You know him as Khalid Mir in Raazi, Hathi Ram in Paatal Lok and Pradip Kamat in Three of Us. Read on to know the man behind those faces…

Sheetal

There are stars and then, there are actors. Jaideep Ahlawat is a star-actor, in a league of his own, which we are told by Namrata Joshi, who moderated a session with the actor on Day 4 of Cinevesture International Film Festival at Taj-Chandigarh. We couldn’t agree more with her, though the actor would rather have us believe that he is a mere product of a writer’s creation and a director’s vision. What he says may be true, but like Joshi said, he indeed is a star-actor. The jam-packed ballroom at Taj-Chandgarh bore testimony to the actor’s stardom!

Ya kaam acha ho ya paise, ghar se nikalne ke liye kuch motivation jaroori hai! (There should be some motivation to do a project, either a great script or a fat cheque) And, it’s important because that big cheque will take care of your needs when you next take up a project with a great role and less money.

Jaideep Ahlawat

While his career spans over a decade, Ahlawat is also one of many actors who have benefited from the OTT boom. He credits his success to one basic thing – good writing. “Good writing is what makes my character look good on screen. It’s not just me who did a great job in Paatal Lok, it was the writer, director, cinematographer and many others. I was only the face of that collective effort,” he explains.

He is old fashioned when it comes to reading his scripts too. “I prefer to have a hard copy of the script and read it, rather than hear it from someone as part of narration. When someone narrates it, he puts in his own emotion to the character, but when I read it, I make my own impression. It’s raw and authentic,” he says.

On the contrary, while shooting for a scene, the intense Ahlawat prefers to have instructions and comments from his director and writer to get into the skin of the character. And, as another Netflix outing, Three of Us, is being appreciated for its unique tale told in a simple manner, he says, “It’s the digital medium that has given freedom to writers and directors to experiment and tell a tale in the long format and in many seasons.” Which reminds us of the second season of Paatal Lok, which is in the offing.

Ahlawat calls filming for Paatal Lok is a ‘beautiful-painful feeling, which is satisfying as well’. He adds, “It’s an example of complicated, nuanced writing.”

Talking about his personal journey from a village near Rohtak, Haryana, to Mumbai, Ahlawat says acting wasn’t the original career option for him. A student of medical stream in Jat College, Rohtak, like many of his peers, his aim was to get into the Armed Forces. But he couldn’t crack the SSB exams, and it broke him completely. After watching the play Oedipus, which moved him to tears, he found his calling in theatre. The stage liberated him. “Plays became my mode of survival. Acting brought me happiness, I could eat and sleep again, and get out and meet friends,” he says.

And this is source of happiness that propelled him to pursue a postgraduate course in FTII Pune. “I never thought of making money through acting. Even if you are an average actor, you can sustain yourself in Mumbai. So, it was always about good work.”

For him, there is no compromise when it comes to a quality product. Even if it means chopping of his own lines from the script, which could have made or marred his image in his debut film Aakrosh. Ahlawat recalls how he asked writer Aditya Dhar to cut down his eight-line scene to three, as those extra lines made no sense to him. “I do poetry recitation in Hindi and Urdu. Poetry is all about brevity. A poet expresses in two lines what a writer does in 200 words. So, I went to Aditya and told him that ‘ye teen char linein to bakwas lag rahi hain’. And he said it was the first time a new actor was reducing his own lines. He was shocked by my suggestion, but we are friends till date because of that incident.” Be it Khalid Mir in Raazi, Shahid Khan in Gangs of Wasseypur, Hathi Ram in Paatal Lok or Pradip Kamat in Three of Us, he enjoys every performance because ‘acting is breathing’ for him and everything else, money or expensive clothes just ‘a bonus’.