Word: khan
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...Eighteen years later, Nair cast him in The Namesake, and he rendered a quietly commanding performance. Khan plays Ashoke Ganguli, an Indian immigrant to the U.S. struggling to connect with his Westernized son. Khan had never been to the U.S. before then, so to play Ashoke he called on an earlier trip to Canada, where he had noticed the many middle-aged immigrants working in shops. "Something stayed in my mind," he says. "A strange sadness set in them. A rhythm that middle-aged people have." Nair says he was true to the quietness of the character, but used...
...final year, a young director casting her first feature - a cinema verité take on slum life in Bombay - came to the school scouting for talent. "One of the things I'm slightly proud of is kind of discovering Irrfan," says Mira Nair, who cast Khan as a letter writer in Salaam Bombay! His role was edited down to a fleeting appearance, but Nair says that even then, Khan was different. "I was very, very struck by his being in the part rather than acting," she recalls. "He wasn't striving. His striving was invisible...
...Khan's ability to generate such empathy led to critical praise and also won the attention of Fox Searchlight Pictures, which co-distributed Slumdog Millionaire. Director Boyle says that Khan's part was crucial. Khan plays the inspector who interrogates Jamal, a young man from the slums of Mumbai, suspecting him of cheating to win a televised quiz show. Everything else in the movie is a flashback, so the suspense hinges on whether the interrogator will release Jamal or keep him in custody. Khan's way of inhabiting the character is consummate and ineffable - as economical and meticulous...
...Breaking Out Khan is not the first indian actor to win acclaim in the West. Before Khan, there was Naseeruddin Shah, a star of Indian parallel cinema's realism; Om Puri, co-star of City of Joy with Patrick Swayze; and Roshan Seth, who played Jawaharlal Nehru, the foil to Ben Kingsley's Oscar-winning portrayal of the Mahatma in Gandhi. All had healthy careers as character actors, but their potential as dramatic leading men was never really fulfilled, in Hollywood or Bollywood. "I feel very sad about it," Khan says. But he seems to have escaped that fate. "Everybody...
...Khan's burgeoning international reputation is perhaps more remarkable because he has established it without leaving Bollywood. During the late 1980s and 1990s, when Indian film went through a particularly low moment, many of Khan's friends left the industry in disgust. "I was absolutely disillusioned," recalls one of them, Vipin Sharma, who emigrated to Toronto to work in documentaries. Bollywood had become dominated by "masala movies" - spicy escapades guaranteed to titillate rural masses with increasingly outlandish plots, tawdry lovemaking scenes and bombshell heroines. Distributors would literally call the shots, sitting in on previews with directors and saying...