How Netflix s The White Tiger became a surprise hit latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Indian actor Adarsh Gourav was relatively obscure until Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ celebrated film ‘The White Tiger’ premiered on Netflix. But soon after the film, a strong indictment on India’s class and caste system released, Gourav gained instant adulation. He played a driver named Balram Halwai who beats the odds to become an entrepreneur. Apart from the rave reviews, he has been nominated for the Best Actor award at the upcoming BAFTAs, due to be held on April 10 and 11. So how important is winning that award, we ask Gourav. But the 26-year-old sensation has a pragmatic take.
“I don’t think it’s important for me to win any award as such. What is important for me is to be part of good films and work with good directors. Of course, when you win any or get nominated for any award, it means more opportunities for work and I am all for it,” said Gourav over a Zoom call.
I’ve been waiting over 15 years to adapt and direct “The White Tiger.” In a folder on my laptop titled, “aravind’s writings,” I discover early drafts dating back to 2004, four years before the novel was published. Even in rough form, it was an amazingly gripping story with vibrant, sarcastic, subversive writing. I told Aravind Adiga, the book’s author, I was confident that someone would publish his debut novel.
Aravind is one of my closest friends since our undergraduate days at Columbia University. We connected as outsiders on a predominantly white campus (I’m Iranian American, Aravind is Indian). I wanted to be a filmmaker and he a novelist.
Balram (Adarsh Gourav) is a young man struggling to escape poverty in
The White Tiger. Tejinder Singh Khamkha/Netflix
The year 2008 saw the publication of Aravind Adiga s novel
Slumdog Millionaire, two stories about young men escaping poverty and defying the odds against the backdrop of a rapidly globalizing India. But Adiga s novel was a far more cynical and morally unsettling piece of work, with a protagonist who came into his fortune through acts of theft, deception and worse. Now, 12 years later, there s a darkly funny new movie adaptation of
The White Tiger, and it plays even more like the flipside to
Review: Netflix s The White Tiger is far more than just a bleaker Slumdog Millionaire theglobeandmail.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theglobeandmail.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.