Angad Bedi was one of the stars in R.Balki’s segment Made For Each Other in the recently released anthology Lust Stories 2. The actor who essayed Arjun, a character who is about to get married to Veda(played by Mrunal Thakur) has received major love for his performance and his character. His short film was majorly headlined by Neena Gupta who shined resplendently as a sex-positive Dadi emphasizing the importance of physical comparability in a relationship.
Although the actors were hailed for their craft in this one, the segment also received a mixed reaction from the critics. Now opening about the same, Angad Bedi talked to News18 Showsha about the segment, working with Mrunal Thakur, his thoughts on the reviews and other aspects.
Here are the excerpts:
Shat do you feel about the response or reviews that your segment got? Objectively as an actor, to what extent do you feel these reviews hold merit?
Honestly, I am a firm-believer that whatever work I have done and I continue to do, it’s for entertainment which is very clear in my head. As an actor, I am here to entertain people, to tell different stories. I am here for the audience. Yes, if you want to review my work, please go ahead and review it. But eventually, if the audience is happy with my work and they are entertained, I have done my job well. Many would love your work, many wouldn’t. You cannot appease everyone, you cannot make everyone happy. As actors, we are doing our job and critics are doing theirs. It’s the power of the pen, they have and we have the power of performance. These are two different professions. We get critical acclaim when they praise our work and they have the right to criticise us also. So criticism makes you better and also very hungry. We have to co-exist. As long as you are not hitting below the belt,
it’s perfectly fine.
Considering it’s an R.Balki film, how were you approached for this role and whether the end product of it all could match with what you might have expected at the start of the project and that too from a film-maker like him?
With R.Balki, you are always secure. All the makers in the Lust Stories 2 anthology are fine makers. This is my second film with R.Balki Sir and I am very fortunate. He makes a very different kind of cinema. It’s not like the dialogues that we are delivering only hold importance. People who are watching his stories are also fully invested in the entire thing he is presenting. When I did Ghoomer, he was happy with the way that film turned out. That’s how he approached me for Lust Stories 2. He told me that he was making a short film for Netflix and I would really like you to be part of it. And I said ‘ofcourse I want to work with you’. And he was like, ‘come have lunch with me for the next five days’. He said, ‘We’ll have a good time, we’ll make a good film and we’ll make sure that people enjoy it. And if you look at the reviews, people are praising our film and I feel sometimes films are meant to be enjoyed and that is the purpose of cinema. I grew up on that kind of cinema and I feel that I have to be part of stories that are entertaining.
Also, as a viewer, I felt like you couldn’t get the space to showcase your true potential compared to Neena Gupta Ji or Mrunal Thakur. Do you also feel that way? Whether you could have showcased more range with this one if your character had been written that way?
When you do romance, you do a lot of things that are very selfless. It is not about the lines. The lines are Dadi’s lines. Now if you’ll give her role to everyone then you’ll have three Dadi’s in the segment. So that is not at all possible. You have to see what the character is doing. The character is projecting romance, he is projecting love, he is projecting selflessness, he is doing things which is making you feel that he is that boy whose marriage is going to happen in an arranged way. So this is a subtle nuanced performance. Now it’s not necessary that you have to put forth your importance through dialogues.If they had written the movie from Arjun’s perspective, he sure would have gotten the lines. But the entire perspective of our segment was of Dadi. From that perspective, if you see the boy and the girl, they become two individuals who are seen from the lens of a grandmother. So my takeaway from the film is that I got to do romance. That I got to play a soft and selfless character. So I feel like sometimes you do a lot of parts and films for a different kind of projection. So now when you’ll see me, you’ll be like he has done Pink, he has done Gunjan Saxena, he played Cricket Captain in Inside Edge, he is the same guy who has played a tough inspector. And now he is playing a part that is sweet and innocent. As long as that is believable and that has come through, my job is done as an actor in a 20-minute film.
How were you able to get the chemistry right with Mrunal Thakur. Considering that you haven’t worked with her before and yet that was one of the brilliant thing about the segment. How did you both navigate that space?
Because Mrunal Thakur is a very good actor. She is a spontaneous actor and has got a great energy as a human being. She has worked a lot before and at the same time, her energy is nice and pure. So when your energy is right, you are very receptive and she is a receptive actor.
Despite Sita Ramam becoming a big success, she still is very rooted as an individual. She always comes into your energy and that is the most beautiful thing. And I guess between Vedha and Arjun, the reason why people are liking them is because we were never trying to outdo each other. We were trying to just submit to our characters and then present the same energy on screen. That is why they both look lovely together and they have such great chemistry.
