‘Working with Kamal is like jazz’

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Rahul Bose in a still from Deepa Meha’s Midnight’s Children

Rahul Bose is 5’8’’, a National level rugby player and has acted in some jewels of films, like Aparna Sen’s Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002), and some off-beat ones like Pyaar ke Side Effects. He is also part of Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children and Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam, two of the most awaited releases of the year.

It’s a wide-ranging and robust filmography for someone who is fine with not having the classical good looks of a Bollywood hero; Maxim magazine of Italy has called him the ‘Sean Penn of Oriental cinema’.
In Midnight’s Children, he was part of a large ensemble cast, and the first time in his career that he was not playing a lead role in a film. “I followed my instincts and completely trusted my director and the way she crafted my character, the Pakistani General Zulfikar. He is arrogant, cold and brutal. But, Deepa has added some scenes, which you don’t find in the book, to make Zulfikar more real,” says Rahul.
He was surrounded by a cast that consisted of Shabana Azmi, Rajat Kapoor, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Vinay Pathak and Soha Ali Khan. But he was not intimidated, he quips, his training as a rugby player having taught him never to get intimidated. “As you spend time in the film industry, you learn that really good actors cannot act alone.”
His other film, Vishwaroopam, is currently in a storm of controversy over Kamal Haasan’s decision to release the film on DTH platforms too, which theatre owners in Tamil Nadu have resented. Rahul will not comment on the matter, but he says cryptically without missing a beat, “You have to understand that you are working with a legend of South cinema and it is obvious that his presence will shadow the footprint of others.”
Acting with Kamal, he says, was so much fun. “He is an amazing actor. Working with him is like jazz. We get on a pace while doing the scene, we get on a rhythm and the other one catches on from there.”