When Mirzapur actor was moved by a struggling youth at Hortus

In a room teeming with people on Saturday, actor Ali Fazal was answering questions about his theatre background, his process of selecting films and so on. Suddenly, he was curious. 'Do dreams have colours?' He looked genuinely piqued. At the Hortus venue, he posed the question to his co-speaker, Malayalam actor Roshan Mathew. He nodded yes. Fazal had the bewildered look of his character, a naive youth of the movie 'Victoria and Abdul'. Roshan wondered. "Do you get enough sleep to dream?" Fazal laughed it off.

Turning up in a black suit coat with matching trousers, Fazal was also worried about one more thing. He had paired the spiffy wear of an executive with boots and socks meant for sneakers. Like a carefree teen, he wore a cap with its brim turned backwards. Fazal was conscious, as he would disclose later in the session. 

He would subtly bend forward and touch the flap of the trousers with his fingers, as though searching for something. An honest, touching question from an aspiring actor in the audience put him at ease. The man said he was having an identity crisis as an actor; he was not getting enough opportunities.

Fazal was evidently moved. Till then, he would answer questions in clipped lines. He would occasionally nod and most often prodded Roshan to field questions. He even asked why would they sit on this stage. "What is the biggest piece of wisdom we can give?" he wondered aloud. 

The man from the crowd stirred something inside him. He said he was struggling to get work. Fazal responded as if he recognised someone after being lost in a crowd. He talked about how his one-year-old daughter had so much fun at a function, having a sense of uninhibited joy.

"For a very little time, what I saw was pure cinema, my daughter being there at the function.  As we grow older, we start deteriorating; to be able to hold on to that innocence has really worked for me. There are certain moments of innocence you grab while playing certain characters.

"We all have a lot of identity crises; this is the sad part. Every small thing affects us. I came here with sneaker socks, and I was worried about my unpolished boots," he said. An actor who had till a few minutes wondered what to tell the audience, suddenly had so much to say, but he kept it short. "Hang in there, man," he said.

Roshan also concurred. "Having an identity crisis is good for actors. It is something all people go through. You let go of the tension you have, you stop being that person, and you simply exist as a character. I have been more comfortable playing a character rather than being the person in a group. The sense of awkwardness of how to behave puts you in a state of hyper awareness, every minute thing you observe, and you gather details," said Roshan.