The colour of my skin was appreciated in the West: Adil
Actor Adil Hussain is in a happy space after the trailer of popular American TV series, Star Trek: Discovery season 3, released. The actor shares that the “opportunity just fell from the sky”, and he never imagined that he would ever work in the Star Trek series.
Not spilling the beans about his role, the 56-yearold actor tells us, “I play someone who was given a responsible position. I had seen the two series, and fell in love with the story of how the crew of the US Discovery travels to the future, over 900 years after the events of the original Star Trek series.” On his experience of meeting the Star trek crew, Adil says they felt like family. “People welcomed me with open arms. I told them that I grew up in a town where newspapers would come three days late. And I spent 17 years in that town and here I am today. They all realised that it is a journey I had to make from a small town in Goalpara in Assam to where I am now,” he shares.
As an actor, Adil admits that it has been an uphill journey to the West, more so because he grew up in an environment where he was “bullied” for his skin colour. “I was dissuaded to become an actor. People used to say ‘tu toh kala hai, tu kya acting karega’. When the cameramen in Assamese film would come to know that Adil is in the scene, they would call for more lights (laughs),” says Adil, adding, “It was engraved in my consciousness that I am not good enough. It took me 35 years to come out of that.”
But when he first went to England with his play Othello, things changed. “People praised my performance and made me realise that I’m good enough. I was called ‘Tall, dark and handsome’. My European girlfriend would say ‘Oh God, you have a body of chocolate’. Nobody had ever looked at me like that, and I realised that I wasn’t invalid,” Adil recalls.
Having worked in Life of Pie (2012) and won the Norwegian national award for Best Actor for What Will People Say (2017), Adil shares that the West has contributed a lot to his career. Though having Indian actors in international projects brings diversity to the series, Adil feels the representation used to be somewhat tokenism which is now changing. “Now, it also reflects the demography of the society. There was a time when Krishna Pandit Bhanji had to change his name to Ben Kingsley in order to get roles. But not anymore. It is no longer about the glorification of poverty and struggling immigrants,” Adil concludes.