Real on reel

Director casts deaf and mute boy to play a character in upcoming film.

Bollywood’s no stranger to disabled characters, but having disabled actors play those roles is a rarity. This makes upcoming kiddy flick Bubblegum a departure from the norm. The film stars a 16-year-old boy, Sohail Lakhani, who is deaf and mute. His character, not surprisingly, also shares the same impairments.

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“From Sanjeev Kumar in Koshish (1972) to Ranbir Kapoor in the upcoming Barfee, normal people have played these roles, so why can’t a boy who is actually deaf and mute?” asks director Sanjivan Lal. He reasons that while accomplished actors are usually bang-on with their expressions when portraying such characters, it’s their body language that isn’t as convincing. “When you just can’t speak or hear 24x7, your body language is bound to be very different,” reasons Lal, whose search for the right actor spanned several cities till one of his assistants found Sohail at a school in Goregaon.

Since Lal knows sign language well, it helped him to build a better rapport with his actor. “We held a 10-day workshop for him, which included a short film on camera technicalities and learning to drive a scooter,” informs the director, adding that since Sohail was a natural actor, he didn’t need much tutoring.

Bubblegum, which releases at the end of the month, is a coming-of-age story of a boy who grows up at a boarding school, and is taken for granted and neglected by his parents who, instead, focus their attention towards their elder deaf and mute son.