Ashmit Patel: A man on the edge

With his ‘rough shoulder-length’ hair and the ’stubby’ look on his face, he appears very much the archetypical ‘menacing’ villain that one has seen in many a Bollywood film over the years.

Ashmit Patel , who featured in last year’s biggest hit Murder , insists that his ‘new look’ was in keeping with a character he was playing in his forthcoming film ‘Rokda’, co-starring Arshad Warsi.

‘’Initially, I developed my hair long and rough for this character I play in my under-production ‘Rokda’, being directed by Ramesh Katkar. As it later turned out, my character in a couple of other films also was on the same lines. So, this get up has stayed with me,'’ Ashmit told a leading news agency in an interview in New Delhi.

Ashmit is in New Delhi in connection with the shooting of Sohail Khan ’s ‘Fight Club’ which also features him in a negative role, Ashmit admitted that he loved playing characters with a ‘negative streak’.

‘’I like playing characters who are “persons on the edge”. For me to essay a character on celluloid it should have something “attractively crazy” about it,'’ Ashmit said.

Ashmit, whose debut in Vikram Bhatt ’s Inteha incidentally too featured him in a similar role of a person obsessed about a girl, however, laments that ‘’in Bollywood, people are either depicted as all white or all black whereas in reality every person is a mix of good as well as bad qualities'’.

Though his debut venture ‘Inteha’ did not fare well at the box office, the stupendous success of his second film ‘Murder’, which co-starred the much-controversial Mallika Sherawat , seemed to have opened the doors of Bollywood for Ashmit, brother of Amisha Patel , ‘’I am grateful to Mr. Mahesh Bhatt , who gave me my first break in ‘Inteha’, for offering me a role in ‘Murder’ despite the lukewarm response to ‘Inteha’ as they had faith and conviction in me as an actor. Now, I am doing another film ‘Nazar’, where I co-star with Pakistani top actress Meera .