Adarsh Gourav has been winning accolades for his breakthrough performance in ‘The White Tiger’, co-starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Rajkummar Rao.
Adarsh has bagged the Rising Star Award at the Asian World Film Festival as well as a BAFTA nomination for the leading actor category!
Directed by Ramin Bahrani, the Netflix film is an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name. The movie features Adarsh as Balram Halwai, the ambitious driver of a rich Indian family, who uses his street smarts to escape poverty and rise to the top!
Did you know that to get into the skin of his character, Adarsh engaged in some method acting? In a chat with The Museum of Modern Art, the young actor opened up on the gruelling experience of working at a Delhi food stall to prep for the role.
“I was basically cleaning plates and sweeping the floor. I got paid ₹100 a day. I worked there for 2 weeks, 12 hour shifts, and it was incredible, eye-opening and the hardest thing I have done in my life. There were moments when I would suddenly snap out of it, like, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’” he said.
He further added – “I would be in the middle of cleaning a plate using less soap because if I would use too much soap, he would get pissed, saying, ‘You can’t use so much soap in a day.’ And I would be like, ‘What am I doing here?’ Because there would be a big bandicoot running next to me, from an open sewer, and then I would be like, ‘This is exactly what Balram felt when he was in the village because he knew his real potential was a lot more than being just confined to the boundaries of a village, and he wanted to get out of that rooster coop, as Adiga calls it.’ I just wanted to experience that feeling of anonymity, insignificance and I stuck around for two weeks, till we started our script-reading sessions.”
Well, isn’t that something!