Made for each other

BENGALURU: Serendipity may have been at play when Mikhail Sen bagged the role of Amit Chatterji in Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy, but it required intense preparation to get into the skin of a famous, arrogant and possible match for Lata, the Bengaluru actor tells CE 

As a present for his 15th birthday, Mikhail Sen received a copy of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, with the inscription ‘To our Suitable Boy.’ from his grandparents. Many years later, the fact that he should play a prominent character in the Netflix series by Mira Nair is nothing short of serendipity for the Bengaluru boy. So was getting the role, to a large extent. Sen recalls that he was acting in a play at the Royal Court in London in June 2018 and Mira Nair was in the audience. “I saw her at the  bar after the show and told her that I had auditioned for the role of Amit Chatterji. She hadn’t seen my tape and asked me to send it to her. The next thing I knew, a meeting was set up with a producer from the BBC and I was auditioning for Amit, with Mira reading Lata,” recalls Sen, who is currently in the United Kingdom. 

Almost a year later, he was informed that he had bagged the role. While fortune might have favoured him, getting into the skin of Chatterji – the eldest sibling in Calcutta’s sophisticated and eccentric Chatterji family, who has abandoned his legal career to become a writer – involved a lot of work, including re-reading the book, and the relevant chapters the night before a particular scene was going to be shot. Sen based Amit on two people, one being his grandfather, a poet who was living in Calcutta in 1951, who was also the co-founder of Writer’s Workshop along with P Lal. 

“I visited Kolkata before filming started and went to Lal’s family home which was the meeting ground for many poets. His son Ananda Lal described how poets would sit on a Sunday afternoon and read and critique each other’s work. My grandfather was one of them. I imagined Amit to be one of those poets,” he tells CE. He also spent time with Seth – whose poems have also been published by Writers Workshop – while they were filming, a requirement Nair had put forth when he got the role.

“There are some similarities between Vikram and Amit, although Vikram would argue that there are elements of him in every character. It was invaluable to get an insight into Amit’s character from Vikram himself. I channelled elements of both Vikram and my grandfather into Amit,” he says.   

Sen’s parents – theatre personalities Ashish and Munira Sen – are the reason he fell in love with theatre. In between shoot schedules, he’d return to Bengaluru to spend time with them, sharing the filming process. “The shooting was intense and packed, and it was my first time in front of the camera. We started filming in September 2019 and wrapped it in December,” says Sen. Working alongside well-known artistes only inspired him to raise his game. “Mira demands the best of her actors and never settles for less. She knows exactly what she wants but doesn’t impose. She allows you to find it in yourself,” he says, adding that he went along with her interpretation of Chatterji, a famous, slightly arrogant, celebrity poet rather than a soft, soppy romantic. 

The still from the show of Sen at a dance with Lata has been going around, but there was much work that went into it. “Learning the Tango was a challenge, but choreographers Rajeshwari Vaidyanathan and Shannon guided us through it, and in the end I had a lot of fun doing it,” he says, recalling a piece of advice that actor Shahana Goswami gave him.

“She told me to think of acting as choreography, especially when it comes to screen acting. This was especially useful during the Christmas dinner scene. There was this scrumptious Bengali spread. I was dying to get my teeth into it. But there was no way I could. Just like there are steps to every dance, these meals had a number of courses. I had to remember which dish came first and to mark exactly where I could take bites,” says Sen, who has just completed an audiobook project –  Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet for Penguin Random House, which will be out this month.