[Did this profile of the actor Adil Hussain for Man’s World magazine. I’m undecided about Hussain as a screen actor – have seen him in a few films, without being especially struck by any one performance – but he was very pleasant and well-spoken in person]
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“I have been a clown since childhood,” is one of the first things Adil Hussain says, and I sit up. The remark doesn’t quite gel with his screen image – refined, understated gravitas has been his stock-in-trade in films – or with the soft-spoken man sitting in front of me. Watching Hussain, fit and trim, looking much younger than his 51 years, speaking eloquently about his life, it is hard to picture him doing stand-up comedy for a raucous audience. But that is how his career as a performer began in his home-state Assam in the early 1980s, when the group he was part of, Bhaya Mama, “became a craze across the state”.
This is also a reminder of how atypical Hussain’s acting trajectory has been. Most viewers who know him only through his movie roles – of which there has been a steady flow in the past four or five years, films as varied as Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish and Chandra Prakash Dwivedi’s recent Zed Plus – would reckon he is a late starter, someone who came into the public gaze when he was well into his forties. Yet, as Hussain points out – not boastfully, just putting things in perspective – he was in his teens when he signed his first autograph.
Bhaya Mama mostly did satire founded on sociopolitical engagement – something that came naturally to young people in the politically turbulent northeast of the time. “We were brutally honest, and covertly responsible for the fall of two governments in Assam,” says Hussain, “We did hundreds of shows, in every nook and corner, to make people aware of what was going on.” The students’ agitation of 1979 had created a lot of tension, and Adil, like other youngsters in the state, didn’t go to school for two years. During this time, many frustrated students took up guns or went astray; he was among those who found catharsis and an anchor in creative expression. “Of course, given the political climate, my father was nervous – if I came home at 2 AM, he didn’t believe I had only been singing or performing, he thought it must be something more dangerous!”
At the same time, he had been doing serious plays in school – “there was a playwright, Rukmul Hazarika, who did absurdist plays inspired by Beckett” – which meant that without really planning it, he was tapping into two sides of his personality simultaneously; feeling his way around, seeing what worked for him. There was no tradition of acting in the family – his father was a teacher, two brothers were lawyers – but being the youngest of seven siblings meant he wasn't burdened with expectations or sternly told what career path he must follow. “The universe was very kindly conspiring to prepare me for acting.”
The results have been visible over the past few years, with Hussain appearing in many different sorts of high-profile movies, from international productions by directors like Mira Nair (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and Danis Tanovic (Tigers) to mainstream and multiplex Hindi cinema (Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod, Vikramaditya Motwane’s classy period film Lootera). He has not had to carry these films on his own shoulders – and there is probably still a question mark about whether he has the right screen presence to do this – but he has played solid supporting parts in all of them.
For a boy from small-town Assam (he grew up in Goalpara, “which is probably the most neglected district centre in the country – everything happened far away for us, even the newspaper came three days after it was published”), it must feel surreal walking the red carpet at international film festivals alongside celebrities like Cate Blanchett, or performing a scene with the French superstar Gerard Depardieu (in Life of Pi). But the way he sees it, "It’s a blessing in disguise that I got recognition at this age, or this level of maturity, because my head is less likely to be turned." Besides, if he was going to be swayed by praise, it would have happened long ago, when he got excellent notices in British newspapers for his stage performance in Roysten Abel's production Othello: A Play in Black and White. “Adil Hussain playing Othello is the best piece of Shakespearean acting I have seen,” gushed a 1999 review in The Scotsman.
No wonder he isn’t distracted by what he calls the paraphernalia that comes with being in the film industry – “all this stuff we are going to do in a little while,” he says, rolling his eyes in mock-terror as he points towards our photographer setting up his equipment in the next room. “It’s nice, but I don’t take it too seriously – and I hope it stays that way!” When the shoot begins, he is professionalism exemplified – bringing out and trying on a variety of shirts and coats, asking our lensman Tarun what he thinks will work – but it is also obvious that posing for a still camera doesn’t come naturally to him. “What role am I playing here, I ask myself?” And then, with a theatrical wave of his hand, “Adil, who is being photographed!”
Things might have gone differently. "I did once dream of becoming a big commercial star," he admits, "But then I happened to watch Dustin Hoffman and Steve MacQueen in Papillon – knowing nothing about American cinema – and they seemed so authentic, I thought they were non-professional actors who had been picked up for this project." Later he was astonished to see the same actors in other, very different films, and that altered his view of the profession. “If it weren’t for that experience, I might have gone to Bombay directly. Instead I came to the National School of Drama in Delhi.” In the process he realised that acting is as large and complex as life, there is no one theory. “There are personality actors and there are character actors. Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Bachchan saab – fantastic performers but they have found a persona that is loved by the audience and they stick with it. I was more interested in being a shape-shifter.”
