This “100 per cent Keralite who can also speak Tamil” has worked in just seven films in five years, and six of them have been in Hindi and one in Bengali! We are talking about Prashanth Narayanan – or rather Prroshant Narayannan, the spelling which he adopted recently for his name. Prroshant who? – did you ask? Well, you will most probably be pardoned by the man himself if you really ask that, the most sensible person that he is.
Prroshant is someone who has always his work extremely carefully, even at the risk of being called arrogant by some people. But connoisseurs of acting would not complain, as he has given stellar performances in each film he has figured in, be it Oscar-winning German director Florian Gallenberger’s Bengali film Shomoyer Chaya /Shadows of Time /Schatten der Zeit or Hindi films Chhal, Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part-II or Mudda.
Prroshant, call him choosy or whatever, is clear about one thing as an actor – “I want to have a really cool DVD collection of my films that I would be proud to show to anybody at any given time in life.” In fact, that is what probably explains his vanishing act for the last few years from the big screen. But now, he is back, or about it to be back, as several films with him in pivotal roles are getting completed simultaneously. So, as Arindam Nandy’s English film Via Darjeeling is awaiting release after a positive premiere at the 9th Osian’s Cinefan Festival of Asian Cinema in Delhi recently, Kaizad Gustad’s Bombil and Beatrice and Pravesh Bhardwaj’s Mr Singh / Mrs Mehta are on the verge of completion, even as Prroshant is in talks with Bharatbala for a film called The Nineteenth Step that will star Kamal Hassan, is getting ready to shoot for Rechaad to be shot in Goa and costarring a German actress, and will soon start work on Suhail Tatari’s Summer of 2007.
If Prroshant had given ample display of his talent in Chhal and Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part-II, and also in Shadows of Time which very few in India have been able to watch in its limited festival screenings, he is sure to take that forward in his upcoming films, going by the interesting characters he is playing in them. Take for example Bombil and Beatrice, where he is playing a hit man in the year 2005, who in his last birth 100 years ago used to be a horse dealer in the Maharashtra hill station Matheran, where he had met a young girl called Beatrice and promise to wait for each other even for a 100 years if need be. “Circumstances don’t allow Vilas and Beatrice to get together, and in 2005, Beatrice comes to Bombil to give him a very interesting proposal where he has to kill her, to make her ‘life’ better,” Prroshant says giving a little peek into the storyline. “It is a strange, beautiful love story,” he says about the film that costars Katie McGuiness and theatre veteran Piyush Mishra. Shot in Mumbai, Matheran and England, the film will see Prroshant in a double role, “which is surely going to shock a lot of people” he says chuckling.
“Mr Singh/Mrs Mehta”, written and directed by Pravesh Bharadwaj, is also about relationships – but of the extra-martial kind - and is also shot extensively in England. With Naved Aslam, Aroosah Hasssan and Aruna Shields as his co-actors, the film has Prroshant playing a painter in a story of an extra marital affair which happens between two people whose spouses are already into it. “It is almost like clinging on to somebody who also is going through the same trauma,” he says.
As a song writer and composer himself, Prroshant is keenly waiting to hear people’s response to the music of the two films, particularly as it has been composed by A R Rahman and Ustad Shujaat Ali Khan respectively. “I am playing this painter, who still has not made it in life and as a result has a low opinion about himself, and he believes that his wife is really a big support to him till he discovers this affair,” he says about his role.
Prroshant was playing the main lead in Gustad’s ill-fated Mumbai Central, which was aborted after a tragic accident at a Mumbai railway station in which an assistant director had died. This connection landed him the lead in Bombil and Beatrice, after a sudden meeting with Gustad during which the director was told by the actor after reading the script, “If you do not take me, it won’t be a good film.” As Prroshant says now, “Thankfully, he agreed, and immediately announced to everybody that I am doing Bombil.”
However, more accidental was the way he got the role in Mr Singh/ Mrs Mehta. In fact, he had met Bharadwaj earlier in England and had told him that his script was very interesting, and also that “I wish I could have portrayed the painters part”. But the cast was already ready for the film, and Prroshant got busy in the shooting for Bombil…, when he got a sudden call from Bharadwaj’s producers, asking him if he could fly back to England at the earliest as there was some problem with the lead actor and they needed to replace him with somebody without upsetting the schedule. “So there I was in Wales shooting for the same painter’s part which I wanted,” he says.
When he is not acting, Prroshant is busy writing films along with friend Indranil Goswami. “It is just a matter of time before people actually start taking seriously the ventures that we are aiming at,” he says.
Prroshant also has written a couple of songs for a new band called Agnee and is working on their next album also. “Some people are keen that I should come out with an album, though I am not too sure about it,” he says.
For Prroshant, the criteria for selecting a role is simple – “I have no particular criteria for doing anything in life. Selecting a role is a small issue. If I have an affinity towards something, I just move instinctively.” And that is why he can confidently say that he truly enjoyed doing the films he has acted in, after more than ten years of prime work on TV that started with Bharat Rungachary’s Parivartan. Meanwhile, the Keralite who has acted in a Bengali and some Hindi films is open to acting in regional language films, particularly from South India – hopefully that will give him another outlet to fully utilise his talents!
