Working with Anurag was liberating: Roshan Mathew

The Kerala-based actor made his first Hindi debut in Netflix’s latest ‘Choked’

Malayalam actor Roshan Mathew is the talk of the town in Bollywood after he played the lead role in Anurag Kashyap’s Netflix film ‘Choked’. He was earlier seen in ‘Moothon’, which was screened in the Toronto International Film Festival in September and at Mumbai Film Festival in October.

Talking to Showtime, he says, “I have been excited to be a part of this project but no one anticipated that this (release during a lockdown) will be the way it will be. It would have been fun to promote the movie with the team and not just do it from the comfort of your home.”

He co-stars with Saiyami Kher in 'Choked', who plays his wife, which is about a bank employee who finds a secret way to get unlimited cash to run her home.

Talking about working with Anurag Kashyap, the actor says, “Whenever you go into an AK set, you have to be prepared for spontaneous changes. He will come up with something new and different every single day. But thankfully, everything is done so effortlessly. I guess you can call it organised chaos.”

Roshan and Saiyami used to hide from Anurag to learn their lines. “We would run off to a friend’s house nearby to learn our lines. AK would yell at us if we are still rehearsing our lines,” he exclaims.

However, he says Anurag is a director he completely trusts. “Working with him is a liberating experience. He makes you give up whatever your idea of the character was and approach it in the way it’s supposed to be. He gets you to sort of just plunge into it blindly and lets you discover it at the moment.”

In ‘Choked’, Roshan was initially supposed to play a Malayali. His character was later changed to Tamil. “That threw me off a little, to be honest. We needed someone from the South and the two main characters met in Bengaluru,” he explains.

Speaking about the Malayalam industry, Roshan says that there should be more regional content on OTT platforms. “Most of what we have now are in English and Hindi. Most Malayalam movies are released on OTT after the theatre release and we’ve received great feedback for that. So we should make more. I’ve been hearing that there may be a few in the pipeline but let’s see how things go after the lockdown.”

His own projects are also on hold at the moment and he is unsure if it will resume at all. “There’s no point talking about it now. Meanwhile, I’ve just been spending a lot of time doing the things I’ve always wanted to do. From reading, watching movies to working out, there’s been a lot of ‘me-time’ and I’m loving it. I’ve been wanting to take a break for a while,” Roshan says.