Young actor Ishaan ventures into the world of audio storytelling with Audible India’s Ravan Rising, in which he voices a young Ravan. The project, which also features Sanjay Dutt, is now streaming. t2 chatted with Ishaan about the new experience and more.

What is it about Ravan Rising that made you want to lend your voice to it?

It is the character before anything else. Ravan is possibly one of the most mercurial, multilayered and certainly one of the most interesting characters from our mythology.

I also jumped at the opportunity to play a young Ravan, which is something that we haven’t known much about. Ravan Rising is about Ravan when he was more of a human than a rakshas and his journey of coming into his own as a warrior king.

Also, Audible is leading from the front. They have brought about a sort of revolution in audio storytelling and it really is so immersive. The fact that it was an Audible series was a motivation.

While voicing this project, what were the aspects of a young Ravan that surprised and intrigued you?

One has known Ravan to be more of an antagonist. What was really interesting was to see what a devotee he was and to understand what drove him and where all that fire in the belly came from. His journey is very interestingly divulged in the series. It is quite a journey and an arc from the first episode to the last.

We had to bring about an evolution with the voice which was very interesting. This story is almost like the coming-of-age of this character, and we had to bring that in through the voice alone. Doing voice work is fascinating, in general, for an actor.

There is so much one has to express without the crutches of body language or your face. Be it emotion and especially action, one needs to convey so much. Dialogue is one thing and finding expression in dialogue is another. Also, being able to express going through physical action was very interesting, and this series definitely has a lot of that.
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Dubbing for films is something you are familiar with. How was this different and what kind of prep went into it?

It is different because you are not dubbing to a visual. When you are dubbing for a movie, you also have the constriction of having to match lip sync. But, here you don’t have that. You have a little more freedom in terms of how you want to modulate the rhythm or the tempo. What’s interesting about audio storytelling is that it is all your imagination. I can read a text and I may see it differently from how somebody else sees it. With Ravan Rising, of course, we had some of the sound effects for me to get a sense of how the world is going to feel.
In terms of prep, all we did was read through it. Beyond that, to be honest, I discovered it as I went. We dubbed over five or six days and we were doing about two episodes a day, which was a decent pace. It was hours of being in that room and visualising and interacting and it was really a lot of fun. Most of the discovery happened in the dubbing room.

Are you a fan of audio storytelling?

I enjoy listening to podcasts. I haven’t heard a lot of audiobooks. But I think it is definitely going to be something that we are going to engage with a lot more as an audience in the future because it does capture your imagination in a very new way. I enjoyed the process very much because it was, in many ways, my first interaction with that kind of medium. That was all I was doing pretty much for seven days. I came out of it every day with my imagination stimulated and challenged.

As a consumer, this is a medium that you can engage with while you are doing other things. There is the multitasking element to being able to listen to an Audible series, which is a very different way to engage with stories.

The Indian creative scape is currently flirting with revisionist takes on Indian mythology. While some have worked, some haven’t. What’s your take on it? Are you a purist?

I would be lying if I said I had any academia about mythology. I have learned about mythology the way that any layman in our country would... growing up hearing these stories in many different forms and different ways, depending on who you hear them from. The characters in these stories are idols, they are figures that we worship.

I imagine you are talking about a lot of the adaptations of mythology that we have been seeing recently in cinema. I think it’s a great foundation because we get the most epic tales from our mythology. So why look elsewhere? But certainly, adaptation comes with a certain level of responsibility. They are not to be twisted and made into a sorry version. When you are telling a story like that you are also catering to a lot of people that hold it very close to them.

A lot of people have told me I am a cinema purist. So, in general, I would hope for the best always. But I think it is wonderful that we still go back to our mythological tales. We have barely scratched the surface of how beautifully one can tell those stories.

We will always find new ways of showcasing all the beautiful stories and facets that we have in our mythology. But I would still always hope that we are firmly grasped to the simplicity of these stories and not get too caught up in the external impressive elements... like being technically brilliant, but not really portraying the substance of the story.

You just said that on this project, you learned and discovered on the job. Would that hold true for your career on the whole as well?

I am not a formally trained actor, in the sense that I didn’t do a lasting course. I did various workshops and many other things that I could reach for to prepare myself and learn because it was something that I was dead focused on from the very beginning.

As I was growing up, I was constantly looking for ways that could expand my knowledge and skill set. I trained as a dancer. I was an AD (assistant director) on some films which gave me a lot of practical experience.

But my biggest learning was my first feature (film), which was Beyond the Clouds with (Iranian filmmaker) Majid Majidi. It was a very unique and challenging role for a young actor. Seldom do you get parts like that, especially somebody who is breaking out. It was layered, and had hero equalities but was flawed and idiosyncratic. Being given an opportunity like that felt like being rewarded after all the work put in to be ready to face the camera. There couldn’t have been a better first mentor for me
than Majid Majidi under whose tutelage, I learned the ropes.

In a short span of time, you have displayed diversity as an actor. And now, you have an international project coming up. How do you look back at the six years you have been in the business?

I would be lying if I said it was all my doing. I have been presented the opportunities to explore different genres and characters. I definitely get attracted to things that I have not explored. Having said that, I am always looking for a deeper personal connection in any character that comes my way. I need to be able to, to some degree, feel like there is some aspect that I connect with on a personal level so that I have an entry point into the character. I don’t want to represent a character, I want to embody it.

Often I get offered something that I would enjoy watching as an audience, but I can’t personally correlate. So I humbly bow out because I feel I don’t have it in me, at least right now That’s more important to me than saying: ‘Oh, let me just do something different for the short value of it.’

My next releases will be very telling and interesting. They are very different from what I have done before. Pippa is a film I am very excited about. It is an honour as a young actor to represent the bravado and the valour of our defence forces. The Perfect Couple (co-starring Nicole Kidman) is a new avenue for me entirely. Again, a very interesting character, one that I would like to see more of. In terms of Asian representation, we don’t get characters that are as interesting and different as this one. When you see that in a Hollywood project, it is definitely something to champion.

Which young Bollywood actor/ actress has a distinctive voice? Tell t2@abp.in