Neil Bhoopalam
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A profile
Gayatri Jayaraman
March 13, 2015
Neil has a bad habit of running away with the focus, be it in the film NH10, or his bit role in the play Hamlet: The Clown Prince
There is an abiding image of actor Neil Bhoopalam's years in school: that of a lonely teenager kicking a football against two palm trees for a game. It's a loneliness that's stayed so deep within him that it seemed natural to seek an audience as its adult corollary. And that is what the 31-year-old has been doing, as he flits between stage-a goosebump-raising performance as Fido and King Claudius in Hamlet: The Clown Prince, a quirky double suitor role in The Merchant of Venice and a villain in a Kalki Koechlin-written and directed forthcoming play; as the Rahul Gandhi the nation wished it had in Anil Kapoor's Indian version of 24; and as Anushka Sharma's road tripping co-star in her first co-production with Phantom, NH 10.
He approaches the field, and the film industry's many camps, like a football leaguer: "You need to be such a good player that everyone wants you on their team just to have a fun game." And Bhoopalam is fun. He stops slicing grilled chicken which waiter Rakesh humorously assures him is "half the chicken, not half-grilled" to convince you that his deep set eyes are what make him appear intense depending on the angle of tilt to his recently near-tonsured head. "My head is mine," he says, pointing to the cut with his steak knife. "I do these things for me."
In fact, the greatest gift he thinks he could ever wish to give anyone, is them inside his head, as the lights go off when he is 'dead' on stage for Hamlet: The Clown Prince and the audience applauds. It's when his hair stands on end. The south Indian conservative Andheri boy, born to an Anglo-Indian mother and Tamil father, didn't grow up watching a lot of films. "My references are therefore more current, more candid," he says. His casting director Roshni Banerjee coaxed him into trying out for 24. It is surreal to shoot even as you watch episodes air, he says. The deferred self-correction becomes a continuum, unlike a play in which you can only correct the next performance. Living on these cusps with mainstream or indie Bollywood, TV and stage are what shape him.
"Anil Kapoor in 24 was the most toned down performance he's ever done, whereas the rest of us come from a very different school of acting, theatre performers, television, friends... so they mixed up and it marinated six months into the series." Blame that for him running away with it. Although the cast and crew have denied any resemblance to the Gandhi family, Bhoopalam spent days watching their speeches. "King or commoner, you are a person in private, so your mannerisms can be uniquely your own. It's in public that you become a persona, so if you don't get that right, you've lost the characterisation," he says. He ran so far with it, he stole the plot out from under Anil 'Jack Bauer' Kapoor, making the power balance tilt towards him on season 1 of the show. He now gets called Aditya Singhania in public: a role association more powerful than the edgiest stuff he's done on the big screen. "I would do a run-of-the-mill role on the big screen, but I would only do TV if it was experimental," he says.
At a time when it is increasingly becoming difficult to be political as an artiste, Bhoopalam, who also played Shayan Munshi, a friend at the time, in No One Killed Jessica (2011), finds himself unwittingly drawn towards the political role: "I'm just an actor and I don't want to be drawn into controversy. But I also know that the part is a sum of the whole. I played the role of Shayan with more empathy than what appeared on screen. That's when I realised yours is not the only propelling vision."
That's why the stage is the bank he draws from for the big screen. He's been up all night rehearsing for his role in The Merchant of Venice, a role that is all of seven minutes. Sharma wished he would override the play for NH10 promotions, he says, but he couldn't. "There's new technology coming in, so I'm paranoid I'll miss a trick. The next generation is always your competition, so I always act with youngies," he says. It's also his way to stay grounded.
When he started out, being a radio jockey straight out of college, an audition here and there, he struggled to put food on his plate and pay rent. Then came Britz, a BAFTA award-winning Channel 4 series on life as a British Muslim after the 2005 London bombings. There was a time, after David (2013) and Ungli (2014), when he saw people with big money and told himself "I want that". It was wife Nandini, a casting director, who pulled him back from that edge. Now, he searches for the small points on which equilibrium turns, such as knowing the audiences responding to each of his genres: the theatre gentry, the mass-of-India TV junkies, and the edgy Anurag Kashyap fan clique. The greatest compliment he's received was years ago: he was wrapping up a rehearsal for Girish Karnad's Hayavadana in Bangalore when a young woman came up to him. "I almost didn't come," she said, "but then I saw your name on the billet and I thought if you were in it, it must be good."
Neil Bhoopalam is no longer playing football alone with two palm trees because he learned along the way it's not the team you play for that counts, it's the kick in the player.
