Exclusive! Dulquer Salmaan: I’m never a threat to my peer group in other industries, I’m just a visiting actor

In his career spanning 10 years, the Malayalam actor has also grabbed plum projects in Tamil, Telugu and Hindi, and is now awaiting the release of his web series debut Guns and Gulaabs on Netflix

Dulquer Salmaan

In a lot of ways, Dulquer Salmaan has been an outlier. At a time when Malayalam actors were struggling to expand their horizons beyond the industry, Dulquer did this effortlessly, beginning from Mani Ratnam’s OK Kanmani in Tamil, carrying it on with Mahanati in Telugu and sustaining the momentum with Karwaan and The Zoya Factor in Bollywood. What makes it more impressive was that he had built a fanbase across industries even before Malayalam cinema and its stars won the attention of audiences across the country with the advent of OTT.

In a recent interview with OTTplay, the actor talked about how much he enjoys the process of venturing out into another language. “Three out of these four languages were very familiar to me,” says Dulquer. “Hindi was my second language and Tamil my third. Also, the college I went to in the US had a large Indian population. So, by the end of four years, I knew what Marathi, Gujarati and Telugu sounded like. All Indians end up speaking in their mother tongue at some point.”

The actor, who had worked in the construction sector in Dubai before his film debut 10 years ago, is also fluent in Hindi. “Also, during my time in Dubai, I had to speak in Hindi. A lot of the staff were Pakistanis, Bangladeshis or North Indians. So, Hindi again became a second language to Malayalam in that space, because I wasn’t dealing with a lot of English at the managerial level. So, I wasn’t afraid of these two languages and I always followed the music and songs,” he explains.

On what he enjoys the most about working in different industries, Dulquer says, “There are things I learn while interacting with actors in my peer group in these industries. I am never a threat to them, I am just a visiting actor. I am like a medical representative; I come, do my job and go. So, they all tend to open up to me a lot and it’s amazing to see that across industries, a lot of the major stars and superstars have the same worries and same joys, irrespective of what they drive and how they stay. Those are the things that only I get to experience.”

Dulquer, meanwhile, is currently awaiting the release of his web series debut Guns and Gulaabs, which is helmed by The Family Man creators Raj Nidimoru and Krishna DK, and is set to drop on Netflix soon. The crime-thriller, set in the 90s, also has Rajkummar Rao and Adarsh Gourav as part of the cast.

Also read: Exclusive! Dulquer Salmaan: Want actors to have courage to do all kinds of films once OTT-theatre clash sorts out

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