For an actor who has made his mark playing an arrogant Intelligence Bureau officer in “Kahani” and the villain with the heinous laugh in the recent blockbuster “Kick”, one would expect Nawazuddin Siddiqui to project a larger than life image, or at least an air of entitlement that stars of lesser talent don effortlessly. Instead, he explains for the benefit of an audience at Chicago’s Icon Theater, he is nervous, being ill at ease on a public stage.
In fact, Siddiqui said in an interview with IANS here that he has never allowed the need for an image to distort his craft as an actor. Siddiqui’s unswerving commitment to the craft and his apparent detachment to stardom appears to have been honed more by his setbacks – till recently his appearances in mainstream Hindi cinema were limited to a solitary scene,often of a torture victim – than his recent spectacular commercial and critical successes. For Siddiqui, who grew up in Budhana, a village in the Muzzafarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, a break in films was nothing if not fortuitous. When he moved to Mumbai, all he wanted were a few roles in television serials.
In a profession, where stardom is a destination, and narcissism an essential virtue, Siddiqui would seem to be a misfit. He struggled for about a decade trying to get a break and today he appears gratified, but not unsettled by success. After the success of “Kick”, he has been getting several offers for similar villainous roles, but has rejected all of them, keeping a promise to himself that he would not do more than one commercial film a year.
“I knew I would get offers to play the villain after ‘Kick’, and I had already decided to reject all of them,” he said, adding: “Fortunately, I have enough scripts to give me a choice. The success of ‘Kick’ will help in the marketing of other small budget independent films I have acted in. A big blockbuster like ‘Kick’ expands the audience for my films and makes it easier to promote them.”
Siddiqui was honored at the Chicago South Asian Festival for his “outstanding achievements”, where two of his films, ‘Liar’s Dice’ (India’s entry for the Oscars) and ‘Monsoon Shootout’ were screened, and where despite his reticence, he appeared to be an audience favorite.
He had earlier attended a similar festival in New York and was scheduled to attend another in Los Angeles. (IANS)