Consequently, staying away from comfort zones has been important for him while choosing roles. Take what is arguably his best-known film part, as Sridevi’s patriarchal, condescending husband in English Vinglish. This is an unsympathetic character, not author-backed at all, but Hussain leapt at the opportunity because he found the role truthful. “This man is not likable, but he is real. He is a product of a society and a way of thinking: that a woman should only be in the kitchen and invisible. Playing it truthfully allows a viewer to look at the film and say yes, he is like that, and even I am like that sometimes, or my husband is like that! It is important to recognise yourself in uncomfortable things.”
In any case, he doesn’t find it useful to think of characters as good or bad. “I don’t even use the word ‘character’ or charitra, because I feel that amounts to a diminishing. I prefer ‘role’ – called paatra in the old Sanskrit tradition – which recognises the complexities and dimensions of people.” And for him, the foundation of being a good actor is empathy. “An actor has to become like water to fit the paatra, and water has three important elements: it is transparent, extremely fluid, and it quenches your thirst. And to become like that is a lifelong journey, maybe several lifetimes.”
This is why he sees his teaching stints – at the NSD – as a learning process, and says he is constantly aware of his own limitations. For instance, though his features don’t mark him out as belonging to a particular region, and have enabled him to be cast as a south Indian, a Bengali and a Maharashtrian, he admits to struggling sometimes with accents. “I would need a lot of preparation time to play a
Haryanvi or Punjabi character. And after watching myself in Zed Plus, I realised that a few of the pronunciations were off.” That apart, getting inside the skin of a small-town puncture-wallah wasn’t a problem. “I grew up in a small town, sat about with all kinds of people. When you grow up without television or telephones, what do you do? You hang around, observe, climb trees, you are curious about the outside world: your hard-drives are free. Now, of course, people are completely immersed in all these strange devices.”
Even as Adil speaks with enthusiasm about his forthcoming films – including Feast of Varanasi, “a small British film, a fantastic thriller that weaves in Indian casteism”, Prashant Nair’s Umrika, which has been selected for the Sundance festival, and Parched, shot by Russell Carpenter, the DoP of films like Titanic – he says he wants to get back to theatre. And there are other activities that demand his time. Such as cooking, which he enjoys very much (“I just made a banana walnut cake with palm jaggery”), or painting, which he discovered a flair for when doing a long take in a film where his character was required to dab at a canvas. Adil improvised for the shot as he had been asked to, but then found that he wanted to finish the painting. It now hangs on a wall in his friend’s house, where we are meeting. On the wall opposite is an MF Hussain original. As our man jokes about not wanting to sign his own painting because he is still only “the other Hussain” – and about how Life of Pi briefly put him in "the Rs 4000 crore club" even though he still hasn't made it to the Rs 200 crore club in India – I think I see a glimpse of the comedian from the Bhaya Mama days.
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[Here’s a post about Lessons in Forgetting, in which Hussain played the lead role – a father searching for the truth behind his daughter’s death]
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“I have been a clown since childhood,” is one of the first things Adil Hussain says, and I sit up. The remark doesn’t quite gel with his screen image – refined, understated gravitas has been his stock-in-trade in films – or with the soft-spoken man sitting in front of me. Watching Hussain, fit and trim, looking much younger than his 51 years, speaking eloquently about his life, it is hard to picture him doing stand-up comedy for a raucous audience. But that is how his career as a performer began in his home-state Assam in the early 1980s, when the group he was part of, Bhaya Mama, “became a craze across the state”.
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| Photo by TARUN GARG |
Bhaya Mama mostly did satire founded on sociopolitical engagement – something that came naturally to young people in the politically turbulent northeast of the time. “We were brutally honest, and covertly responsible for the fall of two governments in Assam,” says Hussain, “We did hundreds of shows, in every nook and corner, to make people aware of what was going on.” The students’ agitation of 1979 had created a lot of tension, and Adil, like other youngsters in the state, didn’t go to school for two years. During this time, many frustrated students took up guns or went astray; he was among those who found catharsis and an anchor in creative expression. “Of course, given the political climate, my father was nervous – if I came home at 2 AM, he didn’t believe I had only been singing or performing, he thought it must be something more dangerous!”
At the same time, he had been doing serious plays in school – “there was a playwright, Rukmul Hazarika, who did absurdist plays inspired by Beckett” – which meant that without really planning it, he was tapping into two sides of his personality simultaneously; feeling his way around, seeing what worked for him. There was no tradition of acting in the family – his father was a teacher, two brothers were lawyers – but being the youngest of seven siblings meant he wasn't burdened with expectations or sternly told what career path he must follow. “The universe was very kindly conspiring to prepare me for acting.”
The results have been visible over the past few years, with Hussain appearing in many different sorts of high-profile movies, from international productions by directors like Mira Nair (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) and Danis Tanovic (Tigers) to mainstream and multiplex Hindi cinema (Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod, Vikramaditya Motwane’s classy period film Lootera). He has not had to carry these films on his own shoulders – and there is probably still a question mark about whether he has the right screen presence to do this – but he has played solid supporting parts in all of them.
