Abhay Deol doesn’t like the word ‘Bollywood’. For him, it’s a genre and not a film industry. He prefers ‘Hindi cinema’ instead — a space that accommodates both the likes of Naseeruddin Shah and Amitabh Bachchan. It’s somewhere in this spectrum that he is trying to fit in, albeit with much struggle. “I don’t see myself being perceived as a Bollywood star and I wouldn’t want to be that either,” says Abhay, hiding behind large yellow-tinted sunglasses in a Mumbai hotel room.
Disrupting distribution
With one foot in the city and the other in Los Angles (“I have a community and family there”), the bohemian actor, wearing yellow floral prints, doesn’t subscribe to the idea of borders or of committing to one medium or industry. His latest outing as an actor is a Netflix film, Chopsticks, and he has three international co-productions, Jungle Cry (Indo-British), JL 50 (Indo-Canadian) and Line of Descent (Indo-American) in advanced stages. As producer, he is backing the coming-of-age series, The Odds , which closed this year’s Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles.
The actor with Mithila Palkar, the co-lead of the Netflix Original film, ‘Chopsticks’
For the famously picky actor, this is a resurgence of sorts, driven by possibilities on streaming platforms. “I was making content-driven stuff in 2007, 2008 and 2009, and back then, I managed to release those movies because the multiplexes were coming up and suddenly, there was more exhibition space,” recalls Abhay, who sees a similar trend emerge today. While the multiplex boom, owing to its real estate logistics, soon crashed, Abhay believes that the digital space is infinite and here to stay. For him, there’s no dearth of talent to make “relatable and entertaining” films, but there is a lack of distribution support. “And that wasn’t going to come from Bollywood,” he says. “So it took someone like Netflix, who have been disruptive from the word go — even in Hollywood — to replicate that here.”
The rebellious Deol aimed to be equally disruptive with his production house Forbidden Films, but it soon folded up. In 2014, he débuted as a producer with One by Two under his new banner, i.e. Films. “But I’ve always kind of been active in some productorial capacity and never taken the credit, so to speak,” he informs. Whether it is acquainting Sunny Deol with Imtiaz Ali for Socha Na Tha (2005), raising funds for Manorama Six Feet Under (2007) or giving Anurag Kashyap the idea to give Devdas a contemporary twist in Dev.D (2009), he often went beyond the traditional responsibilities of an actor in the early days of his career. “Because I wanted those stories to materialise,” he explains. Currently, he is developing a few indie projects as a producer — including the Tamil-language, Idhu Vedhalam Sollum Kathai — but refuses to speak about them.
Refusing stardom
In his almost 15-year career, Abhay has sporadically acted in mainstream films like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), Shanghai (2012), Raanjhanaa (2013) and Happy Bhag Jayegi (2016). “But I’m not very competitive,” he confesses. Unlike many Bollywood celebrities, he has been vocal about issues like wage gap, sexism and patriarchy in the industry on Twitter, and has a fairly active presence on Instagram, even when he was absent on the big screen. While filmmakers and Bollywood audiences have expressed their desire to see more of the actor on-screen, he has abstained from “marketing himself” or picking projects that lack authenticity. “I always wanted my work to speak for itself but I realised you have to show people a little bit of yourself and interact with them, especially before your film releases,” he concedes. “It does not mean that you’re a sellout.”
Despite a Bollywood pedigree, the 43-year-old actor believes he is not a “huge star”. He realises this the most when he markets movies by début filmmakers. “Stardom is something you pay for and buy,” he declares. The actor refuses to be known for advertisements rather than movies, even if it involves “going deliberately slow” with his choices. On the flip side, he is often perceived as a “lazy talented actor”, as Anand L Rai called him in an interview before the release of Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi (2018). “That’s the filmmaker’s perception of me,” responds Abhay. “I can be lazy, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not laziness that’s holding me back, it’s the system where I don’t fit in.”
But the plan is to stick to his gun while experimenting with newer models of distribution — primarily digital — and exploring international markets and co-productions. “I am a citizen of the planet and I want to do films that appeal to people, not communities,” he concludes.
Chopsticks is streaming on Netflix.
