Jaideep Ahlawat is hoping for a rocking 2015 with movies like Gabbar, Meeruthiya Gangster and Vishwaroopam 2 lined up this year. He talks to Shrabasti Mallik about his success and failure
Defence and theatre may not have anything in common but for actor Jaideep Ahlawat, they define success and failure. Defence failed him while theatre lent him a fresh lease of life. The actor, who featured in Gangs of Wasseypur and Commando, couldn’t crack army’s entrance test thrice and went into oblivion. However, the spirit to prove his worth struck back when he watched play Oedipus on stage. “It was like getting on there and tell people that I too can do what I want.
It was an urge to face audience and show my worth. So I stepped into theatre acting,” says the actor who began his acting career with play Poster. “I felt so frustrated from army entrance’s debacle that I stopped eating at all,” he added. However, he found his calling and began to purse theatre seriously. After finishing his higher studies, he moved to FTII to hone his acting skills further. “But I felt out of place there and thought of opting out. As luck would have it, my seniors asked me to stay back and somehow I survived. I started watching world cinema and took campus workshops quite seriously. Within two years I was a different guy and had evolved as an actor too. With that, I began to see everything from a different angle. I saw of a lot of things and I imbibed what I liked,” he says.
Jaideep moved to Mumbai in 2008 and hunted for work for almost two years. like any other outsider, he had his share of struggle. Though he got several television offers, he didn’t give up his dream to work in movies. “I was quite adamant about working in films and not television because I felt I was not made for the idiot box. Also, the two media are treated very differently. I was somehow attracted to silver screen,” he says.
After series of auditions, he got a call for Priyadarshan’s Aakrosh, which also starred Ajay Devgn, Paresh Rawal and Bipasha Basu. “It was a one-line audition and they confirmed me the role in a week’s time. While shooting, the director offered me another role in his forthcoming flick Khatta Meetha,” he says.
Jaideep, who also featured in Chittagong and Rockstar, came into limelight with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur. “I was sleeping that afternoon when I got calls from Manoj Bajpayee, with whom I had worked with in Chittagong and Rajkumar Rao, who was my FTII batchmate. I called back Raju and he directed me to Anurag’s office,” he says adding that it was Manoj Bajpayee who suggested his name to the filmmaker.
Now, Jaideep looks forward to his big releases including Akshay Kumar starrer Gabbar, Zeishan Quadri’s Meeruthiya Gansgter and Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam 2. On working with Haasan, he says, “Kamal sir is like a one-man army. From scripting to direction, acting to post-production, he can do everything on his own,” he says. Meeruthiya Gangster is a story of six friends in Meerut who get into the world of crime by accident.