After Ibrahim Ali Khan’s Nadaaniyan debacle, Dharma Cornerstone boss Rajeev Masand says, ‘One failure cannot make or break an actor’s career’ | Bollywood News
Former journal Rajeev Masand, who now serves as the COO of the Dharma Cornerstone Agency, reflected on how the company manages difficult situations where an actor’s performance has been uniformly panned. He also addressed sniffing out potentially poor scripts, and how the agency protects its talent from signing on to projects doomed to fail. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, he said that the goal of an agent is to support their talent, but admitted that constructive criticism should be taken in a positive spirit, because being oblivious to criticism would hamper artic growth.
Masand was joined his DCA colleague Uday Singh Gauri. DCA represents Ibrahim Ali Khan, who made his acting debut with the universally panned Netflix film Nadaaniyan. Asked if he has ever dissuaded an actor from signing on to a doomed project and been ignored, Masand said, “With the background that I came from, it’s easy to read a script and tell if it’s good writing or not. But there’s a big difference between a good film and a successful film. There’s also a difference between what’s on the page and what’s on the screen.”
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Masand cited the example of a project that the agency was chasing with all its might for one of its talents, but they ultimately lost out. When the project was finally released, it turned out to be terrible, and they all questioned why they went after it in the first place. “In that case, it was a good film that wasn’t directed well. In other cases, you will make a bad judgement call. You might think that a (film) has potential, but maybe it didn’t have the potential to begin with,” he said.
He said that actors do films for various reasons, and sometimes, the reason could something as simple as an image makeover. Asked about the trolling that a certain DCA talent might’ve attracted after their film tanked, Gauri said that it is in their best interest to back their instinct to do the film in the first place. Masand said, “Trolling is ugly, but actors are prepared for it. Having said that, it’s heartbreaking when it’s connected to a choice you made. When you act in a film that tanked, it says that you made the wrong choice. That’s the word on the street. It’s important to rally around your actor and remind them that all is not lost.”
Masand said that these days, one failure cannot make or break a career. “You can’t completely disregard trolling, because that would be like the ostrich that buries its head in the sand,” he said. In the wake of Nadaaniyan’s failure, several individuals associated with the project, either personally or professionally, have spoken about the trolling that Ibrahim experienced. Most recently, his grandmother Sharmila Tagore admitted that the movie wasn’t up to the mark, but praised how good Ibrahim looked in it.
