12 Question With Akshay Oberoi

These days Akshay Oberoi is better known as squadron leader Bash aka Basheer Khan these days owing to his brilliant turn as the fighter pilot in Siddharth Anand's Hrithik Roshan-Deepika Padukone-starrer Fighter. It seems the actor, who had relocated to India from the US in 2008 with the dream to make it big in Bollywood and made his debut in Sooraj Barjatya's Isi Life Mein in 2010 before grabbing eyeballs with his was his turn as Nikki Singh in the dark and gritty 2017 thriller Gurgaon, is finally getting his due. We caught up with the blue-eyed actor to get a glimpse of the man behind the characters.

- Ananya Ghosh

1 THREE WORDS THAT DEFINE YOU:

Hardworking, patient and loving.

2 THREE WORDS THAT DEFINE LOVE:

I'm giving you two words that define love to meAvyaan, my son and Jyoti, my wife.

3 IF NOT AN ACTOR, WHAT WOULD YOU BE?

I have nothing. If I had something else, I would have gone and done that because being an actor is way too difficult a career to survive.

4 YOU GREW UP AND STUDIED IN THE US, WHAT MADE YOU JOIN BOLLYWOOD?

There was absolutely no South Asian representation in America at that time. The brown skin was nowhere on the map. I wanted to become an actor. But the dream was to play all kinds of characters and not just that of a terrorist or a cab driver. I loved the Hindi movies and at that point Bollywood was the most plausible option to realise my dream.

5 WHAT WAS THE FIRST HINDI FILM YOU EVER WATCHED?