‘Heroes can’t play villains’

If Bollywood���s bad man Gulshan Grover is to be believed, this trend of actors experimenting with their looks and reinventing themselves, was started by him.
Grover, who has been busy shooting for Sanjay Gupta���s Acid Factory in Cape Town, is fit as a fiddle. The baddie told BT, ���I believe I���m responsible for starting this trend. Hairstylists like Aalim who design looks for actors, tell me that they use my pictures as reference!���
For a change, he���s not the villain in Gupta���s film.Irrfan Khan, Aftab Shivdasani, Fardeen Khan, Manoj Bajpai, Danny Denzongpa and Dia Mirza make up for him. ���I���m the only positive character in the film,��� chortled Grover, whose role was earlier to be played by Suniel Shetty.
With heroes playing grey shades and the typical villian of Hindi cinema vanishing from the scene, Grover said, ���I don���t think any of the heroes can play villains convincingly. There���s a difference between playing a grey shade and playing an out and out black shade. It requires a certain method and madness to do that.���
He likes the way the West functions. ���If Denzel Washington���s playing a villian, he disappears from the scene for at least six months. Here actors get too much of exposure,��� he rued, blaming filmmakers for this. ���They invite the media on the sets who expose our look, the harness, the mattress on which the actor jumps, etc. The whole concept of ���dream merchants��� creating magic on screen has faded now.��� Grover, incidentally, is also credited for opening the gates of Hollywood for mainstream actors of Bollywood. ���I am now doing a film that���s based on the comic book Nephilim. There will be a lot of action, kicking and jumping in the air and I have an interesting look,��� said Grover, whose face has been appearing in the comic series as the villian for two years now.