Jaideep Ahlawat on dancing, ‘preventing loads’ with Saif Ali Khan in Jewel Thief and his favorite heist film

Jewel Thief. Jaideep Ahlawat in Jewel Thief. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2024
| Photograph Credit score: Courtesy of Netflix

Jaideep Ahlawat is consuming up the response to his velvety dance strikes in Jewel Thief. The 45-year-old actor, usually recognized for taking part in hard-bitten cops and gangsters, or light brooders in movies like Three of Us, reduce a rug alongside Saif Ali Khan and Nikita Dutta within the groovily retro ‘Jaadu’ that broke the web.

“The day it occurred, the show of my cellphone malfunctioned,” Jaideep advised The Hindu in an interview. “By the point the cellphone returned from the service centre, the clips had blown up. I had near 1,000 messages on Instagram.”

The music at present has over 9 million views on YouTube. A majority of the feedback are about Jaideep. There are ‘dancing Jaideep’ reels, and foolish claims of AI use. “It feels nice to be popularly validated like that,” says the Paatal Lok actor who was skilled by choreographers Piyush Bhagat and Shazia Samji for the music.

Jaideep hails from Rohtak, Haryana. Whereas his clips from ‘Jaadu’ have reached far and broad, his followers again house aren’t as gobsmacked, he says. “They already know I can dance,” nods the 6-f-tall actor who spent his youthful days dancing at native weddings. “For them, it’s extra like…. lastly!”

Jaideep Ahlawat, Nikita Dutta in ‘Jewel Thief’
| Photograph Credit score:
Particular Association

This can be a frequent sufficient expertise for Jaideep: followers and admirers encountering him in individual and getting pleasantly shocked. “They count on to satisfy Hathiram or Jadunath Maharaj or Naren Vyas. A girl, who had solely seen Jaane Jaan, as soon as remarked upon assembly me, ‘Oh, you have got hair!’”

One other curious fan needed him to take away his sun shades to confirm his eye color. “He thought I’ll have scary pupil-less eyes like my character in Commando: A One Man Military.”

Jaideep says he doesn’t know what ‘zaddy’—well-liked youth slang for a lovely older man—means. Defined, he deadpans, “Ah, it mainly means I’m previous.”

In Jewel Thief, Jaideep performs a duplicitous crime boss who engages Saif Ali Khan’s companies for an epic diamond heist. The movie, releasing on Netflix on April 25, nods again to a glossier period of Hindi heist movies, full with overseas locales, cavernous hi-tech vaults, and people menacing laser beams that act as tripwires between burglar and loot. Nikita Dutta, Jaideep’s co-star, confirms they’re achieved utilizing sensible results—with out the attendant electrical shock, in fact.

“It’s fairly humorous to see these sequences being shot, particularly if you’re standing outdoors the set,” Jaideep chuckles.

Jaideep is, in fact, a terrific motion performer, memorably bruising up Ayushmann Khurrana in these scruffy close-combat brawls in An Motion Hero. He guarantees comparable electrical energy between him and Saif in Jewel Thief. “We struggle loads within the movie,” Jaideep says. “Throughout one sequence, we broke so many mirrors that Saif was like, ‘Is that this our job now?’“

Spike Lee’s 2006 thriller Inside Man is Jaideep’s favorite heist movie of all time (By the way, the Bollywood music ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ performs at first of that movie). “I like that film,” Jaideep enthuses. “Its screenplay, its intricate enhancing…wonderful stuff!”

Kunal Kapoor, Jaideep’s co-star, is a heist veteran, having performed the hacker in 2011’s Don 2. Right here, he’s a brutish detective on Saif’s scent. “A heist movie all the time needs to be forward of its viewers,” asserts Kunal, who, for as soon as, isn’t taking part in an inert pacifier however a supply of menace. “They assume they know what’s going to occur. However then it doesn’t —- and they’re shocked. They need to all the time go, ‘oh, I didn’t see that coming’.”