Bollywood actor Emraan Hashmi, who is gearing up for his upcoming streaming series Taskaree: The Smuggler’s Web, has opened up about playing characters that have more than one dimension. He lauded the
OTT space for allowing heroes and villains to have layers in a narrative. He remarked that characters in the 90s and the early 2000s were rather one-dimensional.
In Taskaree, Emraan Hashmi plays a customs official who is not afraid to approach criminals in a twisted way. When asked if he seeks out such characters, the actor told Hindustan Times, “I have no idea. It’s just from my first film (Footpath, in which he played a gangster with a heart of gold). And that inherently became the nature of the characters that I was playing.”
The actor mentioned, “And of course, there are a variety of different kinds of characters, but there’s something human about them. Maybe I also seek them. I kind of find very cut-and-dry, one-dimensional heroes and villains extremely boring. I think that if it’s slightly more layered, there’s a little more nuance and fun to be had in playing it. In the grey shades, they become more relatable.”
Emraan said, “In the past 10 years, it could be OTT or theatrical business. I think not heroes or villains, we’re all playing characters. In a sense, it’s blurred. I think if you saw the ’90s or even the early 2000s, there’s only one dimension to it. But as it’s evolved, I think there’s more meat in these characters… I think the paradigm shift also is (due to) players like Netflix. It just showed how the audience matured. There is a market there to see different stories, concepts.”
“Theatrical, in my view, in a sense, is still very limited. You want to make a commercial spinner; (then) you got to dumb it down. You have to make it universal. You have to get everyone into the hall. You’ve got to get families in. So you don’t have experimentation there,” the actor said.
When pointed out that his recent film, Haq, doesn’t dumb down the narrative, he said, “We’re talking about the huge money spinners. (Films like Haq) are very few and far between. Those come probably two or three in a year. But all the cutting-edge stuff is happening over here on OTT. If you see Adolescence. It swept the awards.”
“You can’t do that in a theatrical, or maybe you can, but no one wants to take a punt on it. I think web series gives us the opportunity to play with the characters. It allows us to, you know, deep dive into a character. That’s where you find the shades of grey, or you find the humanity,” the actor concluded.
