Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa da Emraan Hashmi a Karishma Loynmoon, pubblicata da Filmfare il 2 maggio 2012. Meet the Coolio:
'Most of your films have done well at the box-office. Do you consider yourself lucky?
Till recently I was not much into trade figures and stuff. I’ve just woken up to them. Initially, figures spelt boredom for me. Because I had nothing to do, I became an actor. I never wanted to be one. I don’t watch too many Hindi films either. (...) I don’t get the time. I can’t remember the last Hindi film I watched. I still have to watch my own films. I’m probably the only actor who doesn’t watch Hindi films. (...)
Do you think the media has given you your due?
The industry or the media’s perception of me was right to a certain extent. Here was a guy who didn’t in any way fit into the conventional mould of a Hindi film hero. My looks are below average, I’m a terrible dancer, I kissed on screen, which was blasphemous for its time. I agreed to eroticism on screen, which again was blasphemous. Everyone must have thought, what the hell is this guy doing? He’s contaminating and corrupting Indian cinema. But tastes evolve. The paradigm doesn’t shift overnight. I came at a time when the audience was ready for bolder cinema. I started in 2003 and it took till 2012 for the audience to understand what I was doing. For the first five years, my films were ripped apart. Slowly, people started warming up to them. You heard random voices saying, ‘This is nice.’ So from ‘really bad’ it became ‘okay’ and ‘bearable’.
But shouldn’t you have defended yourself?
The audience comes to watch my film. They’ll come again if they like them. I don’t want to be intrusive. I am not desperate to get into someone else’s mind space. I don’t like too much media noise'.
