Akshay Oberoi: Acting is not a sport or a game, you’re just competing with yourself and your last performance
After spending over a decade in the film industry, actor Akshay Oberoi shares what stopped him from packing his bags and quitting.
As Akshay Oberoi works on reinventing his acting career, he wants to keep a check on his “sanity”, and the actor ensures that by cutting off the noise of comparison. He admits that it is the reason he has been able to survive in the industry despite “failures and rejections”.
He shares,“I think having the right priorities keeps you sane. When you are chasing things that are transient and fleeting, you might start to wonder, ‘Yaar usko itna paisa mil raha hai, usko yeh mil raha hai, mujhe kyun nahi mil raha’. These are the transient things and then you go nuts.”
Referring to the constant comparison and the rat race that actors are expected to be a part of, Oberoi finds it quite strange that how acting has turned into some sort of a sport.
“For some reason, we’ve made a sport out of acting, like this actor is on number one, and this is on number two. That’s killing it. Acting is not a sport or a game. You’re just competing with yourself and your last performance. You’ve to keep reminding yourself of that, because the industry has a way of pegging you or slotting you. It’s very important to shut the noise off,” he elaborates.
And that’s the mantra Oberoi follows to protect his mental peace, and he urges others to do the same.
“Focus on what is important — work. You have to constantly remind yourself of it, which is what I have been doing in all these years,” adds the actor, who walked into Bollywood in 2010 with Isi Life Mein...!, and went on to star in films such as Gurgaon (2017) and Kaalakaandi (2018).
Lately, he has been exploring the OTT space with projects such as The Test Case, Illegal - Justice, Out of Order and Flesh.
Being a rank outsider, while one must think it would have been a tough journey for him, Oberoi says he only believes in focusing on and enjoying his work.
“That is the only reason why I’ve survived so many years. Otherwise, the way my career started, with a lot of rejections, failure and flops, I should have packed my bags and left a while ago,” he reveals, and continues, “But because I love my job, and I love the craft, I want to get better at it. Acting is the only thing that gets me going, besides being a father to my son. I just have to keep reminding myself — cut the noise, enjoy the work.”
