For the wholesome Mumbai boy that he is, Ranvir Shorey is often mistaken for a Delhi-ite. “You know why?” he asks me, and promptly offers the answer: “ Khosla Ka Ghosla… It doesn’t leave me.” Dibakar Banerjee’s directorial début got Shorey wide appreciation as Balwant, aka Bunty, the eldest son of a middle class Punjabi family, duped of a plot of land in Gurgaon, now Gurugram. “It’s a perpetual construction machine with cement flying all over,” he describes Gurugram rather accurately. Then moves on to talk about the Mumbai traffic, lack of roads, increase in the number of cars, and how even the Metro hasn’t really been of much help.
We have some more idle chat about Mumbai. How he has nightmares about tidal waves but believes in staying close to the coast just to be able to breathe better air in a choking city. He himself has been moving northwards — from Linking Road to Juhu, later living in Oshiwara and Goregoan and now rooted in Andheri.
He meets us close to his home, in a quiet corner of a Andheri’s Leaping Windows café where he is busy convincing the server to give him a pot than a cup of green tea. No photo-shoot with him. He is sporting a “decrepit look” for his next, a web series called Hasmukh that he is working on with Vir Das for Applause Entertainment. “It is a dark comedy, very dark comedy. Black comedy, you can say,” he says.
Box-office blues
It’s a low phase for him after having hit a high note recently. His work in Abhishek Chaubey’s dacoit drama, Sonchiriya, has come in for all-round critical appreciation . But one weekend into it and the box office numbers haven’t been as encouraging, leaving Shorey disillusioned and despondent. “Everybody says they want good films and when one turns up, they go watch item songs.”
He feels the film was gripping enough to appeal to a larger audience. What may have then gone wrong? As he puts it, does the audience in the theatres want a “lovey dovey, happy-go-lucky vibe” in a film? The only conclusion we arrive at is that no one knows what the audience wants. “Making films in India is the easy part. Marketing and distribution have become a nightmare now… The more risky things you try, on paper you think the audience will reward you, but in reality you are badly taxed, punished for that,” says Shorey.
But he would have still done Sonchiriya . “It’s a film I am very proud of. Chaubey brought different people with different talents and processes together to work in perfect harmony.” Every character in the film has an arc, a journey and a chance at redemption, even an adversarial one like his own. “You don’t get scripts like that,” he says.
Sonchiriya and before that Titli and A Death In The Gunj have been intense explorations of patriarchy and how it determines notions of masculinity, of what ideal male behaviour should be. Shorey says that in both Titli and ADITG he identified more with the lead than the macho character he himself played on screen. Like Titli he was the youngest with two elder brothers, father, patriarchy working in the extended family. In ADITG he identified more with Shutu. “I don’t think I am macho in real life also,” he says.
Back in time
The son of producer KD Shorey, he started off behind the camera on Channel V, producing a show called Timex Timepass that Javed Jaaferi used to host. His boss then, and now a filmmaker, Shashanka Ghosh pushed him in front of the camera. That was the time when every youngster dreamt of being a veejay and Channel V spelt cool. “It breaks my heart to know it doesn’t exist any more,” he says.
Looking back at his acting career, the actor feels he’s had appreciation and recognition aplenty. It’s the box office credibility and equity that have eluded him. He doesn’t want much; not ₹100 crore, he’d be happy with a ₹50 crore hit. “As much as I really love the praise and affection I get when my work is appreciated, it doesn’t translate to money in the bank.” At a broader level, 10 other good scripts, waiting to go on floors, will have a question mark on them when one good film fails. “It hampers the growth of cinema and story-telling,” says Shorey.
Surviving Bollywood
So how difficult/easy has it been for someone like him to create a space for himself in Bollywood? “I don’t think I have ever tried to create a space for myself. All I have tried to do is survive. Every film has been the ticket to the next; that’s what has worked for me,” he says.
“People have been ready to write me off at every stage,” he recollects. Initially the doubts were all about how a veejay would act. A few films like KKG and Pyaar Ke Side Effects did well and he got bracketed as a comedian. “Then you choose roles which are comedic but with dramatic parts in them to showcase a little more of what you can do. For me it’s been a crawl. Every inch you have to work towards and gain,” he looks back.
There have been stretches without work when he has lived on savings, done odd jobs — an event here, an ad there. It’s then that self doubts can begin to overpower. “You wonder if you are in the right place, doing the right thing. Would you be happier doing something else,” he says, adding, “The lows of this business are very ruthless.”
How does he cope? “Whenever I go into a crisis situation I turn myself towards self improvement. I learn something new, pick up a course. Travel somewhere and do something there for a few months… It’s important to do positive things in that phase,” he says.
On the web
Right now things are optimistic primarily because of web-based platforms. “Actors, writers, technicians have work now,” he says. His first brush with web was Rangbaaz that fared well. Metro Park has just dropped on Eros.
- What I love about working with Shorey is that he finds some sort of minute activity in every scene for his character — especially when it’s not written in the script. He was the first person we cast (thanks to my writer/director friend Mansi Jain) for the project and I don’t think we could’ve done justice to this role with anyone else
Theatre, events, commercials, TV, films, Shorey has done them all in the world of entertainment. “I have even hosted a wedding. Some billionaire’s in Indonesia,” he laughs. Theatre he gets past because of the fourth wall but he is petrified of live audiences.
People assume an actor is full of confidence, seeking attention. “That’s not how I romanticise my profession,” he says. He wants to play people so different from himself that no one recognises him. Shorey wants people to pass by and later wonder who he was. It’s precisely what my autorickshaw driver asks me when I jump into one after the interview: “ Wo koi actor tha na (Wasn’t he an actor)?”
