Unlearning Hindi was tough: Prithviraj

South actors are known to struggle with Hindi when they take on Bollywood roles. Some need to learn the language from scratch while others face difficulty when it comes to diction. Prithviraj Sukumaran too had an uphill task for his next release, Aurangzeb.

South actors are known to struggle with Hindi when they take on Bollywood roles. Some need to learn the language from scratch while others face difficulty when it comes to diction.

Prithviraj Sukumaran too had an uphill task for his next release, Aurangzeb. The actor, who made his Bollywood debut with Aiyya (2012), is playing a cop in the film and is also its narrator.

Though Prithviraj could speak Hindi, he had a thick south Indian accent, due to which he had to ‘unlearn’ a lot of the language. “Unlearning Hindi was tough. I knew how to read, write and speak the language, but my accent was different from a north Indian. So I underwent a four-month workshop to perfect my accent and prepare for my role as the narrator,” he says.

Ask the actor whether he achieved the desired results and he says, “When Atul (director, Sabharwal) approached me, he’d told me that giving the voiceover would be a bigger challenge than playing a cop in the film because that’s a role I have played multiple times in my films down south. I accepted the challenge and hope I’ve lived up to his expectations.”