Actor Ali Fazal on his ‘insane’ night-out with stars at the recently concluded Oscars
Shravan Shah (MUMBAI MIRROR; March 7, 2018)

Ali Fazal, who was in the City of Angels to represent his film Victoria & Abdul which was up for Oscars for costume and make-up at the 90th Academy Awards, had a fanboy moment when he ran into his idol, Hollywood actor Samuel Jackson. “It was insane! He congratulated me on Victoria & Abdul and told me that he watches a lot of Bollywood films, the last one being Baahubali which he really liked. We were sitting at the same table with Smokey Robinson, a music legend, and it was nice spending the entire evening with him over a four-course meal,” the actor reminisces, admitting that he was taken by surprise when Darren Aronofsky came up to him to say that he liked his work. Ali was also overwhelmed by all the love he got on the day of the Oscars. “Even though I wasn’t nominated personally, it was one step closer to living the dream and I really hope to bring the statuette home one day,” says the 31-year-old actor.

He goes on to reveal that Hollywood’s perception of Bollywood is fast changing with the realisation that Hindi cinema is much more than just song and dance. “Song and dance is ingrained in our culture and I’m proud of it, but we also have another kind of cinema happening here which is at par with international cinema. Victoria & Abdul was a different take on an Indian and I was careful not to turn it into the caricature that unfortunately Russell Peters has created. He has ruined the Indian accent for everybody and I tried to change that and people bought it,” he says.

The actor also recorded a podcast joining the winners at the Oscars afterparty. “It was crazy, everybody was there,” he says. “Some I knew from before, others I had long admired. Sam Rockwell, Kendal Jenner, Kobe Bryant, Steven Spielberg, you name them, they were present. Richa (actress-girlfriend Richa Chadha) and I chatted with Frances McDormand, this year’s Oscar winner (for the Martin McDonagh-directed crime-drama Three Bilboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri). She is badass and super cool. I also had a great conversation with one of my favourite directors, Ron Howard. We were literally party-hopping.”

And did rapper Drake really stare at Richa as he mentioned in his tweet? “I was just fooling around,” he says. “We met and said hello. There was no drama involved.”

MUMBAI MIRROR (April 8, 2016)

Subhash K Jha (DNA; January 16, 2016)


Tarantino’s eighth film The Hateful Eight, which opens in India this week has been put sternly through the cleaners. The ultra-violent film, with the choicest expletives and grisly visuals of violence — including the film’s only female character played by Jennifer Jason Leigh being repeatedly beaten and battered — has been ordered over 45 visual and verbal cuts.

Says a source, “The film is a three-hour orgy of violence, bloodshed and abuses. There is also a lengthy sequence where Samuel L Jackson describes in graphic, visual and verbal terms how he made a character walk stark naked in the blizzard and perform fellatio on him. All the sexual emotional and physical violence has been either cut or drastically toned down.” Apparently, the film was denied certification without severe cuts.

“The Indian distributor PVR Pictures came back to the Censor Board with the cuts barely 48 hours before release. The Hateful Eight got its censor certificate just in time for release”, adds the source.