Rajkummar Rao: The expressionist Forbes India

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Rajkummar Rao: The expressionist Forbes India

One of the eagerly-anticipated films of 2018 is Hansal Mehta’s Omerta, where actor Rajkummar Rao essays the role of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British terrorist of Pakistani descent, notorious for killing Daniel Pearl, a journalist with The Wall Street Journal.

The film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival in late 2017 and garnered rave reviews. “At the end of this slickly mounted film, there’s no lack of questions still dangling nor hoped-for insights that fail to arrive. Nonetheless, while you’re watching it, Mehta’s freely imagined biopic provides a fascinating Rorschach of a figure who is, unfortunately, truly a man of our times,” a review of the film published in Variety magazine states.

The review is not only a tribute to Mehta’s directorial brilliance, but also speaks volumes of the realism brought to the character by Rao, the film’s lead actor. Rao, 33, has built quite a reputation for getting into the skin of the characters he portrays on screen. And there is no length to which he wouldn’t go to achieve this. So much so that Mehta and Rao’s girlfriend and actor Patralekha tell Forbes India that they could barely recognise Rao during shooting. And they weren’t just talking about his physical appearance.  

“When I visited Raj on the sets of Omerta, he had become this different, annoying person,” recalls Patralekha, who has known Rao for six years. “There was such an eerie feeling around him and he wasn’t the nice person he otherwise is. I told him that I didn’t want to be there and would see him once his shoot is over.”   

Mehta has known Rao since 2011, when he first cast him in Shahid, a biographical portrayal of lawyer and human rights activist Shahid Azmi, for which Rao bagged the National Award in 2014. The two have collaborated on multiple films—CityLights (2014), Aligarh (2016) and now Omerta. Speaking of their latest film, Mehta says Rao, who has pursued a course in acting from the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), imbibed the darkness associated with the character of Sheikh, even when the camera wasn’t rolling. “He pulled out a dark side to himself that you wouldn’t think was possible, since he is such a gentle soul otherwise,” says Mehta. “He was mean, cold and slightly reserved since that is what the character demanded of him. We actually used to keep distance from him.”

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Date Posted: Wed, 3 Jan 2018, 02:29 pm

Tags: Rajkummar Rao

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