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A National Award doesn’t guarantee anything: Rao
His film is India’s entry to the 2018 Oscars. But Rajkummar Rao feels awards don’t promise anything in Bollywood
Actor Rajkummar Rao is unstoppable. After the success of Bareilly Ki Barfi, his new release Newton has been selected as India’s official entry to the Oscars 2018. And his drastic physical transformation — a paunch and half shaved head — for the web series Bose is getting wide appreciation.
“It feels great and I’m content,” says the actor, who believes that this momentum in his career began today, four years back, with the film Shahid that fetched him the National Award. The Hansal Mehta directorial was a biographical film based on the life of lawyer and human rights activist Shahid Azmi, who was assassinated in 2010 in Mumbai.
Rao who played the lead in the film, received critical appreciation and also the National Award that gave him the much-needed push. He says, “It’s a great feeling to get a National Award at such an early stage of your career. But then, it doesn’t guarantee you anything, especially in films. And personally, I had never thought that since I have won an award, something should come my way. There is no formula to success. The only way to go about it is to be honest and that’s what I do.”
However, the actor admits that winning the National Award has opened more doors for him. “I won’t deny that after I won the award, people started taking notice of me. The number of scripts I read now is much more than I was reading earlier. So, that has definitely changed,” he says, adding, “People start trusting you as an actor. Filmmakers have a kind of respect for me that I’ve always aimed for.”
The actor, who has starred in critically-acclaimed films such as City Lights (2014) and Aligarh (2016), says that he had never planned his career and has always gone with the flow. He says, “I take things as they come. I don’t believe in connecting too many dots. I just focus on one film. I put all my heart and soul into it, and once it’s over, I move on to the other one. That’s my mantra.”