The Story of a Brown Actor

By Akshat Gupta (Sunny)

I am a 37-year-old male actor with Indian heritage and have lived in Australia since I was 10 years old. I thought 27 years of living in a country with an Australian passport would be enough to qualify me as an Australian; but alas, the world of showbiz reminds me every day that my passport doesn’t matter, my skills in acting nor my qualifications from esteemed acting colleges matter, neither does my work experience across various stages and platforms. Unfortunately, what matters is the colour of my skin in my headshot; as that alone has the power to push me into the ”not suitable” pile on a casting agent’s table.

I am brown skinned (or wheatish as my aunties in India remind me), and I’m looking for that opportunity to audition for the same roles as my white friends are lucky enough to. Nobody refutes the fact that if you’re simply unable to deliver at the audition then you shouldn’t be given the role. It’s about getting the chance to get to audition in the first place. Sometimes, I’m reminded of my Primary School years again… where you’re last to be selected for a team because they were short one player and your name would balance the equation.

Having grown up in a fairly small white community town of New South Wales, I stood out like a sore thumb. My parents are Hindi speaking, and have always proudly instilled the values and cultural teachings of India and Hinduism in me, and I’m a proud Indian at heart (sorry, but in an India vs Australia Cricket match, I’m always choosing the Blue jersey).

I grew up with a strong love and passion for Bollywood which stemmed from the daily re-runs of recorded Hindi movies on VHS after school (to all the Gen Zs, VHS was like a DVD, but the difference was that you could only have up to 3 hours of really low quality footage recorded, which you had to manually rewind and forward at very slow speed). Anyways, I’d quietly go into my room after the movie and then put on the songs of that Bollywood film on my cassette player and dance my heart out (to all the Gen Zs, a cassette was… you know what, just Google it). I started to get good at my dancing, and every year at the Cultural Festivals, I’d shyly get on stage, and then transform into someone else. The crowd would love it and I would be appreciated.

As time flew on, and I matured into an adult, so did my dancing. Word of my dancing talent had reached Sydney and all these University big kids wanted to dance with me. I got my big break in dancing when I performed behind Indian superstar Shahrukh Khan and musical genius A.R. Rehman.

A knee injury took me out of dancing and I heard through word-of-mouth that there was a play being performed in English about an Indian warrior. With no hope in my heart, I went in for the audition for the lead role. Long story short, I landed that role and got a standing ovation for my performance by the 1000 that were in attendance.

My now wife gave me direction and told me that this is who I’m meant to be. All the reviews said that I’m “a born actor”, “a natural at the game”; and so I discussed it with my wife, worked out how I was going to balance an established finance career, a 1-year-old daughter, and my new found passion in acting, and took a chunk out of a bullet and enrolled myself into one of the most prestigious acting schools in Australia. If I was going to work in this industry, I wanted to be qualified. And this is where the roadblocks started.

In my audition for the school, I was asked by the director “can you do a good Indian accent”? I begrudgingly said “Yes” and then had to demonstrate my version of Apu from The Simpsons. Humiliating much? I went on to gain loads of praise from my mentors and teachers across the course and 2 other acting schools I progressed on to, but alas, the stereotypical expectation of a brown actor shadowed me. I was never asked if I could do a British accent, an American accent, or hell… even an Aussie accent. I was never even in the running to prove it to anyone that I had the goods. I remember getting so teary with joy when I got my first agent. I thought this was my ticket in. I was going to really start watching a flurry of auditions come my way. Unfortunately… not one. Not even a StarNow ping.

 

A few months later, I muscled up some finances, sold my land, quit my job, and kissed my wife and daughter goodbye for one year as I made the decision to migrate to India. I wanted to be in an environment where I could have an opportunity to flourish. And boy did the opportunities roll in.

One month into moving to India, I was signed on for a TV soap, and 1 month later I landed myself as a recurring character on another TV soap on a big network. It all seemed to be going well, but I did encounter a new set of challenges. I realised that the casting couch was all too real in this country. I was advised that I should hide the fact that I have a wife and a child, and get myself a girlfriend as that will make me more sellable. I was asked to pay $100,000 AUD equivalent for a chance to be featured in a film – I declined. I went for meetings with so called ‘Producers’ at fancy places where they simply got up and walked off after dinner, and I was left to foot the entire bill. And then came the day when I was told “You’re too Australian to be in Bollywood films”, even though I look Indian, speak Hindi fluently, and know my culture inside out? But because my CV has my accolades in Australia, they just ‘assume’ that I won’t be able to connect to an Indian audience. So now… I was too white to be an actor in India, and too brown to be an actor in Australia.

Nonetheless, I kept myself focused, went to every audition, stood in line with the hundreds for hours under heat, monsoons, in sickness and in health to make the most out of this year for which I had sacrificed so much back home. I watched my daughter grow up that year on FaceTime and in photos my wife would send me.

Soon, my luck started to change, and I started to meet the right people, I was making connections, I was appearing in ads, I was doing theatre, I was getting there. I finally got cast in a massive production with a great known director and my life was about to change… But unfortunately, this silver lining had a massive black cloud looming, called Covid-19. The project got shelved, work started to disappear, and my family back home got concerned about my well-being and requested that I come back, just for a month.

I packed up shop and returned home to Sydney, and lucky that I did, because 3 weeks upon my return, India went into lockdown for 6 months with Covid cases on a surge higher than any country.

I took up a corporate job at a bank, and tried to pick-up pieces of my broken self. To come so close to your dream profession, to have gone through so much, and then end up having to let it go, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Although there is no comparison, I felt like a soldier who’s returned home after war. He’s tired. He’s shocked at everything that’s he’s seen. And although he’s happy to be home, he’s lost so much of himself in the process and doesn’t know how he could ever live in this new reality.

Today, I work a corporate 9 – 5 job I detest, and still hustle from 5 – 9 to get that dream audition for the next feature film. Sometimes, it’s not worth romanticising the struggles. All you can do is dream the dream and work towards that Oscar winning speech you’ll hopefully get to deliver one day; where’ll I’ll get to proudly tell my wife how much I love her in front of the entire world.

My time will come, and yet it has always been my time. This is my time, and this time, my dreams will come true.