While Randeep Hooda’s role as Charles Sobhraj is getting applause, the film is straddled with brickbats. PRAKRITI ROY talks to the actor who has mastered the art of playing negative and edgy characters on the big screen
Riding high on the applause for playing conman Charles Sobhraj in Main Aur Charles, Randeep Hooda is taking the criticism of the movie in his stride.
Of course, playing an infamous character who became a celebrity, Randeep had to do a lot of preparation. He has played a variety of roles but being Sobhraj was not easy.
“I have gotten under the skin of many characters but playing Sobhraj was tricky. We had to research his persona a lot. The investigating officer of the case Amol Kanth helped us string together everything. I watched documentaries to understand Sobhraj’s thought process,” he says.
Main Aur Charles is not a film that Randeep hopped on to because he liked the script. Director Prawaal Raman and he first started talking about the film seven years back. A long process of detailing, unfolding the screenplay, setting up the problem and then solving it followed. “He is the best director I have worked with,” Hooda says.
Hooda treats himself as a student for a lifetime and says he learnt a great deal from the movie. Playing a character like Sobhraj, impacted him hugely. “I learnt many things. But these are personal and internal,” he says.
Hooda is known for playing grey, edgy roles. With Sobhraj, he has taken that up a notch higher but refuses to term Sobhraj as a negative character. “Some people are just darker than others, Charles being one of them. He is a unique, manipulative and charmingly deceitful person,” he says.
The biggest problem the critics are having with Main Aur Charles is that it is nowhere near a biopic. That despite the fact that the filmmakers have repeatedly clarified it was never meant to be one. The only purpose of the film, they say, was to show the jailbreak Sobhraj managed and how it affected the lives of inmates at Tihar and his string of girlfriends.
While critics may be complaining, Randeep is definitely not. “I am glad that public reaction is positive. The film engages them with Sobhraj and Kanth. No one really finds out who he is but they are enjoying the film. It is a very different screenplay, one that you have to engage with,” he insists. Meanwhile, Hooda remains a busy man with two more of his films under production. The first is Do lafzon Ki Kahani with Kajal Aggarwal and the other Ye laal Rang, which is about the blood mafia in a small town in Haryana.