Nawazuddin Siddiqui: No one ever made a big film with great actors

There were many inspiring qualities of customs officer Costao Fernandes that compelled Nawazuddin Siddiqui to come aboard his biopic. But what got him more excited was the way Fernandes laughed. “He laughs a lot, but there’s still something hidden behind his laughter. That was very interesting to explore,” Siddiqui tells us. The Zee5 biopic drama, directed by Sejal Shah, follows a gold smuggling case that Fernandes fought against in the 1990s. Siddiqui was awed by the officer’s courage and moved by his suffering when standing against a corrupt system. Costao is an addition to his 26-year glorious filmography as an actor. As we remind him of the number of years he has been in the industry, he smiles and says, “The more I am experienced, the more I am scared thinking about acting because there are so many things to be explored. There could be 1,000 ways to perform a scene and the process of finding them is what I feel is interesting.”

Last month, at the Chandigarh Film Festival, Siddiqui had spoken about how he used to be annoyed at being called “unconventionally looking”. Even his NSD (National School of Drama) batchmate, lyricist Swanand Kirkire, in an interview, mentioned how the industry was cruel to him as he didn’t fit their definition of a hero. Does the actor consider it the industry’s failure that it doesn’t trust actors who don’t fit its stereotype of how a hero should look?

“But those, whom you are trusting, what are they doing? We are seeing what’s happening to the films that are coming nowadays with new actors,” he shoots back, before continuing, “The problem is, whether it was Irrfan [Khan] bhai, or Manoj [Bajpayee], Naseeruddin [Shah] saab or Om Puri saab, has anyone ever made a film with them worth R20-30 crore? Today, you shower praise at them and call them great actors, but no one ever made a big film with them. It happens only here. Internationally, they don’t differentiate between actors. They just cast a good actor. Here, we have categories like actor, hero, star, superstar. We have such great actors among us, you will spot them in movies or series in smaller roles. They aren’t supporting actors. They are great actors. Yet no one thought of making a film with them. And maybe no one ever will. We will be gone one day, but this will go on.”

Gangs of Wasseypur 3?

When we mention that director Anurag Kashyap got offers recently to make the third edition of Gangs of Wasseypur, Nawazuddin Siddiqui promptly tells us, “Anurag won’t make it. Neither will I act in it. I get such offers so much. People even tell me, ‘Lets take your character of Faizal Khan from Gangs and make a film on him.’”