Saurabh Sachdeva: I was nervous to share screen space with Bobby Deol in Animal

Popular acting coach and now a well-known actor Saurabh Sachdeva of Sacred Games and Animal movie fame, was in Lucknow to shoot for his next. The actor talked about his journey in the industry, how he became an accidental actor, his famous Jama Kudu step and more. Read on...

What brought you to Lucknow and did you get a chance to explore the city?I have been to Lucknow but that was long ago in the year 2001. This time I was here to shoot for a film titled Maalik. I couldn’t get to explore the city much as we were shooting on the outskirts.

You call yourself an accidental actor. What’s the story behind it?

I started my acting journey in 2001 with Barry John. I never wanted to be an actor, but I came into acting because like so many other people, I wanted to be famous and rich overnight. But when I worked with Barry, I realised that acting is beyond just being famous and rich, in fact, it is about expressing yourself. And being dyslexic, which I understood much later in life, that was something I really wanted to work on. With Barry’s plays and workshops, I started exploring and expressing myself better.

You are an acting coach too, how did that happen?I don’t know what Barry saw in me, but in 2002 he asked me if I wanted to teach acting. While I wasn’t sure of it, my friends suggested to trust Barry, as according to them if he had seen something in me, I would be capable of teaching. I agreed to coach acting students just for a few days... I was just giving it a try. And as luck would have it, I was teaching the students with him for 16 long years and in 2017 I opened my own acting school.

So, acting started quite late for you. See, acting happened when I started teaching in my own acting school. I did Sacred Games for which I was selected after a couple of rounds of auditions. Working in Sacred Games changed my life and immediately after the series was release, work started coming in. In fact, Anurag Kashyap liked my performance so much in Sacred Games, that he offered me his film Manmarziyaan.

Being an acting coach yourself, making youngsters prepare to face the camera, how did it feel to give auditions?Thankfully, abhi toh main auditions nahi deta hoon, but jab dene shuru kiye then I never had any problems though I was never comfortable in the audition rooms. I wasn’t comfortable with the whole setup of giving a screen test in a small room, changing clothes, learning your lines, etc. Everything is done way too quickly in there and I feel it is a very uncertain space for anyone. This whole experience of giving auditions has helped me to make my students fall in this concept of uncertainty while the whole process is on. It helps them overcome the stress and anxiety of the whole process. Uncertainty is the mother of creativity for me now.

Being an acting coach, how do you see the whole process of acting changing in the entertainment field - from being over dramatic to being very real and natural now?No matter how natural acting might be today in films and other mediums at the end of the day, it is still going to be an art. Acting will have calculated dialogues, emotions hongey... in short, dramatization still hoga. For me, I don’t have over or under-acting, I only have honest and dishonest acting. Otherwise, Al Pacino will be called an overacting artist in a lot of his films.

Talking about such kind of acting, we saw a reel on your Instagram of late Irrfan Khan. What do you have to say about him? Irrfan Khan was an honest actor who would go deep into a character. His language to approach a character was different from many others. Irrfan found his language of acting. And initially, such language was not syncing with the kind of cinema we watch. But he was so convinced by

that language that he brought a new dimension to the world.