At the 14th Jagran Film Festival in Mumbai, Paresh Rawal offered a rare, self-aware explanation for a career pattern: arthouse films seldom come to him because producers assume a commercial actor will ask for a commercial fee. The remarks came after the premiere of Pastt Tense, Ananth Narayan Mahadevan’s new film, which was screened ahead of the team’s interaction.
Fee perception, not craft
Asked why filmmakers rarely offer him art films, Rawal was direct. Makers, he said, presume “yeh film toh kar lega lekin paisa zyada maang lega” — that he will do the film but demand more money. Then, laughing, he added the punchline: “mujhe zyada paisa maangna bhi chahiye” — and, in his view, he should ask for more.
On a serious note, he said such opportunities have been genuinely scarce, and that he takes them where he finds them. “I got very few such opportunities. Hence, whenever I get, I grab it with both hands,” he said.
He signed Pastt Tense for three reasons:
- The subject resonated with him, and he believes such films need support.
- He had worked with Mahadevan on The Storyteller (2025) and was happy with the result.
- The script belonged to a category he rarely gets offered.
The Aditya Rawal factor
Pastt Tense is the first film in which Rawal appears with his son Aditya Rawal in lead roles. He was quick to clarify that he made no casting suggestion; the decision was Mahadevan’s alone. His concern was optics — he did not want the industry to say, in his words, that the father was arriving with the son as a “package deal”.
The screening itself drew a strong response, with the audience reacting to the plot, its tense moments and the performances, before the conversation turned to Rawal’s career.
The gap that shapes casting
Rawal’s candour matters because it names an assumption that quietly shapes Hindi cinema’s independent sector. A performer’s box-office image can close a conversation before a call is made; budgets for arthouse films are tighter, and producers often pre-empt the negotiation. The result, as Rawal frames it, is that a body of work is left unbuilt — on both sides.
Whether Pastt Tense shifts that calculus is now the question facing distributors and producers. For Rawal, the position is unchanged: when rare work finds him, he takes it.
Source: bollywoodHungama.com
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