Tanmay Dhanania’s good-hearted Murad, in his just-premiered film The Shameless in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, is poles apart from his par-for-the-course morally ambiguous, darker roles he usually takes on because “others won’t”. How did he plough the depths of his soul to do a very easy role, something that he doesn’t enjoy doing much? Dhanania, 38, lets out a laugh. He was the first to be cast in Bulgarian director Konstantin Bojanov’s The Shameless.
The Shameless features Mita Vashisht, Anasuya Sengupta, who won the Un Certain Regard Best Performance award, the first Indian actor to bag the award, and Omara Shetty, among others. The role came to him through the film connections Bojanov built in Kolkata over a decade. Bojanov “had seen me in Qaushiq Mukherjee aka Q’s Garbage (2018),” he says.
The Shameless is the “first film of mine at Cannes. Brahman Naman was at Sundance, Garbage was in Berlinale, Cat Sticks won the jury award at Slam Dance, Nazarband and The Rapist were at Busan, where the latter won the Kim Jiseok Award… our fight is for this idea of a (indie) community,” says Dhanania, who lives between Goa, Bombay and Kolkata. “Kani Kusruti, who was my co-actor in Nishiddho/Forbidden, is here, with Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagine as Light, which bagged the historic Grand Prix, the first Indian film to win the award. Devika Dave, who worked on Cat Sticks with us, is the production designer of Santosh, which is also in Un Certain Regard. It’s a community that has come to Cannes this year,” he adds.
The 38-year-old actor, an indie star, who traces his roots to Kolkata, has always been a sort of an outlier, even in the roles he’s essayed. As Phanishwar, a hate-spewing cab driver in Goa, in Garbage or Ajay, the bespectacled friend and fellow pervert in Brahman Naman (2016), the emaciated Byang in Ronny Sen’s Cat Sticks (2019), the protagonist in Aparna Sen’s Konkona Sensharma and Arjun Rampal-starrer The Rapist (2021). Or appearing in more mainstream productions, as Nikhil Swarup in Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s Made in Heaven Season One or the overtly ambitious scribe Pushkar Mohan in Hansal Mehta’s Scoop (2023). Whatever shade his character is, on screen and off it, Dhanania is a self-aware quiet presence.
The St Xavier’s Kolkata and UC Berkeley product dabbled in theatre, first with Kolkata’s Tin Can, a young people’s group, and then at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 2013. Then came British television with erudite parts similar to what once Shashi Kapoor enjoyed, not the typical “terrorist or the kebab seller” roles. He’s played a surgeon (Bobby Johal in BBC’s New Tricks, 2014), investigative journalist (Naseem Ali Khan in Channel 4’s Indian Summers, 2015), and Prince Jeejeebuoy (in ITV’s The Durrells, 2018). He last did a play in 2019, The Point of It, based on EM Forster’s books. Then came the pandemic, robbing him of overseas acting gigs. “I’ve lost out two such parts, the studios replaced me, once with Russell Peters and another time with Vir Das, an Emmy winner. That’s something I cannot fight against,” says the actor who’d already left the English shores to return home where he’s “far more relevant than he’d ever be there”.
Even in bit parts, he was noticed. In Q’s Brahman Naman, he had a supporting role, albeit a crucial one, as he does as Murad in The Shameless. “It was initially a bigger role,” he interjects, and adds that he sticks around with a project for reasons beyond the size of his role, if “he gets along with the filmmaker.” “I’m not just as an actor on hire or a mercenary, but a creator when I come on board a project. I was an actor for hire in Britain, and I made money, but when I came here (India), I thought, this is my space. Indie roles came my way but once the ball started rolling, people started seeing me,” says Dhanania, who was the acting coach on Brahman Naman, and helped out during the making of The Shameless, too.
“The Hindi in this film,” by a Bulgarian, “was very generic. I’m not a Delhi boy, but I’ve played people from Delhi. So, I knew the lingo. And, I worked with Teenie (Anasuya Sengupta’s nickname) on that. She found it a bit difficult to be wearing clothes which are not how prostitutes would dress. And I said to her to look at it like a graphic novel, rather than a realistic film. What helped us all to unlock this film was to not see it as a realistic film. There is truth but not realism. The world is hyper real. We could only shoot in Nepal to project a Delhi setting. There’s a Bulgarian director, Swiss cinematographer, French production and Taiwanese editor. All of that added different dimensions to the film. The Shameless is not a Masaan or a Garbage (which ‘shows a very dirty India’). The world of Shameless is ‘local and different’ and reminded me of ’90s and early 2000s films. Konstantin told me that Murad drives a big black sedan, in Nepal and in Bombay, and I was like, this small-time criminal wouldn’t drive a big black sedan but Konstantin saw him like that,” says the actor about his noir thriller.
To play Murad, Dhanania jokes he’s prepped for 18 years. He’s been Anasuya’s best friend for that long, the two shared a house in Goa and a cat Mowgli. The only scene together that took a while to execute is “where I’m trying to splash water on Renuka to get her to get up because she’s off her face”. “The weight of Murad’s character is important. He’s carrying something from his past. I’m playing a good guy in a film replete with really a****** men. It’s a redemption of sorts. I’ve also kind of moved away from the idea of me just being the leading actor, I’m also looking at the community we are trying to build here, especially in indie cinema. You watch an Aki Kaurismaki film, you’ll realise that somebody who’s the lead in one film is part of an ensemble in another film. Friends supporting each other in that way is what we are missing right now in the Indian film industry,” he adds. Except, maybe, a Salman Khan doing a cameo for on-off friend SRK in Pathaan (2023) — or was that the producer’s call to fortify the box-office collections of King Khan’s comeback film?
