Adil Hussain, who will be part of Star Trek Discovery, on why he turns down 90 per cent audition calls
Kunal Guha (MUMBAI MIRROR; October 27, 2019)

This June, when Adil Hussain completed shooting for India Sweets and Spice in Atlanta, he was invited to audition for a part in the third season of Star Trek: Discovery. The character requirement was brief — “human and South Asian”, and Hussain cracked the audition. “I don’t respond to 90 per cent of audition calls,” says the reclusive actor who likes to be on the fringes of the Hindi film industry. “I am allergic to bad acting, and wouldn’t accept a project, unless it allows me time to prepare,” he adds. Hussain remembers watching Star Trek as a student. “I was very fascinated by it, but never thought I would be part of it one day.”

This isn’t the 55-year-old actor’s first crossover project. Hussain earned international acclaim when he starred in Italo Spinelli’s Gangor (2010), which released in the same year as Ishqiya — one of his early mainstream hits. But he shot to fame in the global film circuit with Ang Lee’s Life Of Pi (2012) and Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012).

Hussain, has also worked in regional cinema — Raag: The Rhythm of Love (Assamese), Naval Enna Jewel (Malayalam), Yatchan (Tamil), Ahare Mon (Bengali) and Sunrise (Marathi). The last one was turned down by the National Awards committee because its Mumbai-born filmmaker Partho Sen-Gupta is now an NRI. “Yet, we give a National Award to Akshay Kumar,” quips Hussain, who did, however, bag the Norwegian National Award last year for Iram Haq’s What Will People Say. He also received the Special Jury Mention at the 54th National Awards for Mukti Bhawan (2017). The bittersweet drama features those Varanasi lodges that take on guests who wish to breathe their last in the holy city. It ran for 160 days in Japan, but barely a week in India. “They say it’s a beautiful film, but can’t market it. Yet, they can market trash,” he smiles. “It’s upsetting and harmful. Art helps society evolve. To limit its reach is criminal.”

Hussain’s filmography is dominated by festival pleasers and also mainstream blockbusters like Force 2 and Commando — films that don’t always agree with his creative sensibilities. “I guess it makes me more generous,” he jokes. “I believe my job is to approach projects without judgment,” he says, adding that his decision to take on some projects is encouraged by a dwindling bank balance.

The actor, however, feels that Hindi cinema doesn’t have a place for him. But not all Indian films make his cut either. “They must uplift you and introduce a new perspective. But today, we sell darkness in films — to entice that part of the human body which is easily rattled.”

A man of many dimensions, Hussain recently hosted an eight-course pop-up spread at a Delhi restaurant. “In my hometown, we grew leafy greens in our backyard, and ate fresh catch from the pond.” His favourite recipes, sourced from his mother and his friends’ mothers, include dishes such as Malayali mutton stew, Bengali Shorshe Rui and Shukto, Kashmiri Pandit mutton, and so on.

Hussain grew up in Goalpara in Assam, on the banks of the Brahmaputra where “the newspaper arrived three days late”. His household was among all of three families to own a TV set. “We put up a 70-foot antenna behind our home, and since we were close to the Bangladesh border, it would pick up shows like Dynasty, Different Strokes and Yes Minister, which would air there,” he says, while talking about his early influences.

Today, clocking a decade in films, he says, “I’ve learnt that the camera is not judgemental. It sees through you, so you don’t need to express yourself. Just feel the emotions, and it will capture it.”

Sangeeta Yadav (HINDUSTAN TIMES; October 23, 2019)

Actor Adil Hussain is in a happy space after the trailer of popular American TV series, Star Trek: Discovery season 3, released. The actor shares that the “opportunity just fell from the sky”, and he never imagined that he would ever work in the Star Trek series.

Not spilling the beans about his role, the 56-year-old actor tells us, “I play someone who was given a responsible position. I had seen the two series, and fell in love with the story of how the crew of the US Discovery travels to the future, over 900 years after the events of the original Star Trek series.”

On his experience of meeting the Star trek crew, Adil says they felt like family. “People welcomed me with open arms. I told them that I grew up in a town where newspapers would come three days late. And I spent 17 years in that town and here I am today. They all realised that it is a journey I had to make from a small town in Goalpara in Assam to where I am now,” he shares.

As an actor, Adil admits that it has been an uphill journey to the West, more so because he grew up in an environment where he was “bullied” for his skin colour. “I was dissuaded to become an actor. People used to say ‘tu toh kala hai, tu kya acting karega’. When the cameramen in Assamese film would come to know that Adil is in the scene, they would call for more lights (laughs),” says Adil, adding, “It was engraved in my consciousness that I am not good enough. It took me 35 years to come out of that.”

But when he first went to England with his play Othello, things changed. “People praised my performance and made me realise that I’m good enough. I was called ‘Tall, dark and handsome’. My European girlfriend would say ‘Oh God, you have a body of chocolate’. Nobody had ever looked at me like that, and I realised that I wasn’t invalid,” Adil recalls.

Having worked in Life Of Pie (2012) and won the Norwegian national award for Best Actor for What Will People Say (2017), Adil shares that the West has contributed a lot to his career. Though having Indian actors in international projects brings diversity to the series, Adil feels the representation used to be somewhat tokenism which is now changing. “Now, it also reflects the demography of the society. There was a time when Krishna Pandit Bhanji had to change his name to Ben Kingsley in order to get roles. But not anymore. It is no longer about the glorification of poverty and struggling immigrants,” Adil concludes.