These days, you’ll hear Akshay talking about something the industry doesn’t often put on a pedestal: self-critique. Before the release of Welcome to the Jungle, the 58-year-old was open about how he had been put in a box for years and made up his mind to get out of it. A rare kind of honesty from a star, and one that has his audience on his side.
Why this comes from the heart
Typecasting can be a cruel thing, and Akshay was on to it. “After that decade, I’d see my work and want to slap myself,” he’ll tell you. He’s thinking of a time when he was churning out action and “nobody could see me as anything more”.
He is also the first to admit where he started. “I only wanted to make money,” he says of his early days. Now, it is about the long haul. Hitting 35 in the business is not an excuse to rest; it is a new standard. His goal? “To cross 40 and be on set five minutes before I die.”
Making a change on purpose
It is no accident. Since Khiladi in ’92, he has been in and out of comedy, romance, drama and the odd horror. That is how we got Hera Pheri, Dhadkan, Mujhse Shaadi Karogi, Toilet…Ek Prem Katha and Padman.
Think of it as tearing down and building up over and over. The rule is: don’t let your image do the talking for you, let the work do it.
Putting it to the test with Welcome to the Jungle
His latest has a bit of a meta feel to it. In the film, a ‘fake’ movie crew in the wild is taken for the army and runs into some bandits. Ahmed Khan is at the helm, with a script by Neeraj Vora and production from Firoz Nadiadwala, Rakesh Dang and Vedant Vikaas Baali.
You have Base Industries Group, Cape of Good Films and Seeta Films behind it. It is his second of the year, coming after Bhoot Bangla, and it hits screens on Friday under the Welcome banner.
Put aside the hype for a second and here is what is getting people’s interest:
– A top star who won’t have it with his own typecasting
– A story within a story that is set up for trouble
– Some 90s faces you haven’t seen in a while
– An ensemble of this size is hard to come by in a comedy
A cast made for laughs
You will know them when you see them. There is Paresh Rawal, Arshad Warsi, Suniel Shetty, Johny Lever, Rajpal Yadav, and with them are Shreyas Talpade, Kiku Sharda, Krushna Abhishek and Aftab Shivdasani.
And then there is the rest of the table: Farida Jalal, Daler Mehndi, Urvashi Rautela, Puneet Issar, Yashpal Sharma, Mukesh Tiwari, Kiran Kumar, Zakir Hussain, Vindu Dara Singh and more. Not every day does Bollywood put together a comic lineup like this.
On stardom and the work
Akshay is of the mind that he should be working every day. “I have a duty to put out at least four films,” he says. Whether they are a hit or a miss, you show up and you put in the work. No way around it.
Stardom isn’t about the red carpet to him. It was the look on his father’s face after he had seen a film 12 or 14 times, even if he had to pull the driver along to the theatre. His mother carried on with that. Aarav and Nitara will watch his movies, sure, but he says there is no comparison to a parent’s pleasure in it.
Down the line
Should Welcome to the Jungle be a success, it is just another one of Akshay’s moves to use a crowd-pleaser to put the audience in a new headspace. If not, he has the time. “Thirty-five years is a long run… it is a one in a billion you have a career like this,” he notes.
That is where the drive comes from. For him, reinvention is not a mood; it is how he operates. And for now, he is heading into the jungle with a smile and a whole lot of comic talent to back it up.
