Vi segnalo l'intervista concessa da Abhay Deol a Suruchi Sharma, pubblicata oggi da The Times of India. It's unfair to compare me to my family:
'Industry insiders and critics hail you as the pioneer in new-age cinema. How do you react to that?
Its humbling, it’s exciting, it’s a huge compliment and it can be a little intimidating. But it makes me feel it was all worth it - all the struggle, all the fighting and cynicism or the bitterness that I went through. Not that the struggle is over, but when you hear things like you’re the ‘pioneer for change’ - that’s when you think that maybe I’m not making the amount of money that most actors do, maybe my films don’t get the budget that other films get and my films don’t get much better marketing and publicity - but despite all that, there is recognition, so I must be doing something right. (...) I like characters that I can relate to, characters that are close to people that I have seen in real life. I like scripts that marry entertainment with realism. For me, larger-than-life is boring. Neither can I do something that’s too real because then it becomes over intellectual. So I automatically gravitated towards scripts which were real and entertaining. The only thing that I can say at the risk of sounding egotistical, or arrogant is that I know my scripts - everything else is up in the air - but I depend on my own feelings and instincts when it comes to saying yes to a script. (...)
Even after so many years in B-wood, people ask you the ‘Deol’ question. Isn’t it annoying?
In the beginning it was expected. I mean I was debuting in Bollywood, I hadn’t done many movies, so I was ready for those questions, but when I did my 4th film, 5th, 6th film, and the questions didn’t end, then I started to feel it was very unfair to constantly compare me to my family or say that I don’t do typical Deol kind of roles. I think my family does exactly what everyone else in the industry does. They get an image, they conform to it and then cash in on it, that’s how the business works here - all stars confirm to an image. So let us not just single out my family. There are other actors too who come from film families but they are not constantly compared to their family, they are compared to the reigning stars. I want to be compared to the entire industry.
Are you bitter about this comparison? Or is there something else about this industry that makes you angry?
I was bitter in the beginning, as I felt people were being biased. There wasn’t much coming my way, and whatever work I got was mostly for playing the third guy who’s either a comic or an idiot. I turned down those movies. So, people thought, ‘his debut movie was a flop, he hasn’t worked in the industry that much, why is he turning me down?’ What people didn’t understand was that I was choosy from the very start. I was vocal about formula and non-formula and how we need to make a change. But 7-8 years back people didn’t understand all this. So I had a lot of angst in me because people would just not let me grow.
But you are growing now, with people like Dibakar Banerjee and Anurag Kashyap?
To tell you the truth, Dibakar is an alien in a human body, he is not of this world and that’s why he is such a brilliant filmmaker. It was Dibakar who convinced me to do Shanghai. I wouldn’t have done something so alien to me if I wasn’t sure of the director. Though I was dying to work with him'.
