‘Fetishisation and sexualisation of violence makes me uncomfortable’

Bollywood actor Imran Khan has been absent from the silver screen for the past nine years, but the actor still enjoys a huge fan base who desperately awaits his comeback. While there were talks of Imran making a comeback in an Abbas Tyrewala spy thriller, the actor, in a recent interview, clarified that the project is unlikely to see the light of day. Despite his initial excitement for the comeback, Imran expressed relief that the project didn’t materialise, citing discomfort with the current trend of ‘fetishising and sexualising’ violence in cinema.

Speaking to ‘Film Companion’, Imran revealed the reason behind his comeback project being shelved. He said, “We started talking about it in July of last year. Abbas Tyrewala called me up out of the blue. I was in San Francisco for a holiday and he told me that he had written this amazing thing. It was a cool story and he asked me to do it with him. The project was in early development at ‘Hotstar’. This was before the acquisition. The latter part of last year, ‘Hotstar’ got amalgamated with ‘Jio’ and somewhere within all of this that project felt wayside.”

Sharing his perspective on the current state of cinema, Imran said, “All things said and done, that thing fell into limbo and it doesn’t look like it will be resurrected. I am glad that that thing ended up not coming together because I don’t want to play a character who solves problems with a gun.”

“I have a sense of where cinema is going globally. There is a glamorisation, fetishisation and sexualisation of violence that makes me uncomfortable. I have grown up watching action cinema. My heroes were Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Indiana Jones. But there is a way to portray violence and this is not a moral thing. Violence and action are a language within cinema but when we communicate it and portray it in films, there is a way to do it where you feel the weight of it,” he added.