Irrfan Khan is still celebrating the success of Slumdog Millionaire with Dev Patel, Freida Pinto and Anil Kapoor at the Oscars and predicts it will represent a seachange in East-West movie politics. “It feels good, it’s fantastic,” he exclaimed, “Audiences across Europe, America, everywhere have appreciated the movie. The film will lead to further collaborations between India and world cinema. Jai Ho!”
Irrfan has explained there’s a lot more to his character in Slumdog that hopefully will appear as Extras on the DVD release. “The audience did not get to see my character being ordered by his superior to bully the boy, they did not see him fight his superior when he realised the boy was innocent, take him back to the show, play the middle-man between him and the audience and then drop him off at VT to meet his sweetheart.” Irrfan went on to say that Danny Boyle felt he had to reduce the role to maintain focus on the love story.
Irrfan is also very pleased with his role in Billu with Lara Dutta and Shahrukh Khan. “I believe Billuto be a milestone in my career, even though it is too early to judge its impact on the masses,” he said, “I wanted a film that has a bigger reach and yet retains credibility through characters that give an actor the opportunity to emote. The challenge in playing Billu was to endear him to audiences even though the screenplay does not permit them to understand his mind clearly.”
Busy Irrfan is also working on New York with John Abraham and Katrina Kaif; Acid Factory with Fardeen Khan; Hissss with Mallika Sherawat and Road to Ladakh with Koel Purie.
