Bada ya chota parda doesn’t matter; quality content does: Amir Ali

Wearing a loose white linen shirt and matching trousers, Aamir Ali was chilling in Goa, enjoying the beach breeze like any other visitor. But the actor also had another thing on his agenda, while here: the construction of his second-home, in North Goa. “Goa has always treated me in the most amazing way, and it is literally my second home,” says the FIR actor, whose Vagator home is the developing phase. Though he had visited the state often earlier, Amir fell in love with Goa only during the Pandemic, when he was here shooting for the series Naxalbari in 2020. “I was in Goa two months before the shoot started, and that is where I fell in love with the place. Before this Goa for me was all about chilling, partying and going back. I always chilled here, but never lived here, until the shoot,” he says with a twinkle in his eyes.



I HAD TO STAY AWAY FROM TV TO GET INTO OTT

After ruling the television industry, Aamir is now making waves in the digital space. He was most recently seen as a cop in The Trial, which also stars Kajol and Kubra Sait. He says, “It was challenging in the initial phase when I stopped doing television. When I was meeting people from the OTT industry everyone was very welcoming, nice and warm, but they didn’t give me the kind of roles that I wanted. There were a lot of lunches and dinners where they would talk about how their family members were fans of me. But it never materialised into serious good work, so I realised that I had to stay away from TV a bit longer,” he says. About the kind of content he wanted to be a part of on OTT, Amir shares, “On OTT too there are some TV-based shows being produced and I didn’t want to do that, because if I did that, I would rather stay on TV. This was all in the initial phase. After a couple of years, things began opening up for me. I have two more OTT releases this year.”



FROM THE FUN COP TO A SERIOUS ONE

Known for his role as police inspector Bajrang Pandey in FIR, Amir says he was initially nervous about the shift up to a serious cop in Trial, “I was very nervous about playing a serious cop. Though FIR has been off-air for the last couple of years, people still love and talk about it. I had to trust the makers of Trial to present me in a certain way and had to work on myself, so that people wouldn’t look at me in a uniform and laugh. That would have been bad for me as an actor. It was challenging and not easy.” He says he is now looking for quality and doesn’t want to chase any particular platform. He adds, “For me, quality matters the most. Bada ya chota parda doesn’t matter, as now parda is getting even smaller – our phones! So the size of the platform doesn’t bother me, the quality matters.”