What tested Neil Bhoopalam’s patience in the past two years

While the actor believes that being out of the audience’s sight also means being out of their minds, he says that the past two years helped him accumulate more audience who could access his previous body of work

Actor Neil Bhoopalam was last seen in web series Masaba Masaba in 2020. While he has his hands full with four projects, staying away from the screen for nearly two years bothered him and made him restless.

Neil Bhoopalam will be seen in Masaba Masaba season two, Four more Shots Please! season three, Made In Heaven season two and Lost (Photo: Vidya Subramanian/ Hindustan Times)

He tells us, “More than the fact that I didn’t have a release, what bothered me was that I couldn’t act or perform, not on stage or for camera. That’s a real test of your patience. I believe I was born to be an actor and when you don’t get to do what you were born to do, you become restless.”

‘Out of sight and hence, out of mind’ is a popular adage in showbiz. Quiz him if he was worried about the same and Bhoopalam says, “The old saying ‘jo dikhta hai woh bikta hai’ holds true, to a great extent. I’d add that an artiste must have an element of mystery to themselves. But with today’s extensive library on each streaming platform, your older work can be accessed. And this helps accumulate more audience as time goes by.”

One of the upcoming projects that the NH10 (2015) actor has in the pipeline is the film Lost, which comes two years after his last film, Shakuntala Devi (2020). Having worked in a bunch of web series in the recent past, he shares that he would like to strike a balance between both the formats. However, he adds, “Films is a fascinating medium. It’s like a visual symphony with a beginning, middle and end. It can be larger than life. There is a reason why it’s called the ‘magic of cinema’.”

Not the one to sit idle, he made use of the pandemic by putting himself in an acting class. “That added great value to my being. It kept me on my toes and helped me practice, and if you don’t use it [craft], you lose it!” Bhoopalam ends.