In an industry where a lot of actors prefer diplomacy over frankness and prefer to follow the herd mentality, Abhay Deol has always stood by his own rules. He has a mind and a voice of his own that don’t crumble under pressure. And, of course, his choice of movies and other projects strongly reflect his belief and thought process. In an interview with Bombay Times, the actor talks about his career, beliefs, choices and how the industry accommodated him though he dared to do things differently. Excerpts:

In our space, speaking up can be mistaken as disrespect. All you are doing is speaking your mind and being honest. No one’s there to tell you whether you are right or wrong. You are just frowned upon, but that’s okay. I don’t think I was labelled as a troublemaker, so I would say the film industry has been accommodating towards me.

They may not have agreed with my methods, but they respected the stands I took. It’s highly possible that I may have lost work because of my outspokenness, but that’s okay. It’s just the consequence of you being you. There will always be work. It’s been 17 years, and I am still around. People like my work and I feel grateful. I have no regrets, anger or bitterness towards anyone. I am in a good space, and so is the industry.

I did find myself out of place. I was born in the industry, so I am very much an insider, but I became an outsider. However, I can’t be considered an outsider because I was born into a film family. So, I am neither here nor there. There was a learning process for me. I still don’t necessarily fit in, but there are a lot more people like me in the industry today than at the time that I started out. Time heals everything. I am glad I stuck to my guns.

It wasn’t difficult getting into the role because the tragedy was so hard…. The pain of losing a child. So maybe you can imagine what your parents would go through if you had died. None of that is easy to deal with. Falling into that sort of tragedy because it’s a true story was easy, but getting out of that zone was difficult. This was a real incident; these are real people. You are not portraying fiction, so you can empathise and understand these people easily. It was hard to get out of it because you couldn’t shake off the fact that you just reenacted a trauma that some people went through.

There’s a lot more of provocation, experimentation and bringing out individual artistes and their voices today than when I started out. Getting non-formulaic movies made back then was more difficult. I mostly worked with directors at the beginning of their career because they were the ones with the freshest ideas. They weren’t under the pressure of commercial constraints. I came up with more indie movies because when I was working on them, the multiplexes were just coming up. For a brief period, there was experimentation so I could bring out films like Dev D, Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd, Ek Chalis Ki Last Local, Oye Luck! Lucky Oye and Manorama Six Feet Under. Once the multiplexes were established and stopped expanding, things went back to what they were before, which means less experimentation. With the OTT platforms coming in, they have opened doors for people like myself too.