Read the interview in its entirety over at CinemaDailyUS.com
Disclaimer: This post only displays direct quotes and questions to and from Charlie. There were some questions left out intentionally as they were directed to other cast members.
Q: Charlie, one of the thing that is so engaging in your character is that he’s a man who’s full of juxtapositions. He’s not afraid to get himself into certain situations. At the same time, there is a real softness and delicacy and he’s very emotionally driven as well. Can you talk about your development process in crafting him?
CH: That’s a good question. One of the things I was very focused on was trying to make him as neutral as possible. It was one of the things I felt we could take a little bit of liberty with, departing from the source material. When you meet him initially in the novel, he’s already succumbed to the dark side. I wanted him to be very neutral — relatable and accessible, just like if any one of us had made a horrible mistake that derailed the whole trajectory of our life, so that — he wasn’t carrying a lot of baggage, or wearing a lot of armor.
Steven [Lightfoot], our creator and writer, talked about that a lot. It was really more about the world keeping on tripping him over, that idea of the way positive and negative feedback loops work, that this one mistake led to a series of mistakes that get him deeper and deeper into a hole that he has to try to climb out of.
Q: Charlie and Shubham, you guys crafted this friendship on screen, and it allows for moments of lightness and levity even when they’re in the midst of potential danger or death in situations, and still laughing and joking around with each other. So tonally, how did you find that balance of allowing for the grittier emotional sides of the characters, at the same time allowing for that light playfulness between the two of them?
CH: I really played off Shubham a lot. I attribute a lot of that to the energy that Shub’s brought to who he is and his interpretation of the character. I felt very much that, because of the position that Lin is in in the early episodes, he’s not really in a position to feel a great deal of identity or certainty about who he is. So in this sort of neutral space that I was really interested in exploring, who he was, how the company that he was in, reflected his behavior. He’s really sort of subconsciously trying to ingratiate himself into the environment and the social groups that he was finding himself exposed to.
SS: Well, it was a sort of paint-and-canvas situation. There was what I enjoyed doing with Charlie — and I think you enjoyed [it]. What we enjoyed was having a good time no matter what. No matter what as actors, no matter how hard it was, how tired we were, we were trying to have a good time.
Because it’s hard — thirteen hours a day, six days a week. So we were really going for that, and I think that bled into the characters. I think that’s very much the case with Prabhu, that he arguably has the worst [circumstances] out of anyone. He lives in a slum, he’s literally trying to make a buck so that he can put a meal on his plate.
So he’s going through it and his survival technique is, when a human is pushed to that level of adversity, your survival is to try and have the best time you can. The harder life gets, the more you need to survive, the more you need to try really hard to have a good time. I think the moments that were slightly more emotional — gritty, as you said — happened not because we were trying to, but more like we were trying to not have them, and then they come more as a surprise. That’s what I think happens more in real life; you’re never trying to be that, you’re trying not to be that. And then something happens and you’re sad.
Q: When he first meets Lin, it’s a kind of transaction that’s happening between the two of them, and an opportunity for him. For you, what was the tipping point, or the changing point, where it goes from being a transactional business opportunity into a real friendship and a real place of connectivity for him?
SS: The first scene we found, which was when he comes to my house and I feed him my food and we drink whiskey together and we swear together. That was another moment when the actors bled into the characters, which bled into the story which was, we had met each other before, we were acting for the first time together, and I was just vibing off him.
CH: We shot this — unfortunately, we had to block shoot the whole twelve episodes because we were shooting between Australia and Thailand, and we lost one of our directors in Covid and everything. So we had to start shooting all twelve episodes simultaneously, which meant that there were a lot of the end of the journey at the beginning of relationships, and stuff happening in a way that you wouldn’t usually schedule, at least if you were trying to be somewhat thoughtful of your actors.
Continue reading Press/Interview: The Cast of ‘Shantaram’ Sit Down for a Q&A With Cinema Daily US
