The rise and rise of Amit Sadh

He is the new poster boy of OTT platforms. His life reads like a struggler’s fairy tale. A look at his fascinating career graph

Seema Sachdeva

A long, long struggle to success. 14 years to be precise. This is what took 41-year-old Amit Sadh to reach where he has. The new poster boy of OTT platforms has been setting the screens on fire with his performances in web series like Avrodh — The Siege Within, Breathe, Breathe into the Shadows, besides his roles in films like Yaara, Shakuntala Devi, Sultan, Gold, etc. Currently he’s shooting for Zee5’s web-series Zidd opposite Amrita Puri. Aiming to reach an even wider audience, his popular show Breathe, in which he was cast opposite R Madhavan, is being dubbed in English. His physical transformation in the second season of Breathe: Into the Shadows opposite Abhishek Bachchan cannot be missed.

Amit Sadh, who recently completed 10 years in Bollywood, celebrated it with a powerful performance as Major Videep Singh in SonyLiv’s, Avrodh: The Siege Within, which is based on 2016 Uri surgical attacks. portrayal of Major Mike Tango

Amit Sadh’s fascinating journey in acting has taken a lot of hard work, patience, acceptance of failures, realising his mistakes and his faith in himself as well as God. He feels he is a “product of million miracles.”

Refusing to call himself a star, “Stars are very far off. I don’t want to be a star. I’m happy being actor. I don’t want to create any walls around me and my friends, fans or nature.”

On the outsider debate in Bollywood, he says, “I do not allow anyone to call me an outsider in this industry. I’m as much an insider in this industry as anyone else…. About nepotism, he says, “If this industry was so bad, would I have reached here? The entertainment industry is like any other industry. Just because of few such persons, we can’t blame the entire industry. There are good people as well. A little bit of this is in every other industry. If I start crying nepotism today, then I’ll not be true to the people who gave me an opportunity to work in the first place. My god, too, will get angry with me.

Acting was not something that this alumni of La Martiniere, Lucknow, set out to do when he left his house after his fight with his family when he was barely 16. Survival was what was on his mind when he did various jobs like working as a house help, salesperson, security guard at a showroom, etc. A bet with a friend led to him auditioning for a role in Mumbai and he grabbed the role of Aditya Bhargava in Neena Gupta’s teen drama Kyon Hota Hai Pyarrr. After this initial break as well as roles in TV shows like Durgesh Nandini, Guns and Roses and Kohinoor, his short temper and outspoken nature soon saw him being out of work and he was back to square one. Though he did participate in reality shows like Nach Baliye, Bigg Boss and Fear Factor, but these didn’t boost his work much.

When he was not getting any more roles, realisation dawned upon him that he needed to change himself and keep the focus on his work. To improve his craft and hone his acting skills, he joined the New York’s Lee Strasberg Acting. His Bollywood debut came with Ram Gopal Varma’s Phoonk in 2010 but it was Abhishek Kapoor’s Kai Po Che!(2013) that got him noticed in films. The success of the film, however, didn’t transform into roles for him like it did for his costars Sushant Singh Rajut as well as Rajkummar Rao. Refusing to get disheartened, he kept working hard and aspiring for success. “I am a gladiator and fighter I don’t look behind. I’m a very strong person. I don’t cry for what happened with me yesterday. For tomorrow, I’m not stressed. I’ll work hard for it and achieve, even if it takes me any number of years.”

This struggler’s fairy tale is the triumph of human spirit and brings hope to many trying to cope up with the unfairness of life. For himself as well as those who get disheartened by failures, he says, the only thing that comes between you and your dream is you. “If you want something; go get it. If you have a dream, you have to protect it. Don’t ever let somebody tell you, you can’t do something.”