It's not often that the villain garners more applause than the hero in a Hindi film. Ashutosh Rana is the first, since Shatrughan Sinha in the early 1970s, to deflect attention away from the leading man.
He's also the first successful filmstar who continues to act in television programs.
While other actors like Shah Rukh Khan and Bajpai have forsaken the medium that propelled them into the limelight, Rana believes that the performance and character, and not the medium, are what count. He doesen't care how the small the role is or whether or not he has any lines, because he believes that even a look can make impact to a lasting impression...... how true.
Rana, who is from Madhya Pradesh, began his career in films with walk-on parts in Mahesh Bhatt's "Tamanna" and Vikram Bhatt's "Ghulam."
He says his biggest fear is delivering a mediocre performance, or that his creativity will dry up, or, worse still, stagnate. In his quest for new histrionic challenges, Rana has refused scores of villainous roles that are offered to him almost everyday.
The villains that he played in "Dushman" and "Sangharsh," he says, are consciously and diametrically dissimilar. But, at the same time, Rana realizes that roles like the ones he has enacted in the two films are the exception rather than the norm in the Hindi film industry. Scaling down his ambitions, he says he wants to make the best of what's on offer. In upcoming films, like Raj Kanwar's "Baadal," Rana plays a mobboss. But he asserts that even this role is not a run-of-the-mill part.
Since he constantly outshines the heroes in the films in which he acts, there's the ever-present danger of Rana being run out of the film industry by insecure heroes.
With his chilling role as a psychotic rapist and killer in "Dushman," Rana brought a new kind of villain to Hindi cinema -- a softspoken, understated character who, behind a mask of affability, was obsessed with the idea of murder. With this role, Rana won every popular award in Mumbai for the "Best Villain."
He loves to portray the evil in man. And he makes no bones about his preference. Two back-to-back performances -- in Tanuja Chandra's "Dushman," and "Sangharsh" -- have earned Ashutosh Rana a unique place in the Mumbai film industry.
