FEAR OF THE DARK
Radhika Apte talks to tabloid! about diving into her troubled character in horror web series ‘Ghoul’, streaming now
Bollywood stars Radhika Apte and Manav Kaul aren’t big fans of the horror genre. So much so that the actors of Ghoul, the three-part Indian supernatural miniseries that premiered on Netflix on Friday, joke about how easy it was to act in a role that required them to look spooked.
They were petrified in real life. “There’s this shot where a guy has his back turned to me in a corner and I have to go near him. I was actually scared to do that shot, even though I knew what his make-up looked like and what to expect when he turns. But I couldn’t do that shot for the longest time and in a way it was a good thing because we managed to look genuinely scared,” Apte says in an exclusive interview with tabloid!.
Kaul, who impressed as the understanding middle-class husband in Tumhari Sulu starring Vidya Balan, claims that he will only see a horror film if he’s forced to do so and has trouble sleeping if he watches a scary film.
But acting in Ghoul, which is high on blood, gore and grit, was a different ballgame.
Set against a dystopian future where fascism and sectarian violence dominate, Apte plays the staunch, complex agent Nida Rahim, who gets cherry-picked to work at a remote military interrogation centre.
The grim unit, filled with tyrannical guards, is a modern-day torture chamber that houses submissive, emasculated prisoners who are paying the price for being anti-establishment. Death is their only release, and getting electrocuted or being bludgeoned with an iron rod until they pass out is an ordinary event in their lives.
Apte’s character is the relatively sane voice among her barbaric peers.
“Nida is someone with a strong sense of responsibility towards her belief systems. She’s so convinced about what she has learnt, her passions and her value system. She believes that anybody who stands in the way of her beliefs should be dealt with as a sense of duty,” the actress says. Translation? Her character, who walks around feeling perennially righteous, does the unthinkable.
She snitches on her own academician father, who has a penchant for questioning the existing order with his seditious take while teaching his
students. This earns Nida brownie points with all those who toe the line. She gets her first job because she puts her country’s interest over her family member, an ultimate sacrifice in the world she inhabits.
Sunil Dacunha (Kaul) is Nida’s patriot boss who also walks around with a saviour complex.
“My character is someone who can do anything for his country. He’s straightforward, but has this guilt with the way he deals with his own wife and family. It’s duty above family. He’s complicated… I approached this role with a sense of earnestness and honesty,” Kaul says.
While both talents have put their best foot forward in this horror-fantasy, there’s no denying their controversial methods of interrogation and intimidation shown in this series. They are decidedly blood-curdling and violent, and human rights simply don’t exist for those behind bars. The interrogators are totalitarian in their conduct.
The series gathers steam when the most dreaded terrorist Ali Saeed (Mahesh Balraj) is dumped in their custody. Nida is convinced that the new emaciated inmate isn’t human, but a flesh-eating demon (ghoul). The series, directed by British filmmaker Patrick Graham, takes a strand and more from Arab folklore about evil spirits that can be summoned and feed on people’s guilt.
While it relies on ancient mythology, the series is contemporary and modern. Police brutality and civil rights violations are the recurring themes.
But there’s no agenda in the series, claims its actors.
“It’s about a thought process. It’s about a belief system that as a country, as a society when you have such strong policing and belief system, when will you start questioning it? Perhaps, that is why there’s such ambiguity about where it all takes place. It’s not a comment on anything in particular. Our goal was to make an entertaining horror series that make you want to know what is going to happen next,” says Apte, who filmed the series during the monsoons in Mumbai.
The inquisitiveness to know what’s going to happen next isn’t limited to her latest web series.
The actress, who has impressed in films such as
Parched, Padman and Phobia and is riding on the success of digital content such as Lust
Stories and Sacred Games, is becoming the go-to girl for complex roles in Hindi cinema.
Be it playing an abused wife in
Parched or an eccentric girlfriend in Lust Stories or taking on the character of a stoical Raw (research and analysis) agent in Sacred Games,
Apte seems to have mastered the art of mixing things up.
“But there’s no strategy up my sleeve. Whatever I find exciting, I do,” Apte said in a separate interview with tabloid! while promoting Sacred Games in Dubai in July.
Apte, who hates being called an industry outsider as it means she was being put in a box and labelled, also told us that she had no qualms about auditioning for roles that excited her. In Bollywood, actors auditioning for roles is rare as their body of work is their audition. Apte still remembers her auditions for Sacred Games.
“Mukesh Chabbra was our casting directing and he was so good at auditioning. I am terrible at them… But I managed to audition for a scene that required a lot of improvisation. But my process of acting is different for every role,” Apte said at the time. For her role as an emotionallyunavailable law-enforcement agent in
Sacred Games, she was reminded of how her neurosurgeon father had spoken about his work in a clinical manner when talking about one of his experiences at work.
“When you involve emotions in your job, it may not work. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why you cannot operate on your own family. You cannot involve emotions for your job, because you cannot perform well at your job with an objective, unbiased perspective,” Apte added.
In Ghoul, Apte has done her job well and is chilling as a troubled young woman who finds herself questioning her life choices.
On one hand, she’s swatting fleshdevouring human-monster hybrids in her workplace and in her own head she’s battling a severe case of existentialist angst.
“Ghoul is about injustice and prods you to wonder when will you start questioning your belief systems that have been established. However intelligent or educated we are, if we don’t question, nothing changes. The moment you start questioning, things will start changing on some level,” Apte says.
Asked if Ghoul succumbs to the temptation of branding a certain community as terrorists, both Apte and Kaul resist that idea and reject it.
“We have kept all religions in the series. There are prisoners who are Hindus and Muslims… We don’t commit to any cause in Ghoul… We just want to entertain and make you question your belief systems,” Apte says.