Time Stamps:
02:00 Paatal Lok - Season 1 & 2
06:12 Maharaj
09:28 Jaane Jaan
16:21 Three of Us
22:16 Ajeeb Daastaans
25:35 Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 1
“You just have to feel emotions with the purity of an actor. Don’t try to make it all about ‘I will show you how I’m gonna do it. How great I will be in this film’. Don’t do that. I learnt this very early in my life. Don’t try to impress anyone, not even the audience. Be impressed by what is written on the paper and do it. If you enact it with the utmost honesty, they will get it.”
This is Jaideep Ahlawat’s philosophy. He speaks without artifice or arrogance. His words are considered, punctuated by small pauses as he sometimes takes a few minutes to put his thoughts together, recalling moments from his early career.
He has walked into Black Frames Studio in suburban Mumbai precisely at the appointed hour, with an entourage: his manager, hair and make-up artists, a publicist and a spot boy among others. But that’s as starry as he gets. Swiftly and without fuss, Ahlawat swaps his casual neon tee and trousers with a denim blazer over a black tee — picked out by the stylist — and settles down in front of the camera.
Before streaming platforms broadened the narrative scope of storytelling for television and cinema, Ahlawat would not have been considered a marquee actor. He lacks conventional, boyish good looks and the pedigree of a film family. The rise of OTT platforms and the subsequent shift in viewers’ tastes, worked in Ahlawat’s favour, offering him a buffet of meaty roles. Each time we compliment him on his many notable performances, he unhesitatingly deflects the praise to his director or scriptwriter.
From an early age, Ahlawat has been fond of reading — the legendary Hindi writer Munshi Premchand was his favourite. Every book he read fired his imagination, conjuring different worlds. So much so that to him as a sensitive reader, if there were two characters, each ‘spoke’ with a different voice, had a different form. He tells me, “When we first read a story, a world is created inside our minds. And then the more often that you read it, you develop a better understanding of that world.”
Now when he reads scripts, something similar occurs. A world takes shape in his mind and with each reading, its characters are fleshed out. And what can help you as a performer, he tells me, is that “as a human being, you must be like a slate. So anyone can write whatever they want on it, but you can also erase it”.
This mindset helps Ahlawat wear his characters like well-fitted suits. When he’s in their skin, he takes on their nuances entirely. Take for example his rendition of the pot-bellied Hathi Ram Chaudhary in Paatal Lok, an earnest investigator who has failed to rise up the ranks. “I read the script back-to-back, back-to-back. There was so much to...so much to understand in the first reading, because it was the full graph of…of a character, with very different shades…and everything…. What we call the range of nine emotions that are in the Natyashastra are in him.” Ahlawat is astonishing as a cop who is thoroughly disillusioned, beaten by his own expectations and frustrated by the system in which he works.
Ahlawat’s versatility as an actor is clear through his varied filmography, from Shahid Khan (Gangs Of Wasseypur - Part 1), Pradip Kamat (Three Of Us), Babloo (Ajeeb Daastaans) or Naren Vyas (Jaane Jaan). For Maharaj, where he played the self-proclaimed godman Jadunath (JJ), Ahlawat lost 28 kilogrammes at the urging of producer, Aditya Chopra. He literally got into the character’s leanness required to project a regal demeanour. “I didn’t try to do anything about that aura. I was just feeling like that, every time I was on the set, that everyone in front of me were small people. That’s the thought I used to carry in my head. These are common, ordinary folk. They have no idea what or who I am.”
In his latest and most unexpected turn on the screen, Ahlawat unveils yet another facet of his repertoire. He plays Ranjan Aulakh, a vicious criminal masquerading as an art collector in the recent Netflix movie, Jewel Thief – The Heist Begins. And as Ranjan, Ahlawat does what we’ve never seen him do: dance!
Success did not come easily to Ahlawat. In 2007, the then 28-year-old son of a Jat subedar from Kharkara, a village in Rohtak, Haryana joined the Film and Television Institute of India. After graduating, he moved to Mumbai seeking work, and like all acting hopefuls, Ahlawat too went through the carousel of auditions. It was a period marked by great frustration — waiting for shoots to begin and yearning for a break.
His first notable performance was in Anurag Kashyap’s 2012 epic, Gangs of Wasseypur - Part 1. Though before the filming began there were months filled with uncertainty. Kashyap told Ahlawat not to cut his hair, leading the actor to believe that he had gotten the part, before going silent. Ahlawat recalls how after the first reading, “nobody called me for an audition. I thought, ‘No way, this is not how it works.’ Around two months passed and there was no news.” But despite his confusion over whether he had actually landed the role or not, he let his hair grow out — and his intense performance in the brief role in the gangster epic made Shahid Khan into a cult figure. Ahlawat states that he is glad that he knew little about the intricacies of acting then and purely followed Kashyap’s instructions.
By his own admission, he is a director’s actor whose main job is to translate the “captain’s” vision onto the screen.Yet Ahlawat does bring his own perceptions to the set. Sometimes his interpretation differs from that of the director. In that case, he says, with a mature understanding that indicates a willingness to see different points of view, “Either I convince you or you convince me with that logic why a certain character is behaving in a certain way in certain circumstances. That is the point, the topic to discuss. Most of the time, it does not happen because the two views are not poles apart.” In Ahlawat, one senses an open mind that continues to grow with the desire to assimilate more through discussion, experience, exchange of opinions, even contrary ones.
He recalls a scene in Jaane Jaan in which he was spontaneously moved to stray away from the plan. “The scene that I find very interesting is the one where Maya (Kareena Kapoor Khan’s character) tells Naren Vyas, ‘There’s nothing of the sort between us.’ And then he goes into the room and he cries out, because suddenly...his entire world has dropped. Whatever hope he had held on to is gone. I remember, we designed that scene in a way that he will come in, a little angry and he’d punch that punching bag, and throw some things and then...but I don’t know...something happened. I just closed that gate and I dropped…. And as soon as the scene was done, Sujoyda was like, ‘What the hell happened right now?’”
It seems there’s no part that Ahlawat can’t pull off. Yet, to one’s surprise, he confesses suffering from self-doubt when he’s offered unconventional roles. So, when a character like Babloo comes his way, he takes some convincing to do it. He remembers telling his Ajeeb Daastaans director Shashank Khaitan, “This is very difficult for me. I think you are casting the wrong actor. Look-wise and everything….” And in our conversation, modestly states, “I think I didn’t do much justice to that character. I was just too apprehensive about how to play it…how to show an emotion that you don’t understand.”
Ahlawat tells us, with a moving sincerity, what continues to motivate him in his career: “What drives me as an actor is…I don’t know how to say this, but...it gives me some kind of pleasure when I’m feeling those emotions which are not mine at that particular time. In front of the camera, I’m doing something which is not mine. It gives me a different high. So I think that is something which drives me actually crazy, because I don’t think it’s normal, but you feel special because you are doing something that is completely out of context in terms of your personality, your mood, your day. And still you try to make it believable. You know, this gives me goosebumps sometimes….”