100 years of entertainment
Nawazuddin Siddiqui on Bollywood and Bachchan; theatre personality Aamir Raza Husain discusses his new play
Nawazuddin Siddiqui personifies the common man’s takeover of Bollywood. Slowly stepping into lead- actor roles, the man from the little-known town of Budhana, Uttar Pradesh, has acted in all the major films of Bollywood in recent times – Black Friday, New York, Peepli Live, Kahani, Gangs of Wasseypur, Talaash – winning a Special Jury Award at the 60th National Film Awards. He is now working in Bengali auteur Buddhadev Dasgupta’s Hindi film, Anwar ka Ajab Kissa.
Anwar ka Ajab Kissa is about a man working as a small-time detective in an agency. How difficult or easy is it to portray ‘smallness’, ‘small-townness’?
Buddhadev-da said he wouldn’t do Anwar with anyone else. Because I’m familiar with this life, there was no ‘getting into character’. Anwar realises that people in cities are stuck in small places, there are issues of insecurity, lack of trust. People in cities may be well educated but in the small-town, we know how to live better.
How are Anurag Kashyap, Sujoy Ghosh, Kabir Khan as directors?
Anurag works with the actor’s personality. In Black Friday, I got no chance to know the dialogue for the interrogation scene. I was fumbling, nervous, but he didn’t stop the camera. Kabir Khan ( New York) likes to leave his characters free. In Bollywood, a bada
sahib is usually a high-tech banda. I’m 5’6 and Sujoy made me a top IB officer in Kahani.
You have your strengths.
In a film, I don’t do what I want. With my directors, I’m like a prostitute. It’s about whatever he wants. He sees the entire scene, I see to my character.
Cops like Amitabh Bachchan and gangsters like Ranjeet. We haven’t seen a nervy yet ruthless gangster like Faizal in
Wasseypur.
I base my characters on people I’ve known, not on other actors. I don’t know where I’m going but I want to discover myself through my characters.
What does theatre do differently from cinema?
Theatre demands acting. Cinema explores activities of a character to show who he is. Through dialogue on stage a character says ‘I am a bad man’. In cinema you don’t need to say that.
Do our films need more reality?
Too much of reality becomes boring. What Bollywood needs is truth. It invests in fakeness. Crores are spent on dance sequences. A hero is shown running after girls. Ladki-baazi is his chief job.
We have 100 years of cinema behind us. Anyone you admire?
Directors like Satyajit Ray, Bimal Roy, Ritwik Ghatak, Buddhadeb Dasgupta. Among actors, Dilip Kumar, Naseeruddin Shah. Naseer-saab showed thousands of actors that education and training are important. If singers and dancers can be trained, why not actors? You can’t just run away from home and become a hero. The problem is our cinema has not been performanceoriented.
Has it been difficult to be Nawazuddin in the age of SRK?
Shah Rukh doesn’t need to be me or vice versa. He also came from outside and made himself.