Actor Nasser had barely spent a day on the sets of Kamal Haasan’s Uttama Villain when he heard the news of his eldest son Faizal having met with a horrific road accident which left him with serious internal injuries. Kamal Haasan then asked the massive set to be dismantled and postponed filming until Nasser was ready to face the camera again.
While Nasser stayed by his son’s side, the grief and helplessness soon got to him. “I didn’t have the strength to bear it. I wanted to be someone else for a few days,” he says, sitting outside his son’s room at the hospital. It was then that Nasser decided to go back to the film set. “The day I went back, Kamal shot a scene just because I was there. If not for his support and that of my friends and family, it wouldn’t have been possible for me to face it,” he says.
On the sets, he encountered one of the toughest predicaments of his career. “I had to do comedy with Kamal Haasan, who is arguably one of the best in the business, when I was emotionally drained,” he says. “I had to lie down with my eyes closed for three hours for the “theyyam” make-up. I told myself, ‘Let me go and see if I can handle the situation. If not, I will return home,” he recalls.
The last time he faced this kind of uncertainty was three decades ago. He came to Madras as a 21-year-old with “unrealistic dreams”, to become an actor. “I was an idiot,” he says. Actor Nasser had the world standing against him: he was economically backward and a Muslim; everybody thought he looked too thin and possessed a big forehead; a nose, which, he says, was often compared ‘to a parrot’s beak’. “Some even suggested that I must consider learning stunts and that I would make a good henchman in movies.”
The only way to succeed was to compensate for all these apparent disadvantages by working on his craft. Ruminating on his struggle as an actor, he says, “There was a time when I couldn’t get two meals a day. But, many of my fellow Indians go through that kind of hardship. I faced religious discrimination occasionally, but when I was a struggling actor and literally had no place to sleep, a Hindu friend of mine let me sleep in his puja room. So, I wouldn’t consider these my struggles. For me, becoming a good actor was a real struggle, one that required a lot of hard work.”
He is an actor today because of his father, Mehaboob Basha, whom Nasser describes as a man with ‘strange’ ideas. “He was a conservative Muslim, but he always wanted me to be an actor. It’s a strange thing. Right from my younger days, he would fund local theatre groups just so that I could get a role. I didn’t know that he was grooming me then. I wanted to get a regular job which would pay my bills every month,” he says.
In fact, Nasser did manage to get a job in the Indian Air Force as an airman, which would pay him a considerable monthly stipend of Rs. 260. But his father’s wish that his son become a movie actor prevailed. Strangely enough, acting was never a passion for Nasser though his stint in theatre gave him a basic understanding of the craft. He came to Chennai and joined the Film Chamber and the Adyar Film Institute.
Having been introduced to theoretical concepts of cinema and the art of acting, Nasser wanted to understand the subject deeper. The more he read and experimented with the craft, the more interested he became. Along the way, he also became an idealist. After the initial days in the industry, he started developing a revulsion for the way the system worked. He felt his dreams of experimenting with roles came crumbling down. “I was told that I was being argumentative when I said this is not the way to do it,” he recollects. He did all kinds of odd jobs to keep himself afloat. He worked as a waiter at a five-star hotel, as a security guard and sought work in the television industry where he would get paid Rs. 75 for an episode.
The debut, however, came finally through K. Balachander, who gave him a role in his directorial venture, Kalyana Agadhigal . The film unfortunately flopped. “In those days, the industry cared deeply about good luck and bad luck. So, if someone had a flop in his/her first film, it was usually game over. Thankfully, writer Ananthu consistently offered me work in productions undertaken by Kavithalaya,” he says.
His first big break came in the blockbuster Nayagan , in which he played a small but a significant role. At the time, Nayagan was one of the most talked-about films in Tamil cinema. Touted as homage to The Godfather , Nayagan was directed by Mani Ratnam. By this time, Nasser had lost the exuberance and idealism of his youth. He had come to accept that he cannot change the system and did what most of us do: stop being a rebel and aspire for financial stability.
“When I signed Nayagan , I had matured and made peace with the system. I understood that my knowledge of cinema or art of acting doesn’t guarantee my success. In fact, in many cases, I realised it was quite the opposite,” he says, further adding, “In those days, one couldn’t just approach directors directly for work. I had to meet the director’s associate. I thought I wouldn’t get it, but my portion was filmed almost at the very end of production. I just worked on the film for seven days and never realised that my career was going to change after this. Only after I saw the complete film, I realised how my character was crucial to the film.”
Nasser went on to collaborate with both Mani Ratnam and Kamal Haasan on other memorable films such as Roja , Bombay , Thevar Magan , Magalir Mattum , Kurudhipunal and many more. In the next two decades, Nasser’s stock as an actor steadily grew. For someone who had reconciled with the ‘system’, these were the films that let him do the kind of work he always wanted to.
He speaks at length about how actors in Tamil cinema ought to work. He says, “The ideal way is to have the script well beforehand, have the entire cast read the script together and do rehearsals. The actor must also be given the time to experiment with the character and interpret it in his/her own way. These things don’t happen in Tamil cinema.”
Ask him about his collaborations with Kamal Haasan, Kurudhipunal in particular, in which Nasser played the role of a Naxal commander, he says it was one of those films in which he had the freedom to “interpret” the character. “I remember the sort of lengthy, in-depth discussions that Kamal, P.C. Sreeram and I had during the making of the film. Kamal was the author of the film. We used to look at the way the plot was structured from different perspectives, constantly debating on the hows and the whys of the narrative.” He adds, “I didn’t really ‘act’ in the film. The context of every scene was so well established, that I did nothing more than maintain a stoic expression in most scenes. The fact that my character was torturing someone and yet my face was so calm contributed to the impact.”
If the Uttama Villain experience has tested his mettle as an actor, Vasantha Balan’s Kaaviya Thalaivan seems to have taken him back to the days when he was a theatre actor. The cherry on top was the fact that Nasser’s character in Kaaviya Thalaivan was modelled on Shankar Das Swamigal, considered the father of Tamil theatre.
It gave him the opportunity to ruminate on the ‘what-ifs’ of life: “Thoughts like, ‘If I had stuck to theatre, what would have happened to me?’.” For someone who came from Chengalpattu to Chennai with nothing but unrealistic dreams, Nasser has had a glittering career. What does he feel about the newer crop of actors and filmmakers? He says, “The way actors are being handled has changed. It is both scary and exciting to work with youngsters. Either they have too much confidence in me or too little. They say, ‘Please do what I say’.”
After 29 years in the industry, does he not have the authority to do things he always wanted to do as a young actor? “I have strong, well-informed opinions on the craft of acting, but I can’t let that come in the way. It is very nice to work with the younger generation. I try not to disapprove and learn from them.”
But why? “Deep down, I think I am still the son of Mehaboob Basha.”