Neena Gupta was a true star in this segment as this progressive and sex-positive daadi. What was the best thing about her or her craft that you most definitely picked up after the camera went rolling?
Neena Gupta got a tailor made part. It has dialogues and projection. The thing is that she got the best part. It has elements of comedy, realisation, authority basically everything. It has been written that way. And then to see her perform, she got the walk right, the song she has sung in it was very nice and endearing. And she has played a woman much older than her age. Actors have these things that they can’t age themselves, they can’t do this and that. There are insecurities. But she showed that one shouldn’t have insecurity. It’s a role at the end of the day and it will get love despite age, spectacles, crooked walk if it is done correctly. So her submission is very good towards the part.
The main message of the segment was how sexual compatibility is important before starting a journey with our partners. But some review pointed out that it ignored other aspects. What are your thoughts on that?
I feel it is a balanced film. It’s not like characters in this film have to touch upon every factor in a marriage. Her character is just that if you are getting married, then ensure sexual compatibility because that will last your marriage for a long time. All the other aspects related to kids, arguments, financial divide are things of a later stage. The thing is that if the sex is good and if you are physically compatible then no matter how many fights you have with your partner or how many arguments you have with your partner, the relationship will stand solid on the ground. And if that aspect goes cold, all the other aspects also gets affected by it.
As an actor and straying away from the director’s vision, what kind of dialogue or discussion do you wanted to start in the context of the story that you presented and through your performance? And whether you feel successful in doing that?
I feel it’s a very fulfilling and enriching experience. Our purpose of telling a story, that has been fulfilled. It has been told in the most sweet nice, yet unapologetic, yet submissive manner. It is not authoritative, it is not forceful, it is not told by the lens of a man or a girl. It’s told from the Dadi’s lens and it becomes even more endearing, more personal, more sweet. There is no aggressiveness in the film. So it’s a family lust film. You can watch this film since it’s a love story told as a lust story.
Growing up, what was your point of source for sex education and whether sex was a taboo at your home or whether you had conversations around it in your family as a teenager?
Sex is still a taboo in the mass areas. Who talks about sex that openly? It’s only in the urban spaces do we see that people are more receptive about sex and topics around it. According to me, conversations on sex is not accepted as a drawing room conversation. You can talk in front of your parents like the Dadi does in the film. We are still far away from reaching that progression. Yes, the conversation is slowly going to start but I feel that we didn’t get sex education back in school. Now it must be a part of the curriculum across schools. How is that being taught, that we will get to know in future only because my kid is also small. So I don’t know what the youth is listening to but I feel dialogues on sex in mass spaces is still not progressive.
As a follow up, you are a doting father yourself and you are someone who is really close to your kids. So I am curious how will you and Neha approach a dialogue on topics like these when your kids reach an impressionable age so that they don’t end up consuming information from unreliable sources?
They’ll only bring it to us. If we turned mature at the age of 18, kids of today are maturing even faster, when they are just 14-15 years of age. That makes a lot of difference. So this enlightenment must be early for my kids. So we will be as forthright, as honest and as clear as possible because that’s what we want. If we don’t help them, they’ll commit mistakes. So in order to protect them, we have to educate them ourselves.It is better that we do it with honesty and care.
Having all said and done, if you were to rank your segment from the Lust Stories 2 anthology, where will you place it and why? What was your favourite segment from the lot and why?
Honestly, for me R.Balki’s segment in the Lust Stories ranks at number 1.Because it is told through the perspective of a grandparent so that India comes to know. That was our message and that message has been told very beautifully. If that was the message, then it has ticked all the boxes and I feel that is very important. I loved Konkona’s film. I told her it was brilliant and I loved the turnout of the Amit Sharma’s film with the realisation of Kajol Ma’am. Every film had it’s own way of narrating stories but I feel we had a message for India and that was imperative.
You and Neha recently got a shoutout from Karan Johar for your own version of ‘Tum Kya Mile’ song and I was also going through the comments and people were like ‘better chemistry than Ranveer and Alia’. How do you feel about such love and compliments coming your way? And whether you would like Karan to direct you both in a romantic saga in future?
I would love to work with Karan Johar any day. The way he projects romance and emotions, his sense of drama and music, I feel he is the number 1 commercial film-maker that our country ever had. And one day, I’d love to work with him on a project. That reel was just an audition from our end that ‘Sir please see, If you make anothe romantic film, you can take us in that’.
Comments
0 comment