Ishaan Khatter Goes Global

Shooter Uxley was a character written by the novelist Elin Hilderbrand, a Caucasian. There were several white actors up to play the character in the book’s streaming adaptation. But the role of Shooter, the groom’s enigmatic friend in Susanne Bier’s The Perfect Couple (the Netflix series adapted from the book) went to India’s very own Ishaan Khatter. Khatter has built quite an international roll call for himself in the last six years, with Majid Majidi’s Beyond the Clouds (2017) and Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy (2020), and is getting lots of response for his role as Shooter Dival. Dival is a ransom-rich Indian (though he makes his own bed like a poor boy, and sniffs the housekeeper) who thinks nothing of lending his friend’s mother $300,000 (spoiler alert) and fits right into the posh Nantucket crowd of beautiful people with dark secrets. Khatter says this case of colourless casting went beyond mere tokenism in his case because his is a clearly fleshed out character. “But the world was so culturally far removed from anything I had seen,” says Khatter. So he did a lot of work on his physicality and his accent. There was a diction coach on set given the many nationalities the cast represented, Nicole Kidman being Australian, Eve Hewson (rock star Bono’s daughter) being Irish, Billy Howle being English and the great French diva Isabelle Adjani. The cast spent four months together in Cape Cod, then gathered again in London and Los Angeles after the writers’ strike. All of 28, Khatter has six years of work behind him and a lot ahead of him. This includes the upcoming The Royals, a romantic comedy series with Netflix (co-starring Bhumi Pednekar and Zeenat Aman) and a new film for Neeraj Ghaywan. “I will go wherever there is good work,” he says. And if there is a Bollywood-style dance attached to it, as there is The Perfect Couple (which was choreographed by Charm La’Donna of Dua Lipa and Kendrick Lamar fame) why not? “It was so liberating,” says Khatter of the dance which was used in the credits. And cool to watch.

Sagar Radia Stands Out

One of the good things about Jurassic World (2015) was that the late Irrfan Khan was playing a rich Indian tycoon, Simon Masrani. Rich as in private plane rich. That is the change in representation now. It was evident in The Perfect Couple, as well as in the fourth episode of Season 3 of HBO’s hit show, Industry (2020). Sagar Radia, an English actor, plays the role of Rishi Ramdani, one of the most aggressive brokers on the trading floor. He gets to play a complete Alpha male in the show. As he said to The New York Times, “He is the epitome of bravado, which is so fascinating, because for someone like myself who comes from a British South Asian background as an actor, we don’t get the chance to play those type of roles.” In another interview to The Cut, Radia said: “People who look like me don’t get to play those type of characters. We’re always the terrorist, the taxi driver, the best friend. So to be who Rishi is —work hard, play hard, he’s sexualised in a way that you don’t get to see South Asian actors get sexualised—it is a dream role.” Radia, 37, gets to play a fully rounded broker who is married to Old English Money, yet made to feel inadequate because he is not as white as everyone else in the countryside where he has bought a pile of land. As he says, these are roles that normally go to the Asian A-listers Riz Ahmed and Dev Patel. They have moved on to bigger things, so there is greater choice if anyone wants to do more than just tick the diversity box.

Rewind

Netflix’s show IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack has brought a lot of old spies intothe front and centre of the national dialogue, with each senior IB and R&AW operative giving his point of view on the negotiations with the hijackers. The spy has become a staple of Hindi cinema, especially with the success of the Tiger franchise. But the spy is a fairly new character in the Bollywood story, emerging with the understanding of India’s strategic importance in the world. Ankhen, directed by Ramanand Sagar, in 1968, was perhaps the first of its genre in Hindi cinema, with the spy played by a suave Dharmendra who vows to carry out the promises of Azad Hind Fauj’s veteran soldiers. The enemy, perhaps because it was made in the aftermath of the 1962 war, is Chinese. Pakistan had still not become Public Enemy No 1.

BollywoodcinemaDharmendraIshaan KhatterSagar Radia