Emraan Hashmi feels theatrical money-spinners 'dumb down' storytelling: 'Don't have experimentation there' | Interview

EMraan Hashmi has played a various run of roles in a calling spanning o'er deuce decades. However, the hallmark of his diverse filmography has been his ability to portray characters with complex shades of grey. Whether he has played a lover or a fighter, Emraan’s characters have always been rougher than what was the norm for Bollywood. In a chat ahead of the release of his new show, Taskaree, the actor chats with HT about his career trajectory and more.Emraan Hashmi on playing grey charactersIn Taskaree, Emraan plays a customs official, but one who is not averse to getting his hands dirty. In a career that is replete with such characters, the question is whether he seeks them out. A laughing Emraan replies, “I have no idea. It’s just from my first film (Footpath, in which he played a gangster with a heart of gold). And that inherently became the nature of the characters that I was playing. And of course, there are a variety of different kinds of characters, but there's something human about them. Maybe I also seek them. I kind of find very cut-and-dry, one-dimensional heroes and villains extremely boring. I think that if it's slightly more layered, there's a little more nuance and fun to be had in playing it. In the grey shades, they become more relatable.”While Emraan did play relatable, grey characters in films for a long time, he feels storytelling is getting more experimental with fleshing out characters and not relegating them to heroes and villains. “In the past 10 years, it could be OTT or theatrical business. I think not heroes or villains, we're all playing characters. In a sense, it's blurred. I think if you saw the '90s or even the early 2000s, there's only one dimension to it. But as it's evolved, I think there's more meat in these characters,” he says. ‘Theatrical is still very limited’The actor attributes a significant portion of the credit for this change to OTT platforms. “I think the paradigm shift also is (due to) players like Netflix. It just showed how the audience matured. There is a market there to see different stories, concepts.”The actor argues that commercial cinema, made for theatres, is still very limited in its scope of storytelling. “Theatrical, in my view, in a sense, is still very limited. You want to make a commercial spinner; (then) you got to dumb it down. You have to make it universal. You have to get everyone into the hall. You've got to get families in. So you don't have experimentation there,” he argues.We remind him that he recently starred in Suparn Varma’s Haq, which was acclaimed for not dumbing down the narrative. Emraan counters, “We're talking about the huge money spinners. (Films like Haq) are very few and far between. Those come probably two or three in a year. But all the cutting-edge stuff is happening over here on OTT. If you see Adolescence. It swept the awards. You can’t do that in a theatrical, or maybe you can, but no one wants to take a punt on it. I think web series gives us the opportunity to play with the characters. It allows us to, you know, deep dive into a character. That's where you find the shades of grey, or you find the humanity.”Taskaree: The Smuggler's Web, Emraan's upcoming show, has been created by Neeraj Pandey for Netflix. It also stars Sharad Kelkar, Amruta Khanvilkar, Zoya Afroz, Nandish Sandhu and Anurag Sinha. The series premieres on January 14.