Ronit Roy
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A profile
Ronit Roy is a remarkably secure actor in a frazzled, insecure industry
Gayatri Jayaraman
January 22, 2015
On the sets of the television courtroom drama Adaalat in Madh Island, Ronit Roy is that rare breed of superstar, television superstar, who sprays his own hair down and does his own make-up as he watches a business channel for market news. He also makes you turn around while he changes his shirt, sale able eight-pack abs notwithstanding. The 48-year-old runs 10 km every morning. His regimen includes parkour, which he learnt from actor Akshay Kumar, the art of surmounting physical obstacles, seeing it as a spiritual practice: "Nothing is insurmountable". He won't share his routine with the prying camera, he insists. "Then what is the difference between me and the eight-pack-abs brigade? I'm an actor, not a burger. Some things are just not for sale," he says, wagging a finger as you sneak a peek.
Fitter than most people on screen, including his closest rival in TV land Ram Kapoor whom he sees as his 'little brother', this Nagpur-born Bengali is built like a rock. But there is an innate steadfastness and decency about him that makes him a beloved to many across Bollywood and television: From Amitabh Bachchan to Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan; his firm, Ace Security and Protection Agency, also provides security to all three, amongst others. He is tight-lipped about his business; a trained security expert, he gives little away except that security in India, all those people who check the boot of your car at hotels, is a sham. "We have a saying in the security business: dead clients don't pay." He smiles, as if reassuring you: "I focus on keeping them alive."
You can see why the steeliness in him extends to the taut body language of an obsessive-compulsive disorder ridden perennially angry cop in the recent Ugly for which plaudits, as he tells mentor Anurag Kashyap over the phone, are still pouring in. "Even the enemy says it's good, at least accept a thank you," he says to him. For Ugly, he says, "I gave Kashyap my little finger and asked him to guide me." Roy has the humility of one exceedingly willing to surrender to a mentor. It began with producer-director Subhash Ghai, with whom he found shelter as an Ahmedabad-trained hotel management graduate arriving in Mumbai with Rs.6.20 in his pocket on his maiden foray into Bollywood. Roy washed the dishes and paid his dues at the now defunct Sea Rock Hotel, attempting entirely forgettable roles in films such as Jurmana (1996) and Army (1996), until Ekta Kapoor, under whose wings he discovered television, gave him a temporary role in Kasautii Zindagii Kay that grew to a full-scale one when audiences gasped at how suave he was on screen. With Kashyap, Udaan (2010) earned him his first critical acclaim. Roy's mettle is malleable and ductile. "This Ronit Roy you see here is not one product. I tell everyone that I am a thief. I take the best of what everyone has given me, and the composite makes me." Even that is a philosophy he learned in his early days from Jeetendra, he says. "Jeetendra told me I don't climb ladders, because vertical ascent also means vertical descent. I spread out like a tree. I am rooted to the earth, am free beneath the sky and unshakeable in the wind." Roy realised early on, in days he says when he needed to put square meals on the table for the home he has with second wife Neelam Singh and bring up two children-daughter Ador, 11, and son Agasthya, 7 (Ona, 23, his daughter from his first marriage, lives in the US)-that he needed a Plan B. "In this industry nobody is a friend. A friend can pay your rent for one month or two, but to make a film, you'd have to sell your house. To depend on friends for work means you're impractically waiting for them to sell their houses for you." There are people who'd have easily made a film for him had he asked them to. But he never did. "People kept asking, when I was struggling, why don't I make a comeback on television with Ekta. I would tell them, nobody knows the market like Ekta. When she spots a role made for me, she will call me."
Sure enough, when Kapoor decided to change the saas-bahu formula with Itna Karo Na Mujhe Pyaar, a tale of a divorced middle-aged couple who find a tentative attraction for each other again, it was the gracefully ageing Roy she called to star with comeback actress Pallavi Kulkarni. "I don't try to play roles 10 years younger. There is a dignity to where I am, my years of hard work and the intensity show. I am not a very intelligent person, but I am a very spiritual person," he says. It is a clarity he brings to many aspects of his life. When Ador was five, she didn't speak to him for a whole day after watching Udaan. Did that hurt his feelings or cause him to reassess the roles he took? "She was the five-year-old, not me," he retorts.
Would he like to break out of playing angry father roles, a stereotyping now repeated across Udaan (2010), 2 States and Ugly (2014)? "Very few people can relay intensity through the eyes or body language. If it has come to me, it has come to me for a reason. I know you'd like me to have more intelligent reasons for my choices, but I don't question. I accept," he says. Film is a hobby, television is where his bread and butter lie, and the security business, markets, are where his investments are. His indulgences include properties he buys in farmlands to stay rooted to the earth, and the latest Audi R8 with a yellow Lamborghini chassis bought on a bank loan. His sexiness, that quality in Itna Karo Na Mujhe Pyaar which even younger characters on the show find irresistible, is incidental. This is his spreading. This is Ronit Roy cool.
