As Rajkummar Rao turns 38, here's why the actor is such a nice guy to know

I’ve known Rajkummar Rao from the time he was Raj Kumar Yadav. Eager to  make a success of his dreams to be an actor, he started with a small part in Ram Gopal Varma’s Rann in  2010, so technically, Raj is a Ram Gopal Varma discovery, although he came into his own with Hansal Mehta’s cinematic attention.

Raj is eternally indebted to Hansal. “I don’t think I’d have been what I am today were it not for Hansal. Hansal Sir believed in me and gave me Shahid, Omerta, Citylights and Aligarh. I treasure my association with him.”

Raj’s first film Love Sex Aur Dhokha came to him without much struggle. And it was a lead. After that, he sought interesting roles, not necessarily leads. Raj did Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitaan as a guest appearance. When Raj started shooting for Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs Of Wasseypur, he was told it was the story of two characters played by Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Raj. Then Raj went on to do Ragini MMS. When he came back to Wasseypur, it wasn’t his story any more.

Luckily for Raj, his stories have almost remained his. He has rarely been a victim of role poaching or footage vandalism. Raj still doesn’t  know the reason for the changes. But he is glad he did Gangs Of  Wasseypur. It was because of this film that he got Shahid. The casting director of Wasseypur suggested Raj’s name to Hansal Mehta for Shahid.

It would be insulting to call Raj’s presence in Hansal Mehta’s Shahid and Citylights a performance. There is no element of exhibitionism in his screen presence. Raj once told me, “I don’t want to look like I am acting. I want to occupy the truth of a character as much as possible. I don’t want to imbue my roles with any artifice.”

The one actor that Raj is really inspired by is Daniel Day-Lewis. In India, he admires Irrfan Khan, Manoj Bajpayee, Aamir Khan, Dilip Kumar and Balraj Sahni. He craves to play good characters, not eye-catching characters. Raj wants people to say, ‘If Rajkummar is in this film, it has to be good.’ For Raj, every character is a chance to know someone new. “It’s like going on holiday with a friend, spending every waking hour with him and then not seeing him after the holiday ends.”

Three years after playing the sex-video sleazebag in Love Sex Aur Dhokha, Rajkummar Rao rose on the moral scale to play the controversial lawyer-activist Shahid Azmi, who spent his life fighting for the terror-accused convicts until he was gunned down in his own office by unknown miscreants. This Hansal Mehta biopic showcased Rao’s raw energy and his supreme ability to penetrate the very core of the human heart in pursuit of those truths that we hide even from ourselves.

But my favourite Rajkummar Rao performance is in Vikram Motwane’s   Trapped (2017). Playing a a man trapped in an apartment in a high-rise for nearly two weeks without food or water, Raj shed over ten kilos to look like a  man who is unlikely to survive his ordeal. Such dedication to depicting desolation was evident only in Tom Hanks when he did Castaway. Alas, the material provided for Raj’s survival story could barely survive its own ridiculous  plot premise.

Hansal Mehta’s Omerta (2018) is the film that was most challenging for the actor. To the life and goals of man who wants to change the world with his vigorously violent methods, Rajkummar Rao brought a smirking serenity, an imperturbable certainty to every violent action manned by a core of “truth” obtainable only to those who believe they are among the Chosen Ones. Raj  conveyed the unplumbed turbulence of an ocean that’s deceptively calm on  the surface. His performance is magnificent without aiming to be so.

Omerta is not an easy film to watch. It cuts the protagonist’s movements down to size in episodic chunks and then regurgitates the vivid moments into scenes  of colour-blinded documentation. There is a moment where Omar pretending to be an ordinary tourist in Delhi named ‘Rohit’, is accosted by an aggressive cop on the road who tells him bluntly that he ‘looks’ like a Muslim. That  moment provides us with a blinding flash of recognition of  the problem as to why global terrorism has come to a flashpoint. There are many dialogues and images in this film that will make you wince and squirm. In the uncut version of the film that I saw, Rao is fully nude, having unsimulated sex with a sex worker. Nothing artificial here.

Raj is rightly proud of Omerta. The one that he considers his special  (neglected) child is Ekta Kapoor’s 2017 series Bose: Dead/Alive . Playing Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose on screen was one of the most fascinating experiences for Raj. It was not an easy task. There was a lot of preparation involved. Starting from reading a lot about him through his autobiography and some other available books, watching lot of documentaries and visiting his house in Kolkata, learning a new language, gaining 12 kgs of weight, going half bald to try and look as close to him as possible …But more than the look, Raj tried to catch his passion, his unconditional love for his mother land and his drive and vision.

For Raj, it’s the emotional journey which is more important than the physical appearance. Having played a variety of real-life characters, Raj admits there is a different approach involved when playing people who exist. There is so much information already available to start from and the actor has real-life references to build the character, Raj feels an added sense of responsibility when he plays a part like Shahid or Netaji on screen .

Right now, he is super-excited about his forthcoming releases-Anubhav Sinha’s Bheed, Vasan Bala’s Monica My Darling and Sharan Sharma’s Mr & Mrs Mahi.

“If twelve years ago, someone had predicted that I would play all these wonderful characters, I would have laughed. Dreams do come true,” says Rajkummar Rao, whose motto in life is, never give up on your dreams even if they give up on you.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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