Actor Saurabh Sachdeva, who is currently winning all the right accolades with his stint in Zee5’s Haddi, speaks of the preparations of his character, his liking for Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and more.
SHIKHA DUGGAL
A hopeful year for the transgender community has come, and some really good representations of them have come on screen. One of which was actor Saurabh Sachdeva’s role, executed with defiance and style. Yes, we are talking about Haddi streaming on Zee5, and we see the emotional blueprint he showcases in the vengeful track.
On an even more rebellious note, the actor who is grabbing all the eyeballs with his pairing opposite Kareena Kapoor Khan in Jaane Jaan—it seems like he’s really imbuing all his character roles with his heart. Don’t you think so?
In an exclusive conversation with us, also, an acting coach also expressed, “It wasn’t my responsibility to make the caricature of the character, nor did I want to be scornful about the community. I was free of values and morals when I was representing this
role. Now I didn’t enter their community just to understand their world; I was just empathizing. I watched quite a few documentaries and met a few of them personally. You have to be liberal to understand their psyche, or else you can’t.”
The sweet exchange of conversation continues with Sacred Games fame: “I saw this role as a literal challenge. I read the script a lot, many times. I have always been like this: without going out of the circumference of the character that’s given to me, I try to find the spine of it. This time the body language was very violent, but externally I was happy.”
In true blue honesty, the actor who has even trained Rana Daggubati has an extreme liking for Nawazuddin Siddiqui, to which he explains, “We may have studied at different acting schools, but we are in the same tandem. Our mother tongues match. He was always joking around me on the sets, asking me to finally let go of my trans character when the cameras weren’t rolling. I knew there was an Anurag Kashyap and a Nawaz in the movie, but I was never fearful of getting blocked out by the veterans.”
Those outwardly feminine gestures and everything he did to make the character look real were greenlit. His comment was, “Transgenders shouldn’t just play themselves. They should grab every role! But the scene where all of us go to the Kinnar Gharana to kill Ila Arun was disturbing to all of us. We were just following the director’s instructions and didn’t get into the why and how of it.”
