Higher Life

Sushant Singh Rajput is restless with fame – and brimming with ideas on what to do next. It may just shock you.

- Priya Pathiyan & K. Sunil Thomas

Many a television heartthrob has tried to make the transition to the big screen only to fail spectacularly. No one has been able to decode why a megastar on the small screen cannot become a superstar on the the big one. Shah Rukh Khan proved it was possible, but that was 20-odd years ago. And now there is Sushant Singh Rajput. Not quite in the same league of stardom, but popular enough to make Bollywood notice him and put good work his way. With the days of mindless masala movies more or less on the wane, and given the abysmal flops of some of the biggies recently, THE MAN tries to figure out what works.Excerpts from an exclusive interview:

You’ve done a coming-of-age film with Kai Po Che!, a typical romance in Shuddh Desi Romance, an action-thriller in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!, and a biopic with M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story. Your next film is science fiction. Is this variety accidental or planned? 

There are two things that are important when I say yes to a project. First, I should like listening to the story so I can contribute to the narrative. Second, I should not understand completely how to play my character. If I already know how to play the part, there’s no point in it. Right now, I’d be playing the 58thcharacter in the last 11 years of doing theatre, TV and films. All these characters had something that I didn’t understand completely.

I always thought actors wanted to know the character well before they committed to playing it.