First time lucky

By Express News Service

Actor Mridul das is riding high on success with his recently released movie State Of Siege: Temple Attack. Streaming on Zee5, the fictional retelling of the Akshardham Temple attack in Gujarat, features Das as an antagonist Ashraf Ali Mohammed Farooq along with Akshaye Khanna as the protagonist. And his performance, especially his Punjabi-Urdu accent as a terrorist from Pakistan, has gone down well with critics and audiences alike. Mridul tells us that he adapted the accent by watching several Pakistani movies.

“I also followed many Pakistani social media influencers to get Pakistani Punjabi right. I learned Urdu to get the right accent and pronunciation,” he begins. Before getting his big break with Ken Ghosh, which he calls a dream come true; Das was a well-known face on television with his famous show Kasautii Zindagii Kay. It was after the show abruptly went off air that Das got the opportunity to give an audition for this role. “By the time I went for the audition it was already late. I went through several rounds of auditions and look tests for months and out of 200 actors I was selected in the top five list,” recalls the actor and gushes that it took five minutes for Ghosh to give the final node.

“Ghosh gave me complete liberty to experiment with my role. I am lucky to have worked with him,” expresses the actor, adding that he enjoyed working with Khanna. “I have not seen any actor like him so far, apart from Nawazuddin Siddiqui,” he adds. Curious to know what is next for him, we asked about his future projects on TV as well as on the web. We are sure that this new face is here to stay even as the actor tells us that his next outing is with Eros International and Apple TV, “It will be out in two months, ” he confirms. “I love to do TV because it has good money but since I have been doing good roles now I would like to take up something challenging enough,”he concludes.