“Whoa, that’s the same person?” (and other thoughts in the binge-viewing era)

(Did this piece for the Economic Times. More soon on other epiphanies involving performers whom one sees in different contexts across shows and films)
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A few months ago I watched the veteran Irish actor Ciaran Hinds play Julius Caesar in the series Rome. Hinds has been a familiar presence in many films and shows (he is an Oscar nominee this year for Belfast), and here he was in the Ides of March scene, blood-soaked, flailing about, and Et-Tu-ing. What I didn’t know though was that the same actor had once played the perpetrator of a famous underhanded killing from Indian mythology: the night-time guerrilla attack on the Pandava camp in the Mahabharata. A younger, leaner Hinds was Ashwatthama in Peter Brook’s stage and screen productions of the epic (he also doubled up as Nakula – anyone can – on stage).

I first watched the Brook film in the early 1990s, but have revisited it since, and shown scenes from it during a Mahabharata-in-pop-culture online course I taught with my writer friend Karthika Nair. You could even say I was over-familiar with it. And yet I never made the Hinds connection until I happened to flip through a book about the production. It is one of a few “Whoa! That was the same person?” moments I have had lately, while watching actors across a range of shows and films.

There are too many such epiphanies to list here, but another recent one was the realisation that the educator Kamla Chowdhry in the new historical show Rocket Boys was played by the same actress (Neha Chauhan) who was the salesgirl in Love, Sex aur Dhokha more than a decade ago. LSD was a favourite film back in the day, and I remember wondering what had happened to its lower-profile actors. But it took a perusal of IMDB before I made the connection between the T-shirt-and-jeans-clad Rashmi, emotionally abused by a co-worker, and the elegant Kamla.

Such lack of recognition is understandable in some cases: say, when an actor whom one doesn’t know well is heavily made up. (I was astonished to find that the Danish actor David Dencik, from the crime show The Chestnut Man, was also the worried Mikhail Gorbachev, “apologising to friends and enemies” – as a current Russian leader is definitely not doing – in Chernobyl.) But at other times one wonders if the old brain cells and memory receptors are corroding fast due to age.

For obvious reasons I prefer alternate explanations, so here’s one: such disorientation is inevitable in this cluttered era of movie-and-series viewing (or as some nasty people put it, “content consuming”). We have a much larger pool of things to see than ever before: those of us who move outside comfort zones (rather than obediently following algorithms) might, in the same week, watch a Tamil film followed by a Nordic crime series and then a mainstream Hindi film populated by shiny debutants who turn out to be the grandchildren of actors we knew in the 1980s. We encounter a number of performers, across cultures and genres, whom we may have only seen fleetingly before.

How this affects you – or whether you even realise it – also hinges on the type of viewer you are. I am the sort who keeps a film’s or show’s Wikipedia page open while watching it, so I can check little things like an interesting performer’s filmography, or (in the case of a convoluted narrative) a plot point that wasn’t clear. This is partly necessitated by being a professional writer who must take notes, but it is a personality kink too. I don’t understand how people binge their way through show after show after show without taking a break to process what they have just watched (and give their eyes a rest), to think about performance, visual design, narrative structuring. And this isn’t about age-related fatigue: even as a much younger, fresher movie buff, I couldn’t bring myself to watch three or four films back to back at a festival.

Which is not to say that such confusion didn’t happen in an earlier time. As a teenager getting into world cinema in the early 1990s (when one didn’t constantly have information on one’s fingertips via the internet), I remember how thrilling it could be to form an impression of a previously unencountered actor’s persona or “type” in a foreign film, and then to subsequently see him or her in a very different role or environment. After watching Toshiro Mifune as the scruffy, bearded Samurai in Edo period settings in Yojimbo and The Hidden Fortress, how weird to see him as a clean-shaven cop, walking the noirish mean streets of 1940s Japan in contemporary clothes in Stray Dog.

Once, upon realising that Chishu Ryu, the old man in the Japanese classic Tokyo Story, was still only in his forties and youthful-looking in other films of the time, I wondered if this was a case of extraordinary versatility or a viewer’s disconnect caused by unfamiliarity. Would a non-Indian viewer, wading bravely into popular Hindi films of the 1980s, have a similar experience if he saw Rajesh Khanna for the first time as the elderly man in Avtar (another Tokyo Story-like film about the generational divide and the neglect of old people)? Would this viewer be astounded if he then saw RK as he was at the time, still playing romantic hero – even if the films and performances were pedestrian? 

These are questions to ponder, but alas, one can only think about them – if one does – in the very narrow spaces between our binge-watching sessions.