We meet Randeep Hooda when he is in the in-between-ness of things. Laal Rang is behind him, Sarbjit ahead. And he is hurriedly gulping down a salmon dish at a Juhu restaurant on a break from dubbing for Sarbjit at the Sunny Super Sound studio. “My attitude to food is very functional. It stems from having lived in a hostel. We used to eat quickly for a refill. I still do the same.” The hostel life affected him in another way: not being set in his ways. Which he considers quite a curse: “You are expected to be consistent in your behaviour and thought.”
Taking stock
A lot else forms the food for thought in the ensuing conversation. Laal Rang may have been panned by critics but his quirky turn as the Haryanvi blood bank racketeer had them impressed. His thin, lean, mean look for the forthcoming Sarbjit also has come in for a lot of praise.
He is happy with what Laal Rang has done for him. “It captured something no other film could: the flamboyance, the dark sense of humour. It was a slice of life from Haryana,” he says. He got the rustic, cool character spot on; delivering the rough lines with a perfect sense of timing. But his home State Haryana was not the reason why he chose to do the film. It was for what the film was trying to do. “I strongly believe that for going global you have to first go local, which the film did rather well. It had quite an international potential. If only the makers had been guided better to polish the rough edges.”
Sarbjit has the same rooted feel, only it is set in neighbouring Punjab: “You have to have these new stories and settings. The Mumbai mafia has been done to death.” So are these the kind of films that he is getting attracted to these days as a performer? “I want to fit in everywhere. I want to keep growing. I want to change my demeanour with every new role. I am selfish. I am dying to reach out,” he says. “I don’t want to carry just the yoke of new cinema.” He wants a piece of every pie, wants to pick up anything that excites him. So up ahead in July is an “interesting” role in the Salman Khan vehicle Sultan .
In between the perennially loud guffaws and “hey man” interspersing every other sentence, Hooda often, and all of a sudden, lapses into some serious thoughts. Like looking back at his career and the long, dull phase when things were not going quite as well as now. “I was not involved with people of consequence.”
The crucial change came after Once Upon A Time In Mumbai .
He wants to stay on in the good place he is in now. “Very few are given a second chance after being written off. I won’t beg for time off now as I did in 2007-08. I want bigger, better roles,” says Hooda, who was a closet actor in his childhood often mimicking scenes from the English movies they were regularly shown at the hostel. Many of the tips and ethics of acting were imbibed from Naseeruddin Shah while working in the theatre group Motley. “It is a cradle of discipline and experimentation.”
According to him acting is about baring the soul, than the body; mannerisms are easy to capture, it’s tapping in to the inner conflict of a character that defines an actor.
But aren’t most of his characters inhabiting the grey zone? “Even if it isn’t there I’d put some grey. Silent roles are my biggest strength,” he says. Yet, he claims he doesn’t have any image to live up to. “I just jump off the cliff” when it comes to acting, he says. He loves the experience of becoming someone else, something that only acting can allow him. “It shows me another reality, gives me freedom from my own self.”
He also claims he never gives a shot insincerely and never looks at the monitor after a shot. “I have played so many cops, but put them all together and none of them will seem the same.”
The serious actor in him comes to fore when he discusses the tough time he is having with the dubbing of Sarbjit . Mostly because he has gained back the weight he lost for the film and has to work hard at getting the voice of the emaciated self that he was when he had shot for the film. No wonder that Hooda thinks that an actor is the last cog in the wheel of filmmaking. Much of how a performance shapes up depends on how it is shaped at the editing table.
In the company of animals
Acting, as of now, is making him ignore a lot of things. Like how he hasn’t been on a holiday for a long while. The only diversion he has is equestrian and canine: his six horses at Mahalaxmi and his dog, Candy, at home. He trains the horses himself. “I am enjoying the company of people less and that of animals more,” he says. Is there any role he would want to do? Any director on his wish list? “I have done practically everything with everyone,” he shrugs it off, then adds an afterthought: “Other than James Bond perhaps.” A good thought that!
“I want to fit in everywhere. I
don’t want to carry just the yoke of new cinema.”
