Babil Khan on Dancing Through Pain in Netflix Top 10 Hit ‘Friday Night Plan’ and the Legacy of ‘Immortal’ Father Irrfan (EXCLUSIVE)
Indian actor Babil Khan is basking in the success of Netflix original film “Friday Night Plan.”
The high school comedy bowed Sept. 1 and has consistently stayed in the Netflix Top 10 charts across South Asia. Khan debuted with Netflix original film “Qala” and his next venture, drama series “The Railway Men” is also due to bow on the service.
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Khan describes those two roles as “emotionally intense.” “I wanted to do something that would leave the audience with a little lightness and relief from a world that is already consuming you,” Khan told Variety.
The actor, who is in his early 20s, added: “People my age are burdened by social media and the anxieties of feeling like they’re being left behind and constantly seeking for validation from outside. I just wanted to do a film, which we can watch without thinking, without intellectualizing and just feel a little lighter from all this chaos that’s happening.”
The film is directed by debutant Vatsal Neelakantan and the references he provided to the cast were “Superbad” and “10 Things I Hate About You” to achieve the core humor of those films. The crux of the film is Khan’s character’s relationship with his brother (played by Amrith Jayan) and the actor prepared for the part by observing his own brother. “In the prep for the character, I would use his mannerisms mechanically in real life and my body started to become familiar with the mechanics of the character. And through that I started getting closer to the core of what the character feels,” Khan said.
The film is also about the bloom of first love and as Khan had already experienced this in real life, he put himself in sensory deprivation mode for two weeks to come as close to that feeling as possible.
“I didn’t listen to music, I didn’t do anything that I like to do that gave me a dopamine release of any sort,” Khan said. “I let the process come to me rather than trying to find a process.”
The actor’s biggest challenge was the film’s central dance sequence, having twisted his knee just two days before it was shot. “I’m a good dancer but it was extremely excruciating, the pain. Every time I landed on my right leg there was a jolt of sharp pain that went through my spine and into my head. It was very difficult to do and I had to keep taking breaks and keep icing my foot. I shiver every time I think of that experience because I didn’t think I’d make it through,” Khan said.
Though not formally trained as an actor, Khan benefited from observing two actors at home – his father, the late Irrfan Khan (“The Lunchbox,” “Life of Pi”) and mother Sutapa Sikdar, both graduates of India’s prestigious National School of Drama.
“I practiced with Mama, the craft of it, but the art of it I inherited. I told my father, I wanted to be an actor. And he said, ‘If you want to be an actor in cinema, then you must go understand what cinema is. And you must understand what acting means in cinema, you must understand what cinema means to humanity,'” Khan said. Khan did a degree in film at London’s University of Westminster and then returned to India to pursue an acting career.
Irrfan Khan leaves behind a massive legacy and an acclaimed body of work. “When a man completely and truthfully devotes his existence to art and the idea of seeking then he never dies, he becomes immortal,” Babil Khan said. “So his legacy is not just on my shoulders, his legacy is on every actor’s shoulders that believes in acting as an art form and acting as an expression of art. Every theater actor that looks up to him and gets inspired by him, considers him as a father. I’m just his biological son. This legacy is actually shared by all of us that want acting as an art form to evolve.”
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