BEING MIR
When writer-director Meghna Gulzar told Jaideep Ahlawat she’d cast him as the stern Intelligence Bureau training officer Khalid Mir, he asked her the same question his protégé Sehmat (Alia Bhatt) posed to him in the film: “Do you think I will be able to do it?” Then 35, he was set to portray a man at least a decade older than himself. But the audience response to his commanding performance proved he had the gravitas needed to add dramatic heft to the espionage thriller. “[Mir] doesn’t show emotions. He thinks they can get you in trouble,” says Ahlawat. “There are so many thoughts brewing inside him, but he doesn’t share them.”
Ahlawat’s phone has been beeping constantly with congratulatory messages, a sign that the film industry is finally recognising his talent. The Haryana-born Film & Television Institute of India graduate happily reveals that filmmakers such as Vishal Bhardwaj, Kabir Khan, Rajkumar Hirani and
Zoya Akhtar have praised his work. “You feel good that you have reached the people you admire,” he said.
The son of teachers, Ahlawat was set on joining the army as a child in Kharkara, a village 20 kilometres away from Rohtak. But when he failed three attempts to clear the examinations, he found comfort in theatre. “What I couldn’t say and express to everybody, stage gave me the space to release.”
Joining Rajkummar Rao, Pitobash Tripathy and Vijay Varma to pursue acting at FTII in 2005, he again found space to “experiment on the self without fear of failure or criticism”. Three years later, he was in the city of dreams. His big screen journey began with Khatta Meetha (2010) alongside his teenage idol Akshay Kumar. Then he featured in Gangs of Wasseypur I & II, Commando and Vishwaroopam.
There’s more to come for him in 2018. After Raazi, he has two releases, both with filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee—whom he calls one of the most intelligent directors he has come across. First, he stars in a Banerjee-directed short that forms part of Lust Stories, a Netflix original series that releases on June 15. Then, in August, he plays a Delhi police officer in the Yash Raj film Sandeep aur Pinky Faraar.
Now if they’d just let him play a character his own age for a change.