despite his distaste for being a cop in real life, Rahul loved doing the cop roles in Kyon and 88 Antop Hill. “Though they were not commercial hits, I want to continue doing films like that,” states Rahul. “I know I may not be paid much, but I want to explore the actor within me.”
IN SEARCH OF MORE
And indeed life has been good to Rahul in the past year, as even the actor admits it himself. For starters, he’s been shooting a lot and has had a couple of releases. “I have six more releases, including a film with Vikram Bhatt, a big project for which I have an NDA,” he reveals. “But I’ve been blessed that I could shoot in Punjab with a crew of 150 and an uninvited crowd of 2,000 locals who insisted on clicking selfies with me.”
But was that not scary for him given the pandemic situation? “I was not wearing a mask because I had to be seen on camera and was doing hand-to-hand combats, but thanks to my fitness, I have been safe,” says the actor.