Dhanania shot for Bojanov’s film right after shooting an Achal Mishra film, which he has co-written, for “six months”, and co-produced, it is shot by cinematographer Anand Bansal (The Elephant Whisperers, The Mirror in Lust Stories 2), and is basically about a filmmaker returning home. Actor Sonal Jha, whose Cannes-premiered film Agra (2023, directed by Kanu Bahl) will play Tanmay’s sister in the film.
Was Hansal Mehta’s Scoop offered to him because he could channel the complex, ambivalent, inner evil so well? Dhanania sniggers and says, “not many people know this, but Hansal was one of the producers of Garbage, and has been wanting to work with me since. Even Aparna’s film is not really indie, it’s produced by Applause Entertainment, so it’s kind of mainstream. It’s just a very hard subject matter. Though I got offered The Rapist because Aparna saw my work in Cat Sticks. So, my mainstream films are also happening because I’m doing good work in the indie space.”
“No one wants to be a fringe actor, right? But I didn’t want to play, say, Shahid Kapoor’s best friend. I would have if I had got offered a lot of money. There’s a feudal structure in Bollywood. I started my career in the UK, where I got paid a lot, I still get royalties for it, which nobody gets in India, which was very surprising for me when I started working here, and when I started asking for royalties for the parts I did, nobody would entertain me. It’s exploitation that happens in India because of this supply-demand thing. A lot of these actors are willing to pay money to be a part of films. Plus, there’s no unity. We all aspire towards Hollywood, but there’s no writers’ guild, no actors’ guild. There are, but they don’t really work well. There are no strikes. If you do a strike, thousands of others will come and replace us,” he adds.
Dhanania mentions the case of Vijay Varma, “one of the best actors in India right now. He’s so effortless. All this success he’s only getting now, after about a decade in the indie circuit, he went to Cannes in 2014 with Monsoon Shootout. I am not as technically talented as Vijay. I accept that my talent lies in my choices, in trying to rise above mediocrity,” says Dhanania, who does workshops with SRFTI students in Kolkata.
Mention Netflix and Dhanania quips, “it was supposed to save the indie cinema. Brahman Naman couldn’t have happened without Netflix. It would have never got a theatrical run. But now, the OTTs have descended into television, and I really, absolutely detest is people saying, ‘for India, it’s not bad, not bad for the mainstream, not bad for a star kid.’ We didn’t have OTTs in the ’70s and ’80s and we were in competition in global festivals. After 30 effing years, we go into competition in Cannes now. I have friends in Romania, actor-filmmaker Alina Serban, who keeps going to Cannes and all of Romania stands with her. But if they’re not going to Cannes with a film, they’re not pushing their weight behind these mainstream stars. No ministers from Romania are going there. Nor are influencers being sponsored to go there. It is ludicrous and funny. While here are non-mainstream actors like us who are representing India at the competition and parallel segments at Cannes Film Festival but have to beg for money from our friends, family, break our FDs, just to get to Cannes,” he says, “It happened to us in Berlin as well. We were the only film at Berlinale 2018, and there were well-known Indian filmmakers and actors on the red carpet who had no clue that an Indian film Garbage was premiering there. They even did a dinner and didn’t invite Q (the director) or me.”
However, “the future is bright,” he says, “not because of funding from abroad but because of the amazing young filmmakers, like Achal Mishra (Maithili films Gamak Ghar and Dhuin), Natesh Hegde (Kannada film Pedro), and Dominic Sangma (Garo films Ma.Ama and Rapture) in the Northeast, similarly, things are exciting in the south Indian film industry…they have story-based films which sell also. In Bollywood, it’s important to make good films like Laapataa Ladies, it can be didactic and has got its own issues but is important. You don’t need a lot of money to make a good film.”
Among actors he looks up to Irrfan, Gael Garcia Bernal, Shardul Bharadwaj (Eeb Allay Ooo!, Unpaused) and Abhinav Jha (Gamak Ghar, Dhuin, Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar).
Like the OTTs, does he see mainstream producers, like Guneet Monga (Oscar-winning documentary short The Elephant Whisperers’ producer) and Karan Johar (producer of hyper-real indie thriller Kill) as allies or as usurpers of the indie space? “It’s a tough line to walk. Obviously, we need all the help we can get. I don’t think Guneet is somebody in the mainstream at all. Even Ekta Kapoor has produced Dibakar Banerjee’s LSD 1 & 2. As long as they can back us without taking the calls in terms of casting and getting the teams involved, it’s a great thing. The problem is with the structure of the film industry,” says Dhanania, who, besides web series and indie films in his kitty, is developing a sci-fi film in Goa.
Does he miss nuclear engineering, I ask the UC Berkeley alumnus, who’s quick to respond: “I miss mathematics. Math is poetry. It’s taught badly in India. Just like Shakespeare is taught badly in India. With all our honour culture and honour killings, Shakespeare’s plays are way more relevant to India than to the West,” says Dhanania, who says his “Bengali is not great” but he’s open to doing Bengali films. He’s done Parambrata Chatterjee-produced series Mafia (2020) and played a Bengali migrant labourer in the Malayalam film Nishiddho, and he quite likes the work of young filmmakers like Ishaan Ghose, son of filmmaker Goutam Ghose whose Antarjali Jatra brushed shoulders with Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! in Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988.
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