Key Points
Anup Soni discusses ragging juniors at NSD with verbal acting challenges
Famous actors like Ashutosh Rana emerged from same drama school
Podcast reveals behind-the-scenes interactions among aspiring actors
Soni's unexpected cold call to Yash Chopra seeking work
He told Cyrus Broacha on his podcast, "Ashutosh Rana, Mukesh Tiwari, Kumud Mishra, and Yashpal Sharma, all the villains of the Hindi film industry, these all are my juniors from NSD. I have ragged them."
He further mentioned, "Actually it was like more of a roasting session. We used to ask them, 'Where did you come from?'. Then ask them to do something, say a dialogue. And, even if they said the dialogue correctly, we used to tell them, 'You watch a lot of films. This is a theatre. You know, films and theatres are different media. Have you come to be a hero?' This is how we bullied them. Nobody was physically hurt in those roasting sessions. It was just verbal sledging. It was more related to acting but in a little bullying way."
Earlier, on the same podcast, Anup had shared an interesting anecdote about cold-calling the late filmmaker Yash Chopra to get some work.
The actor said that he dialed a landline number, and luckily Yash Chopra picked up the call as those were the days when cell phones hadn't penetrated the telecommunications market. A video of the actor talking about the same has resurfaced on the Internet.
In the video, the actor said, "I opened the directory and dialed the number of Yash Raj Films, and Yash Chopra picked up the phone. I swear, mobiles didn't come till then. I told him that, 'I am from the National School of Drama', specifically underlined NSD because some NSD passouts had worked with him."
