I WAS F***ING SCARED OF S THE STAGE...

... says Sushant Singh Rajput. But then he found theatre and things changed forever, shares the actor as he walks down memory lane

ushant Singh Rajput might come across as one of the most extrovert, talkative actors in Bollywood, but the 32-year-old hasn’t always been the same person. In fact, the MS Dhoni star reveals he was “very shy and introvert” before he started to perform on stage as a dancer, and then an actor.

“When I was in college, people thought that I would become Mr Fresher, or someone like that. But what they didn’t know was the fact that I was f ***** g scared of the stage. I was the same in school. I remember I was one of the nominees for head boy when I was in class XII. But to be the head boy, one has to give a speech, and I couldn’t do that. For the first 19-20 years of my life, I was very shy, and I never really liked talking to people,” he says.

However, the 31-year-old from Patna, who did his engineering from Delhi, changed, once he became a backup dancer in a dance troupe. “When I started dancing, I realised that I could communicate my emotions, through my movements, and that I don’t have to express myself only verbally to people. Later, when I started doing theatre as an actor, I told myself that I am playing a character on stage, and people would judge the character and not me. I could just say or do what I wanted to. And that’s how I got super confident,” he shares.

Sushant admits he never dreamt of becoming an actor, and he chanced upon the profession. “I was studying engineering, and that’s what I thought I liked. But then I found acting and dancing, and I said to myself, ‘This is something I like’. I thought I was making myself a c**t by studying,” he says.

However, the decision to take up acting as a profession wasn’t easy either. “I am a middle class boy. I needed to have a degree. It took me three years to muster that courage, and then I went to Bombay. I didn’t go to Bombay beca-use I had a few film offers or anything concrete. I went there because I wanted to do theatre,” he says.

For the first 19-20 years of my life, I was very shy, and I never really liked talking to people SUSHANT SINGH RAJPUT, ACTOR