Bobby Deol chills out
Arun Roy

FOR an actor who has produced a hat-trick of flops with Badal, Bichchoo and Hum To Mohabbat Karega, Bobby Deol is unusually cool. He couldn’t be bothered how his latest starrer, Aashiq fares or for that matter, what people feel about his attitude.

"I know most people do not take me seriously as an actor," he says matter-of-factly. "But I know that eventually my work will speak for me. I suppose when you do more films, people get used to what you are and then they see you grow as an actor. So it’s for them to change their point of view."

As the youngest of the Deol family, Bobby has been somewhat of an odd ball. While papa Dharmendra continues to keep himself busy (even if it is a guest appearance in a B-grade film) and elder brother Sunny juggles acting, directing and production, Bobby has been quite laid-back and reticent.

He appears to be more preoccupied with "chilling out" with his wife and friends, attending parties and forever growing or trimming his hair. Critics continue to pan him for his wooden acting, the looks "of an Italian bartender", being too casual on the sets... and yet, he couldn’t care less.

"I can’t go around telling people to take me seriously," he retorts. "I try to do good films with as good a subject as I get. But eventually, it is not in my hands how a film shapes up. As an actor, I try as hard as I can. Just because I don’t go around talking, people think I am very laid-back."

Bobby however, points out that regardless of whether or not his films run in the box-office, he hasn’t lost his popularity with the masses. In fact, if there’s one thing that he regrets about entering films, it is the invasion of his privacy.

"When you go out, you can’t be with you wife peacefully," he explains. "And you are more irritated, because your wife is irritated. You don’t want a crowd around you and that becomes a worrying factor. But I have learnt to live with it because I am who I am."

Does he ever watch his films?

"I have glimpses of them. You can’t see you own films because when you do, you always feel that you could have done one scene or the other better. But my family watches them as and when they come on television. And I catch glimpses of them as I pass by..."

Once again Bobby strays from the subject and says that what strikes him most about his earlier films is not how he has grown as an actor, but his changing hairstyles. "I look at my long hair and reminisce about how good it was in my first film, Barsaat and how bad it became by Kareeb," he points out.

"I should have maintained it at the same length that it was in Barsaat. You don’t realise all that, you know. I do miss my long hair, because I always like long hair. But in our films you need to maintain a look that can be easily identified and fits every character."

In his opinion, the only actor in Hindi cinema who has successfully maintained an "evergreen image" is his father. "He is my perennial favourite," says Bobby. "But I would not want to be like him. I would rather be myself. For that matter, I couldn’t care to have any actor as my role model."

And what about his becoming a father? "Oh, I want to be a father," he exults. "I will be one. Ever since I got married, people have been asking me if I did not want to have kids. And I keep saying that if that were so, I wouldn’t have got married. So I will certainly have kids before I grow any older. I love playing father!"

Confessions of a marriage
Asha Singh

Akshay Kumar is now talking about his hush-hush marriage with Twinkle Khanna on January 16. The event, which took Bollywood by surprise, has been a subject of speculation because of rumours that neither the groom’s nor the bride’s family approved of the wedding.

“I know it looked very sudden, but good things always happen suddenly,” said the macho actor who has been linked to a host of Bollywood beauties from Raveena Tandon to Shilpa Shetty. “We figured that any day is good enough to get married if the two people in question are prepared.”

Oddly enough, the day after the wedding, Akshay had reported early on the sets of Mumbai’s Film City for a shoot, while Twinkle flew to Bangalore to judge the preliminary rounds of the Miss India 2001 contest. Her parents, yesteryear stars Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia, were incommunicado.

When asked for about the details of the wedding, Akshay laughed: “I wore a very Indian, chikan-embroidered, cream-coloured sherwani and she was in a lovely red outfit designed by Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla. The ceremonies were held in a friend’s place.”

He added that they would soon host a reception in Mumbai for family and friends: “We are planning the reception some time in March. But that will not be as sudden as our engagement and the wedding. Just wait and see.”

And what about their honeymoon?

“For the honeymoon, we have the whole year ahead of us,” he retorted in Hindi. “There is no hurry. The question is that we should both be able to take time out from work and be able to get away for a month. I think we both deserve such a break.”

— MF