For a boy from small-town Assam (he grew up in Goalpara, “which is probably the most neglected district centre in the country – everything happened far away for us, even the newspaper came three days after it was published”), it must feel surreal walking the red carpet at international film festivals alongside celebrities like Cate Blanchett, or performing a scene with the French superstar Gerard Depardieu (in Life of Pi). But the way he sees it, "It’s a blessing in disguise that I got recognition at this age, or this level of maturity, because my head is less likely to be turned." Besides, if he was going to be swayed by praise, it would have happened long ago, when he got excellent notices in British newspapers for his stage performance in Roysten Abel's production Othello: A Play in Black and White. “Adil Hussain playing Othello is the best piece of Shakespearean acting I have seen,” gushed a 1999 review in The Scotsman.
No wonder he isn’t distracted by what he calls the paraphernalia that comes with being in the film industry – “all this stuff we are going to do in a little while,” he says, rolling his eyes in mock-terror as he points towards our photographer setting up his equipment in the next room. “It’s nice, but I don’t take it too seriously – and I hope it stays that way!” When the shoot begins, he is professionalism exemplified – bringing out and trying on a variety of shirts and coats, asking our lensman Tarun what he thinks will work – but it is also obvious that posing for a still camera doesn’t come naturally to him. “What role am I playing here, I ask myself?” And then, with a theatrical wave of his hand, “Adil, who is being photographed!”
Things might have gone differently. "I did once dream of becoming a big commercial star," he admits, "But then I happened to watch Dustin Hoffman and Steve MacQueen in Papillon – knowing nothing about American cinema – and they seemed so authentic, I thought they were non-professional actors who had been picked up for this project." Later he was astonished to see the same actors in other, very different films, and that altered his view of the profession. “If it weren’t for that experience, I might have gone to Bombay directly. Instead I came to the National School of Drama in Delhi.” In the process he realised that acting is as large and complex as life, there is no one theory. “There are personality actors and there are character actors. Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Bachchan saab – fantastic performers but they have found a persona that is loved by the audience and they stick with it. I was more interested in being a shape-shifter.”
Consequently, staying away from comfort zones has been important for him while choosing roles. Take what is arguably his best-known film part, as Sridevi’s patriarchal, condescending husband in English Vinglish. This is an unsympathetic character, not author-backed at all, but Hussain leapt at the opportunity because he found the role truthful. “This man is not likable, but he is real. He is a product of a society and a way of thinking: that a woman should only be in the kitchen and invisible. Playing it truthfully allows a viewer to look at the film and say yes, he is like that, and even I am like that sometimes, or my husband is like that! It is important to recognise yourself in uncomfortable things.”In any case, he doesn’t find it useful to think of characters as good or bad. “I don’t even use the word ‘character’ or charitra, because I feel that amounts to a diminishing. I prefer ‘role’ – called paatra in the old Sanskrit tradition – which recognises the complexities and dimensions of people.” And for him, the foundation of being a good actor is empathy. “An actor has to become like water to fit the paatra, and water has three important elements: it is transparent, extremely fluid, and it quenches your thirst. And to become like that is a lifelong journey, maybe several lifetimes.”
This is why he sees his teaching stints – at the NSD – as a learning process, and says he is constantly aware of his own limitations. For instance, though his features don’t mark him out as belonging to a particular region, and have enabled him to be cast as a south Indian, a Bengali and a Maharashtrian, he admits to struggling sometimes with accents. “I would need a lot of preparation time to play a
Haryanvi or Punjabi character. And after watching myself in Zed Plus, I realised that a few of the pronunciations were off.” That apart, getting inside the skin of a small-town puncture-wallah wasn’t a problem. “I grew up in a small town, sat about with all kinds of people. When you grow up without television or telephones, what do you do? You hang around, observe, climb trees, you are curious about the outside world: your hard-drives are free. Now, of course, people are completely immersed in all these strange devices.”Even as Adil speaks with enthusiasm about his forthcoming films – including Feast of Varanasi, “a small British film, a fantastic thriller that weaves in Indian casteism”, Prashant Nair’s Umrika, which has been selected for the Sundance festival, and Parched, shot by Russell Carpenter, the DoP of films like Titanic – he says he wants to get back to theatre. And there are other activities that demand his time. Such as cooking, which he enjoys very much (“I just made a banana walnut cake with palm jaggery”), or painting, which he discovered a flair for when doing a long take in a film where his character was required to dab at a canvas. Adil improvised for the shot as he had been asked to, but then found that he wanted to finish the painting. It now hangs on a wall in his friend’s house, where we are meeting. On the wall opposite is an MF Hussain original. As our man jokes about not wanting to sign his own painting because he is still only “the other Hussain” – and about how Life of Pi briefly put him in "the Rs 4000 crore club" even though he still hasn't made it to the Rs 200 crore club in India – I think I see a glimpse of the comedian from the Bhaya Mama days.
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[Here’s a post about Lessons in Forgetting, in which Hussain played the lead role – a father searching for the truth behind his daughter’s death]
