Paatal Lok would’ve been just as successful with another star in the lead: Jaideep Ahlawat downplays actors’ contribution to hit projects

Jaideep Ahlawat said that whenever people pay him compliments for his performance in Paatal Lok, he sees the faces of everyone that worked on the series.

Jaideep Ahlawat in a still from Paatal Lok.

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Actor Jaideep Ahlawat said that it would be delusional to believe that his hit series Paatal Lok, or any other excellent project that he has been a part of, wouldn’t be as successful without him. In an interview, Jaideep said that whenever he receives a compliment for his performance in the Prime Video crime drama, he can see the faces of everyone that worked on it.

In a conversation with his Jaane Jaan co-star Saurabh Sachdeva on the The Actors Truth YouTube channel, Jaideep compared actors to prisms, whose only job is to find the correct angle to create a rainbow. “And don’t be under the delusion that the rainbow belongs to you,” he said in Hindi. “The light isn’t yours either, your job is to find the right angle. You are merely a conduit, through which words and emotions can flow, and create rainbows on screen.”

Also read | ‘Alia Bhatt threatened to block my number if…’: Jaideep Ahlawat says working on Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi gave him nightmares

He continued, “It’s okay if the audience believes that you are solely responsible for creating the rainbow, as long as you don’t start believing it yourself. It’s very easy to start thinking that you’re the most important piece of the project. It’s never true. Paatal Lok would’ve been just as successful with someone else starring in it; Raazi, too. I’m sure Satya, Shool, The Godfather would’ve been just as big, only the faces in them would’ve been different.” As prisms, Jaideep said, the actors in these projects were the best suited for the job.

In the same interview, Jaideep said that he finds it difficult to watch himself on screen. But one of the few projects that he has watched from start to finish is Paatal Lok. And he did it two months after it debuted on Prime Video in 2020. The actor is currently gearing up for the release of season two.

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