Rishabh Sawhney On Creating Two Very Different Characters In Nagabandham: ‘For Ali, I Kept His Movements Very Sly..For Abdali, I Went With A Lion".
Rishabh Sawhney On Creating Two Very Different Characters In Nagabandham: ‘For Ali, I Kept His Movements Very Sly..For Abdali, I Went With A Lion".
Rishabh Sawhney took audiences into a world of history, power and larger-than-life characters with his latest film Nagabandham, and one of the most intriguing aspects of his role was that the actor got to portray two distinctly different personalities. For Sawhney, making the two characters look and feel different went far beyond costumes and appearances. He worked extensively on their body language, movements and gaze.
“I tried to design them as differently as possible. For Ali, I kept his movements very sly, slithering and cunning. I tried to make him very unpredictable. For Abdali, I went with a lion because he was leading the pack and had to be this huge, larger-than-life character with an immense stature,” he shared.
The actor also worked on his gaze to distinguish the two personas. “My gaze with Abdali was very powerful and lustful for the gold that he was searching for. With Ali, it was again very sly and cunning,” he reveals, adding that the differences were developed through extensive practice. “I kept it deliberately different so that people can see two different people in me.”
Playing Abdali also required Sawhney to delve deep into the world and mindset of the people from the era. His research exposed him to a way of life that he found both difficult and fascinating. “It was tough, the kind of life they led. They would leave their homes on nothing but horses and travel for hundreds of days to different lands, not knowing what was happening back at home or what was waiting ahead of them.”
The actor also studied books on the Afghan dynasty and the battles fought during the period, using accounts of those conflicts to understand the characters beyond their physical appearance. “Those tales talk about what they thought, what they felt during those fights and how they fought during that time. That really helped shape my approach towards the character,” he says.
For Sawhney, understanding the beliefs and motivations of these men was crucial to bringing them alive on screen. “They were just highly motivated, tough men who would just give it their all to get it all,” he says.
With his physical transformation, contrasting body language and extensive historical research, Sawhney appears to have approached Nagabandham as much as an exercise in character construction as it was an acting challenge - creating two men who, despite being played by the same actor, are designed to feel worlds apart.
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