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Gaurav Chopra: People continue to put me in a box
Actor Gaurav Chopra, who was last seen in Gadar 2, opens up about battling sterotypes associated with small screen
This year, Gaurav Chopra has consciously opted for diverse projects on big screen and OTT space to steer away from getting slotted as a TV actor. However, the actor admits that he is still struggling to come out of the box.
After getting noticed for his outing in the streaming space with web show Rana Naidu, he was most recently seen in Sunny Deol’s Gadar 2. Now, his focus is to continue adding diverse projects into his kitty to break the stereotypical image.
“The announcement of my next project will happen anytime soon. And this was the plan post the lockdown,” Chopra says.
But what was the plan? “The plan was to seem different, to change perception, and to sort of get out of the box that people had put me into. You Google my name and the first thing that comes up is -- Gaurav Chopra, TV actor. And that’s where the problem lies. You will never see that happening to an actor from the west,” adds the 44-year-old.
Opening up about it further, the actor shares, “This is the jaati-waad story which is in our vein. We want to know aap kahan se ho, and then people segregate into a category and put you in a box”.
“The biggest problem is that you might not have actually seen my work on TV, or don’t know what I bring to the table. But by giving me a label, you put me along with everybody else with a generalised opinion about how television actors have been. I might be a very different individual, but you are not allowing me that variation,” he says.
Here, Chopra reveals that he sensed this pattern when he started getting “same roles for very good money”.
“But these were the kinds of roles that I’ve been playing for a long time, and I wanted to break free from that. It took a lot of effort and discipline to say yes to three projects such as Rana Naidu and Gadar 2. Shooting for both the projects was tough because the looks were different,” he says, adding, “Those two years were painful, putting on weight and losing it”.
“It was not easy. The whole effort was to create this new perception of an actor trying to break and extend his boundaries while trying to do good cinema. Now, my upcoming projects will also reflect that,” he ends.
