No words can describe the acting chops of this veteran actor. When it comes to brand recall, people mostly associate actor Paresh Rawal with comedy than all the other genres he has taken up so far. With his last big screen outing ‘Oh My God OMG!’ raking in moolah at the Box Office, Paresh’s recent performance in ‘Table No 21’ saw him in his elements. TOI caught up with the actor when he was in Ahmedabad for a promotional tour.
Looked quite composed after the day’s promotions, the actor sat down for a relaxed chat. Ask him about thriller as a genre considering his latest movie is one and he says,”This movie is an emotional thriller where the main target audiences are the youngsters as it tackles youth-related problems. This is different from other thrillers as in the other movies, they sacrifice the logic first. But in this movie, the story revolves around three characters and there is something eerie about the whole set up. But the climax of the film comes in the last two-three minutes of the film.”
While the talking point of the film industry in 2012 was the 100 crore club, Paresh agrees that this means the films are doing great business. “It is good that 2012 has given audiences a variety of movies in different genres, like Kahaani, Rowdy Rathore, Oh My God OMG!, Talaash…but content is the king. If a film has a good story, the audience will lap it up immediately,” he says. Ask him about his favourite directors and he replies, “Dibakar Banerjee is one; for the uniqueness of his story and a sense of proportion.”
While the role of Kanjilal that he played in his last movie was a big hit, is it also true that Gujarati characters are typecast with certain characteristics. He says, “That is going to be there because such characters are cast to show them in a certain way. Gujaratis will be portrayed in a way like Malayalis are portrayed in their own way. Some idiosyncrasies of the communities shown will be there.”
With changing times, Bollywood has also seen a huge rise in the promotional activities of movies. Paresh Rawal, who feels that there is an overdrive of promotional activities at times, says, “Promotional overdrive can’t make a film a hit. Going to all cities will not help a movie. I feel this ‘into-the-face’ marketing makes a film lose its magic, the mystic quality that is there about a film. If a magician tells people about all his tricks, it will be no fun in watching the magic show.”
