He wasn’t born with a silver spoon but managed to grab a National Film Award within five years of joining the film industry. The talented and versatile Rajkummar Rao is seven years young in the industry and is getting a huge nod of appreciation for his first film of 2017, Trapped.
The plot revolves around Rajkummar Rao’s character Shaurya, who gets locked in his apartment. The movie shows how he survives in despair with no food, water and electricity, while attempting to set him self free. Clearly a metaphor of urban maladies, despair and isolation.
“My character Shaurya is a migrant to Mumbai. He works with a very small travel agency and falls in love with his colleague. Both plan to elope. So he desperately looks for a house and finds an apartment in the 35th floor of a non-functional building. So the film is about him and how he gets stuck there for about three weeks without food, water, electricity and other basic things of life,” he told us. A sort of James Franco in 127 Hours scenario in a monstrous mess called Mumbai.
Starving for 16 days and living on a coffee and carrot diet is what it took him to play the lead in the survivor thriller. “Shaurya was living without food and water. As an actor it was my responsibility to go through that process and not fake it. Because I needed some food to perform and to be able to stand, I thought of going on a diet of carrot and black coffee.
“To make the whole story and my performance believable was definitely very challenging for me. Because there are a lot of places where you can go over the top or make it dramatic but that was something we didn’t want. And as a film-maker, Vikaram sir’s focus was to make it engaging for the viewers and to keep it very logical and believable. This has been my most challenging role so far. It has really pushed me to my limits. I have never gone through the kind of process I went through portraying Shaurya,” he explained.
How difficult is it to avoid an image trap in the industry where content-oriented and character studies are still on the fringesIJ “Even that is changing slowly and steadily. look at Dangal. It was very much a so-called, non-conventional commercial film. There were no dance numbers, romance and item songs. It was about a 58-year-old guy, his two feisty young daughters and their relationship dynamics set in a small village of Haryana. We’ve had Kapoor and Sons, Queen, Kai Po Che! and Neerja bringing in decent returns. Indian cinema is going through an amazing change which is good for all of us,” said Rajkummar.
Having said that, the actor has been very measured in his choices. “I try to do different things and play different characters on screen. I try not to be monotonous. I love portraying real people on screen, something that people can relate to. And that hunger keeps me in the hunt. I feel very fortunate that the directors think of me in every genre, be it a frothy film like Bareilly ki Barfi and Behen Hogi Teri or content-driven studies like Trapped and Omerta,” he said.
Rajkummar also mentioned that he is scared of heights and how he got used to it after Trapped. “I am scared of heights but since we shot the entire film on the 35th floor, I got used to it and I am very comfortable with the whole space now,” he laughed.
So does he review his work time to timeIJ “We grow with every film, as actors and as people too. There’s some kind of maturity and broader perspective towards life that I have developed courtesy my profession and directors who challenged me.” Personally, he is in a happy space. “Everybody knows about my relationship (with Patralekha). We are both there for each other. She has got my back and I have got hers,” he ended, the laugh lines etched deep.