Five years ago, Gulshan Devaiah quit a successful fashion business to become an actor. Today, he awaits the release of Ram-Leela, which can be a game changer for him
ALAKA SAHANI
Some years ago when Gulshan Devaiah was walking towards his Andheri pad after a particularly bad day, he got a call from Kalki Koechlin. She was having dinner with Anurag Kashyap in the vicinity and wanted him to join them. Devaiah headed there. However, there was more in store for him. Kashyap and Koechlin narrated some scenes from That Girl in Yellow Boots to him and asked him to play the role of Chittiappa.
The character of this ruthless gangster was not fully fleshed out at that time. Drawing from his experience of devised theatre where the cast improvises together and develops a script, Devaiah started working on it. “We did not want Chittiappa to be a typical gangster. Apart from theatre, what helped me was the experience of living on the outskirts of Bangalore. People I had encountered there as well as the hoodlums in my college came handy in giving shape to the character,” he says.
With this, Devaiah got his first break on the big screen that kind of justified this National Institute of Fashion Technology, Bangalore, graduate’s decision to give up a fairly successful career in fashion at the age of 30 and shift to Mumbai. Five years since, he has acted in seven films and is awaiting the release of the most commercial of them all — Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Ram-Leela, where he is cast as Deepika Padukone’s cousin Bhavani. Most of his characters, including the one in this movie, where his villainy is unveiled gradually, are marked by dark shades. “Yet with each of these roles — be it KC of Shaitan or Siddharth Dhanrajgir of Hate Story — I have attempted to do something out of the box. I don’t have a straightforward approach; I like to deviate a bit,” says Devaiah, who has done English theatre in Bangalore and Mumbai. He featured in acclaimed plays such as Butter and Mashed Banana, Hamlet: The Clown Prince and Project STRIP.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home / by Alaka Sahani / Thursday – November 14th, 2013
