Randeep Hooda is a man of few words. Ahead of Highway's release, he told I Kaur that he hates actors who engage in mischief on sets
Sometimes a few words are enough to describe a person and for Randeep Hooda, conceit is the only word that fits his personality. He has a mind of his own and usually doesn’t like to share too many personal details. However, when it came to his character in Highway he was generously verbose. “My character is unlike many in Hindi cinema because he is actually rooted somewhere. His name is Mahadira, an NCR man who has had a checkered past with criminal activities amounting to a very rough life. However he is on the journey of his life when the story of Highway happens to him,” he shared “without letting the cat out of the bag.”
Randeep’s character looks rugged and belongs to the Gujjar community. The actor said that he had to “laze around in the sun a lot so that my face looked older than it is. I also learnt the language that Gujjars speak. They are from in and around the NCR who speak a language which is a cross between Haryanvi and Brij bhasha. I met a lot of Gujjars who were doing similar things to what the character does in and around NCR. These were very interesting encounters. At the end of the day they are nice people in spite of what they do. That was just the external bit, the main thing was to identify as much with the character as I could. I had to be somewhere in awe of these people in order to play that character,” he added.
The actor also drew the tattoos on his arm. He elaborated, “I drew the tattoos on the back of my palm and wrote Mahadir on my forearm. I wrote that on my right arm with my left hand even though I’m right-handed.”
Randeep also shared a few anecdotes from his travel through the film. “I joined the shooting from a village called Mangad near Faridabad which was close to my parent’s house. So when I was shooting there I would go home and eat parathas cooked by my mom and then come back. Then while travelling in Rajasthan we went to Ajmer where I visited Ajmer Sharif. In Jaipur I went to 61st Cavalry Regiment and rode some of the best horses in the country. I did a lot of hiking in Himachal Pradesh and also got altitude sickness. We went to the China border as well which is nearly a desert in the mountains,” he said.
Talking about the fun they had on sets, Randeep turned a grim colour. He commented, “I don’t like people who play pranks on set. I actually go there to work and not have fun.” TheHighway crew were also confronted with challenges, added Randeep. “We went to this one place where the mountains were made of loose rocks and they would keep tumbling with the wind. So we had to keep watching out for them so that we could stop or speed up the car. It was like a video game,” he shared.
At the moment Randeep has a lot of projects lined up. “I am finishing the shooting of Main Aur Charles which is based on the Tihar Jail break in 1986. I’m also shooting for Kick with Salman Khan and then there is an ensemble-cast film called Ungli,” he summed up.