I ran into an actor friend of mine who told me she played Indira Gandhi 7 times in 4 different films in different languages. This got me thinking. What goes into the casting of a famous person? How many Mrs Gs are too many? Do you have to look like that person?
Bollywood is famous for legends about the same actor playing the same role. The most notable (perhaps untrue) nugget is about Iftekhar, who played a police commissioner so often in the 1970s-1980s that his kids thought he was one.
Recently, there's been a lot of talk about an upcoming biopic on Sourav Ganguly, titled, naturally, Dada. The publicity photo used is the iconic shirtless wave of the India captain's shirt from the Lord's balcony, shouting expletives - which, in one sense, defined the postcolonial end of Indian cricket's servitude to the Empire, and, in another, was just a topless Indian captain at Lord's swearing, which purists deemed uncouth.
That defining moment is the main publicity still for the biopic. But the controversy is not about Ganguly. It's about the shape of the man playing him: Rajkummar Rao. RKR is a versatile, critically-acclaimed powerhouse. But someone who looks nothing like Ganguly. Therefore, raising the question of whether likeness is important when playing a famous person.
The social media debate is not waiting to see what nuances RKR may have picked up that might make audiences catch glimpses of Ganguly on screen. Their argument is this: when RKR waves his shirt, his body is too lithe, too sculpted, too movie star-like, whereas Ganguly's was , shall we say, fuller, with a belly.
This is the first time a belly has threatened to give away a biopic. When Jesse Eisenberg played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, or Joaquin Phoenix played Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, neither looked much like the protagonist. Yet, no contentious bellies came up. Which goes to show that when you wave a shirt, shirtless, at Lord's during the NatWest Series Final in 2002, it might have grave cinematic consequences 24 years later.
Incidentally, the same actor also played Subhas Chandra Bose in an OTT series. And although much can be said about famous, stubborn Bengalis, it was never said, or imagined, that they looked alike, let alone that they'd be played by the same actor. Who, of course, if we are to apply set theory, sits at the intersection of neither of them, looks-wise.
Please note, this is acting, which is different from impersonators - like the half-a-million Donald Trump impersonators on Instagram, or the folks who show up at parties in a Modi or Bachchan wig. Or do an SRK voice or antics to giggles and applause.
I asked my actor friend Avantika Akerkar, who has a distinguished body of work, if it was different each of the 7 times she played Gandhi. She replied, 'Absolutely. The events of her [Gandhi's] political career being depicted were different-spanning her early years through the Emergency. The scenes evolved with different rhythms and different energy, depending upon what the director wanted and how I engaged with the various actors I played opposite.'
Initially, I thought she'd been cast because she vaguely resembled Mrs G. Then I realised that politicians, sportspeople, and celebrities evolve into different characters over time. The Ganguly waving his shirt is not the Ganguly hosting a TV game show today. Performance, more than physical resemblance, is what lets an actor inhabit them.
Not to mention the current, somewhat racially-charged, debate surrounding Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and whether Helen, the Greek beauty whose face launched a thousand ships, can be played by Black actress Lupita Nyong'o.
With Indira Gandhi, the fact that she became a different person at different times in her reign is well-documented. Which naturally brings us to our current PM. Narendra Modi has been played by Mahesh Thakur three times, Vivek Oberoi once, and Rajit Kapoor once. Now, whether 7 portrayals of Mrs Gandhi outweigh 3 portrayals of our current PM is a contest that's far more political than comedic.
