Priyanka, Deepika, Irrfan… Desi stars giving Hollywood a Bollywood shine

Priyanka Chopra says she rejected six Hollywood films! You can now actually imagine Bollywood shudder at the thought of going to her with a script. “Yeh toh George Clooney ko naa bolti hai… toh hum kya cheez hain!” Here’s one desi girl who’s done what many before her have tried without much success. From being the star attraction of Quantico on TV, she’s jumped right into the big screen avatar of Baywatch.

Interestingly, not so long ago, before Aadhar card became mandatory, someone told Mallika Sherawat that she should try her luck in Hollywood. And she did. But her luck didn’t seem to go beyond clicking a selfie with Obama and some lame gossip with Antonio Banderas. Before you wonder why am I suddenly talking about Mallika, the point is, she seemed like the ideal candidate to run down the beach in that red swimsuit made famous by Pamela Anderson and Yasmine Bleeth. But it’s our Ms Piggy Chops who’s going to be doing all the running in Baywatch. And while Ms Sherawat was busy taking selfies at Cannes, a little known Freida Pinto found herself in the company of a Slumdog Millionaire, Woody Allen and a planet full of apes. And soon, it’s going to be raining more Bollywood babes in Hollywood, as Deepika Padukone is all set to unleash XXX: Return of Xander Cage.


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You might think our men are yet to score big in Hollywood. Except for Irrfan, who’s rubbing shoulders with Tom Hanks and Spielberg’s dinosaurs with equal ease. But who knows? Tomorrow, it could be a Hrithik Roshan in a sequel to Knight and Day or Tiger Shroff somersaulting into Fast and Furious Part 10…

After all, it was a 12-year old Sabu Dastagir, a stable boy from Mysore, who became the first Indian actor to enjoy some degree of success in Hollywood. It was through Alexander Korda’s Elephant Boy (1937), based on Rudyard Kipling’s Toomai Of The Elephants.  Sabu also portrayed Mowgli in Korda’s lavish version of Kipling’s classic The Jungle Book (1942). Before his early death at the age of 39, he played a variety of roles in a series of colourful films set in India – he was the prince joining hands with the British to fight his uncle in The Drum (1938); a doctor fighting a blood-thirsty tiger in Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948); and a prince again in Song of India (1942).


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After Sabu, we didn’t have an Indian star in international cinema until Kabir Bedi swashbuckled as a 19th century Malayan pirate in Sandokan, a teleserial co-produced by Italy, Germany and France. While he gained widespread exposure from it, Sandokan didn’t do much for him in Hollywood, where he was reduced to playing bit roles. His most notable appearance had been Bond baddie Gobinda in Octopussy. Another Indian who shaved off her head and tried her luck in Hollywood was the late Persis Khambatta in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. She then went on to do forgettable flicks like Nighthawks (1981) and Megaforce (1982). On the other hand, though Amrish Puri conducted an open-heart surgery on Harrison Ford in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), it didn’t result in Puri joining the medical team in Spielberg’s TV series, ER.

Naseeruddin Shah found himself in a crossover attempt as Inspector Ganesh Ghote in Ismail Merchant’s The Perfect Murder (1988), based on HRF Keating’s popular detective series set in Mumbai. The movie was far from perfect, though decades later, Shah managed to rub shoulders with Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). Unfortunately, the film met with some ordinary box-office grosses and reviews. It’s not known whether Shah found Connery mediocre or gave him pass marks. However, the actor who enjoyed a fair degree of success on the international scene is Om Puri – who graduated from cameos in big Hollywood productions like The Ghost And The Darkness (1996) and The Hundred Foot Journey (2014) to meaty roles in British films like East is East (1999).


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Anyways, I’m keen to see some reverse Hollywood import to Bollywood. I mean, we did get a Sylvester Stallone cameo in Kambakht Ishq and some buzz about Arnold Schwarzenegger being in and out of Robot 2. But wouldn’t it be great to see some of their hunks in some of our stuff? Imagine Tom Cruise doing a Dabangg sequel and dishing out the kind of standard quotes our guys do in their interviews: “It’s a challenging role. In this film, I play a cop who can’t spell the word arrest.” And there could be Julia Roberts taking up the challenge of playing sister to Katrina Kaif and saying, “I’ve never played a sister before, especially to Katrina Kaif. In this film I catch pneumonia after dancing in the rain and then I die, which is such a challenge. I’ve never died before on film, except for a near-death experience while watching a Hindi film called Clerk.”

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