Exclusive! Dulquer on his web debut with Raj and DK’s Guns and Gulaabs: I loved the world and my role in it

Even though most South stars jumped aboard the OTT bandwagon since the pandemic, Dulquer Salmaan has resisted the offers till early this year, when he had signed The Family Man creators Raj Nidimuru and Krishna DK’s upcoming Netflix series Guns and Gulaabs.

In an exclusive interview with OTTplay recently, Dulquer opened up about his digital debut with the crime-thriller series set in the ‘90s. However, the Kurup actor tells us that his web debut wasn’t something that he was planning.

“But I have always been curious about the format of storytelling and it’s something that I really enjoy consuming. I also really like Raj and DK’s work. So, when I heard the narration, I loved the world, my role and sure, there is Rajkummar and Adarsh, who are both phenomenal talents,” says Dulquer. “These are things I enjoy. End of the day, everyone from our generation onwards is looking for experiences. I genuinely feel that’s what I seek, more than an incredible formula in my career. I am excited about these experiences that I am having everywhere.”

Guns and Gulaabs, according to Netflix's official synopsis, blends '90s romance and humour while telling the story of love and innocence set against the world of crime. 

Ask him if it was a deliberate decision to pick a multi-starrer to make his OTT debut in Hindi, considering his Bollywood debut Karwaan too had Irrfan and Mithila Palkar, and he says, “In Tamil, when you are doing a Mani (Ratnam) sir’s film, people will definitely watch it even if it has a new hero or someone who isn’t familiar to the audience. But in other industries, I am quite aware that people would still need to watch the movie. If I am going to debut in Hindi, and I have this misconception that I am a star from the South and I would come here too as a star, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I can bring people to the theatres. I like that there was Irrfan in Karwaan because people will come to watch him and obviously, they will also see me in the process.”

Elaborating on picking a multi-starrer like Guns and Gulaabs, Dulquer says, “For my OTT debut too, there was a lot of stuff that came my way that I would headline. But a lot of them were remakes. I have been fighting so hard for the past 10 years to not do remakes, even though sometimes they are plum, lucrative or visible projects. But I wanted to stick to this principle that I decided even before I became an actor, that I will never do remakes or sequels of my father’s films.”

The actor says that another criterion he had coming into the films was that he would never do bilinguals. “But nowadays, the fabric has changed so much that I had to. Even then I only do certain movies like Tamil-Telugu bilinguals. I don’t see backtracking these to Malayalam as our cinema and culture are so different.”

Read the entire interview: Exclusive! Dulquer Salmaan: The next stage of my career is to lose myself and delve deep into my characters