Gajraj Rao has been lurking in the movies for so many years, it was only a matter of time before he pushed his way front and centre. In Ma...
Gajraj Rao has been lurking in the movies for so many years, it was only a matter of time before he pushed his way front and centre.
In Mani Ratnam’s terrorism-themed Dil Se (1998), the actor was hovering around Piyush Mishra’s shoulder as one of the Central Bureau of Investigation officials. In Anurag Kashyap’s investigative thriller Black Friday (2004), his tonsured head is on the posters – although Rao has only a small part. Rao played Dawood Phanse, a small-time smuggler who is thrilled to bits to meet his more powerful namesake.
But the roles were few and far between. This prompted Rao to move away from acting between 2008 and 2015 to focus on Code Red Films, the advertising agency he had co-founded in 2003. “It’s not like I was deprived of work – I just wasn’t getting convincing scripts during that period, so I focused on making ad films,” Rao told Scroll.in. He didn’t want to be a “bechara actor”, a struggler. “The thing is when you are a bechara, your friends and family too are becharas – your pain is shared by all of them,” Rao observed.
After returning to the screen as a comically inept police inspector in Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar (2015), Rao’s assignments included the television...
